Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Karl Bitar's leap to Crown Casino

by David Hetherington

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the news that former Labor boss Karl Bitar is joining Crown Casino. The scriptwriters at the Simpsons couldn’t have cast a more delicious storyline, but at the same time it simply cements the public’s rock-bottom perception of politics and its practitioners.

... In some sections of corporate Australia, it’s assumed that anything which threatens a company’s quarterly earnings is by extension a cancer on our body politic. Over the last year alone, a host of policy proposals have attracted organised corporate resistance: the resource rent tax, banking competition, pokies reform, MySuper, cigarette advertising and, not least, a carbon price. An American CEO is famously misquoted as saying in the 1950s that “what‘s good for General Motors is good for the country”. In the last few months, we might have rephrased this to say: “If it’s bad for BlueScope or Rio or British American Tobacco, it’s bad for Australia.”

To read full article link here.

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