In his first press conference as Liberal leader yesterday, Peter Dutton made the most amazing statement, and the entire press gallery let it pass without comment: “I think the Liberal Party in recent years has become quite estranged from big business and I want to focus on small business.”
The only coverage the remark got was from political journalists accepting its truth and placing it in the context of Dutton’s professed wish to become the party of small business and the outer suburbs.
The latter claim has been advanced for generations of conservatives — Howard’s battlers, anyone? — and can wait for another occasion. But the alleged Liberal estrangement from big business is not merely an audacious lie, it goes to the very heart of how the Coalition ended up with fewer than 60 seats.
There was no estrangement between big business and the Liberals. The Liberals for their entire time in government ran a donations-for-policy rort in which donors were allowed to dictate policy outcomes, to the extent that state capture was not merely an accurate, but the only accurate description of public policy in Australia.
There was no estrangement between the Liberals and multinational fossil fuel giants: the likes of Chevron happily gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Coalition while paying zero tax on its billions of dollars in revenue from offshore gas.
There was no estrangement between the Liberals and local fossil fuel giants like Woodside, Origin and Santos, who gave millions of dollars in donations while paying minimal tax on offshore gas and getting to dictate a “gas-led recovery” policy and receiving handouts for the carbon capture and storage scam.
In fact, so un-estranged were the Liberals from the fossil fuel industry that climate activist independents cut a swathe through their ranks.
There was no estrangement between the Liberals and the big banks, which continue to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the Liberals and got a reversal of banking regulation and the abandonment of many of the Hayne royal commission recommendations for their efforts.
There was no estrangement between the Liberals and the big four consulting firms, which have steadily increased their donations to the point of becoming some of the biggest political donors in the country as they collected billions in government contracts.
There was no estrangement between the Liberals and the mining industry, which heavily favours the Coalition with donations and enjoys favoured status — the Coalition bending over backwards to assist it.
Nor was there any estrangement between the Liberals and the gambling and hospitality industries, which are the biggest donors of all.
So who were the Liberals estranged from? The timing of Dutton’s remarks gives a clue — he was speaking only a couple of hours after AGL, another fossil fuel giant, had been forced to kill off its demerger of its fossil fuel assets at the hand of billionaire investor Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The Liberals aren’t estranged from big business — they remain in the pockets of large corporations.
They’re estranged from investors.
Contradicting quaint rhetoric about being the party of free markets, the Liberals despise investors who are determined to use their money to deliver the corporate outcomes they want in the ESG space — most especially on climate.
The Liberal hatred of industry super funds is well known. It spent its entire time in government attacking them. But it leaves office with the sector bigger, more concentrated and more powerful than ever.
Dutton confirmed the Liberals’ plans to allow people to drive up house prices by raiding their super yesterday. The fact that super fund HESTA had backed Cannon-Brookes against the AGL demerger will be a reminder to the Liberals that huge industry super funds now wield massive power among Australian companies — something that utterly enrages them.
Such “activist investors” as Cannon-Brookes joined the Liberal demonology in the past three years as well — derided as out-of-touch elites deluded by green ideology and committed to destroying the jobs of ordinary Australians. Banks that were increasingly refusing to fund fossil fuel projects and insurance companies declining to insure fossil fuel projects also got an occasional touch-up from an economically illiterate National MP too.
And what was Josh Frydenberg desperate to achieve in his last year as treasurer? What did he waste more political capital on than anything else? A cack-handed attempt to destroy the proxy advice firms that are a key part of active investor decision-making — a move backed by big businesses but ultimately defeated.
If that’s estrangement, you’d hate to see a love-in.
Big business is a collective of large corporations untethered from any notions of public interest, happy to exploit whatever mechanisms are available to control politicians in their own interests — not those of economic efficiency or the public good.
Investors, who ultimately decide how and where they direct their capital, are the problem for the Liberals because they insist on embodying the market philosophy the Liberals profess to support, not the rort they actually run.
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