Think Right

Viv Forbes
Written 1991

Gough Whitlam once boasted that he had a hundred expert committees hard at work on Australia’s problems.

This probably represented the high water mark of Government by Enquiry.

However the Goss government looks set to challenge Gough’s record.

Expert committees are already at work on the QIDC, Fraser Island, the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation, the ports, the financial institutions, land tenure, daylight saving, road safety, economic development and over-regulation.

Getting named to head a royal commission is a sure way to fame and wealth in Australia. Names such as Jackson, Crawford, Campbell, Vernon, Matthews, Costigan, Coombs, Henderson, Rae, Muirhead, Fox, Woodward, Williams, Sackville and Wilenski are remembered more for their enquiries than for anything else.
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“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920

Viv Forbes
Written 11 April 1990

The threat by the Goss Government to legislate against voluntary employment agreements is a blot on an otherwise promising first semester report.

The ALP were rightly critical of cronyism in previous administrations. They cited cronyism in awarding tenders, provision of cheap finance, drought relief and rezoning of land. Naturally, all charges were vigorously denied.

Cronyism occurs when a trustee provides favours for friends at the expense of those he supposedly represents. Where payment is made for the favour, cronyism becomes bribery.

The threatened attack on VEA’s looks more like favours for friends than actions in the public interest. The essence of a VEA is a voluntary agreement negotiated in complete harmony by employer and employees. This allows both parties to choose that unique package of wages, working hours, overtime, and other conditions which maximises their satisfaction. It allows both employers and employees to regain some control over their lives instead of being subject to the dictates of distant arbitrary strangers.
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