Why the Business Council of Australia is Useless

Why is the Business Council of Australia is Useless? Why does it continue to appoint milquetoast leaders who would be better placed in the middle levels of an average local council? Its because the leader of Australia’s big businesses are themselves milquetoast wimps.

In a well written and well time Chaticleer opinion in today’s AFR, Anthony Macdonald comments about the free kick offered and free kick offer to and declined by Australia’s business leadership elite. Yes. Those who need to be protected from their customers and suppliers with their membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

Writes Macdonald:

Give most CEOs a free hit and they don’t take it.

It’s the wrong time in the political cycle, wrong time with inflation still driving prices up more than normal, wrong time with households and particularly young people struggling – we get it. You have to be brave to stick your head above the parapet; government and corporate affairs types would say you have to be dumb.

You see, the AFR asked 60 CEOs, whether, as Michael Chaney suggested, profit has become a “dirty word” in Australia.

The reply. Squib, squib, squib.

Few CEOs were willing to firmly call it out – reliably plain-speaking Ryan Stokes (SGH Group), National Australia Bank boss Andrew Irvine, Chaney’s CEO at Wesfarmers Rob Scott and Washington H Soul Pattinson CEO Todd Barlow were among them.

Some CEOs skipped the question altogether, while others just focused on what they do (provide jobs, pay tax, deliver shareholder returns) to address their own social licence question. Qantas’ Vanessa Hudson represented the responsible middle ground when she said: “It is up to businesses to do a better job of explaining why posting profits are important.”

Cowards. The most of them. And don’t forget, the current generation of CEOs is the next generation of board chairs and directors.

Why else hire Bran Flakes to lead the BCA.

According also to Macdonald:

The lack of firm answers was surprising.

Really? Is it.

The spine and leadership deficit is not just in Canberra. It is in the executive suite of many leading companies. Talk tough in private. Wimper and squib when asked for a public position.

It’s an absolute free-hit as far as a journalists’ question is concerned and we have heard it over and over in Chatham House formats from CEOs, chairs, directors and their investors this year – the ACCC running rampant, ASIC wasting time investigating private markets deals, regulations too soft on foreign companies that pay little or no Australian tax. This was a chance to put it on the record.

Destroying an economy is a team sport. It requires stupid policies from stupid politicians and cowardice from business who is damaged.

They may have great access to Australia’s political dross through their ownership of the orange lanyard class but they will never understand that access and influence are vastly different things.

No doubt they have lots of highly paid corporate affairs and corporate relations people on staff.

I was at a luncheon last week with some friends, current and former senior people in corporate Australia. Multiple suggested we are past peak woke. I replied no way, no how.

(Hat tips to MS, CG, SF, BF, SR, RD)

Woke is a mutating disease. It grew out of a university laboritory in England where it was called Marxism. It escaped and spread mutating into Marxist-Leninism leading to the deaths of well over 100 million. It then morphed again, within universities into DEI and its parallel strain of ESG. It will morph yet again and continue to morph until it captures and kills its host.

Its super carriers are now the CEO class, bathed in toxic virus.

As Albert Camus suggested in La Peste, the plague carrying rats aren’t dead. They just hide, underground in the sewer system, waiting for right opportunity to return.

Australia’s contemporary CEOs are the sentinels, softening the ground for the next plague to come.

Vigilence and resistance is the only defence.