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What a week.

Who'd have thought that our Prime Minister would turn communist and lead the union march on the Arbitration Commission demanding the abandonment of enterprise agreements and the re-introduction of collective bargaining.

It's whispered that he king-hit the Minister for Workplace Agreements, Tony Abbot, and stole his flag in order to lead the march. And he was backed up by Peter Reith, who had brought along his Rottweilers in case the Federal Police turned ugly.

I must admit that the One.Tel story got incredibly complex and I may have become a bit confused, but something like this seems to have happened.

I saw Comrade John on TV saying that he expects those two capitalistic management contractors, Jodie Rich and Brad Keeling to hand back their $14 million consultancy fees -- after the One.Tel board had confirmed these as special bonus for managerial achievements.

Lauchie and James, it seems, also have a moral obligation to kick in a few million more to top up the billion dollars they've already lost. But there's no ad-hocery here, just the ideological principle that in an election year anyone who can pay, pays; and politicians fiercely defend the financial rights of battler-voters.

It's amazing how the collapse of a wannabe-telco could generate so many column inches. Of course, News Limited and Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd. are involved, and even these wealthy media corporations don't toss $500 million into the fire without wincing.

What interests me most about the collapse however, was the time it took the principles to wake up and ask questions. I don't mean James and Lachlan personally, but rather the management teams who track, audit and report investments for junior and senior moguls. Only PBL's Nick Falloon appears to have hinted at trouble, and he received the bullet for his arrogant honesty.

In many newspaper reports you can detected distinct traces of suppressed journalistic glee at the failure of the mighty in management, and some hints that the real story is one of upper class-betrayal. There's a story here about the failure of the Old-Mates Act, but the journalists can't bring themselves to key these words into their newsroom computers.

In Australian business you trust old school buddies and family friends to tip you off when things turn sour so that you can flog your shares to the plebs before the problems become public knowledge. But for some reason, this didn't happen.

I'm not entirely sure the system still operates this way in the upper echelons of the corporate world. These days the mogul and entrepreneurial-classes appear more willing than most to stab each other in the back and exploit each other's weaknesses. While they regularly share business ventures, they also fight tooth-and-nail for dominance and market share, and exhaustively analyse any move made by the others.

Anyone with experience in the Big End of town also assumes that accounting figures are rubbery; that audits are only occasionally accurate and rarely reveal the corporation's true financial position; and that consultancy contracts, bonuses and ex-gratia payments are not always transparent and not necessarily to the benefit of shareholders. They calculate their involvement accordingly.

However, I expect politicians to take a different view -- one that protects the small investor and the worker, and ensured that national resources aren't being squandered. Which I why I am pleased to be able to praise John Howard for his swift action.

At least, I would if I could. But I bet he still uses snail mail.

One.Tel collapse, and that of HIH and the dot-coms, and of National Textiles and the NSW coal mines before them, show quite clearly that politicians have ignored all the warning signs. They've progressively reduced the role of regulators and increased the country's reliance on self-regulating corporate capitalism.

Yet the danger of letting businesses (especially publicly-traded companies) off the leash has been obvious to everyone for years, and with industry aggregation the problems seem to be compounding.

Those determination to minimise government and the public sector are the real cause of the problem. And by promoting this ideology and globalisation jointly, as inevitable, desirable and democratic, the politicians have triggered most of Australia's major corporate and share-market debacles over the last few years.

Neither party does much to correct the fundamental problems when they are in power. They always maintain that legislation is in the pipeline, but it rarely appears on the table in the Parliament

I suspect that such political lethargy is the direct consequence of corporate generosity in funding political campaigns. But another factor is that of the ministers. On assuming government, they immediately see themselves as celebrity members of the management elite -- and begin to assume the airs and attitudes of their new-found friends, associates and policy advisers.

Big business knows this and panders unmercifully to the political pretensions of any second-rate party-hack cum minister.

In previous Labor governments this technique became so obvious that it earned the sobriquet "duchessing". And duchessing is most common when Labor is in power, because the Liberals were born to rule and expect be treated as equals by the bunyip aristocracy and the corporate silver-tails, anyway. Stroking their silver locks is less effective.

I offer as evidence the common-sense rule that the auditors of any public company should have no other financial involvement with the company they are auditing. The should neither supply directors to the board or perform non-auditing legal or accounting work for profit.

This should be blatantly obvious to the village idiot. Auditing not only needs to be done, but it must be seen to have been done competently, fairly and impartially .. and in a way designed to protect shareholder interests.

What's more, the selection of the auditor should be controlled by the shareholders not the management, and the auditor's report should pass to shareholders immediately and directly. It should not be filtered through management for modification, massaging and manipulation.

Even in the USA, where unencumbered and exploitative enterprise is celebrated as a Constitutional birthright, along with the right to shoot people, they now beginning to regulate auditors and the audit process in this way. If they can do it, why can't we?

It should also be obvious that we need to rethink the idea of limited-liability in companies, and also the identification of wealth held by family units and trusts. Clearly husbands and wives, and parents and children, often act as a single unit in the consumption and control of that wealth, and clearly directors often use artificial structures involving their families to reduce tax and the consequences of management culpability.

Any parliamentarian who doesn't see this today must be comatose.

But no one seems to care ... or very few protest if they do. Quite apart from its economic aspects, globalisation is also having a secondary effect on Australian society in changing our attitudes to work and life-style.

At one time Australian's rejoiced in being a bit different. We scorned "the American Way" as forcing employees to devote their lives to work. We laughed at the way they lionised wealth and management elites, and we were critical of the enormous discrepancies in the USA between haves and have-nots.

We were dismissive of the Japanese salaryman spending 10 hours a day devoted to his company, with a further hour and half of commuting each way on cattle trains. And we rejected the British class system with its rigid social hierarchies, where key directors and business managers always went to the same private school and conspired at the same exclusive clubs.

But since the 1970s we've embraced all of these national defects, and we've done so in the belief that we need to assimilate such global ideals into Australia's culture, to 'find our place in the world' and preserve our standard of living.

And that's all rubbish. Australians still have the highest average standard of living in the world, and we are as democratic and free as any people on earth.

Yet the French recently introduced a 35 hour week which we've abandoned, and they are currently battling hard to maintain their Gallic sovereignty against moves to submerge their identify within the European Union. They still put life-style ahead of profits.

The British are fighting to retain the sterling and therefore their self-reliance and the ability to make their own economic decisions. And the states of Europe are managing to stave off the US recession, despite being more welfare-oriented than the UK "Nanny state" before Maggie Thatcher tore it asunder.

There's no evidence that a laid-back French life-style has harmed their economy, or that any welfare state in Europe is heading for collapse. And there's even less that the euro as a currency would boost the British economy -- as distinct from helping financial speculators make a killing in the City.

Current Crossroads column in The Australian IT
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