The Australian multimillionaire Tim Gurner has apologised for the controversial comments he made at a property summit on Tuesday, saying he deeply regrets his remarks and they “were wrong”.
On Tuesday, Gurner, who is a property developer and founder of the Gurner Group, drew fierce backlash after he suggested at the event held by the Australian Financial Review that unemployment should increase by 40% to 50% to create more productive workers.
“At the AFR Property Summit this week I made some remarks about unemployment and productivity in Australia that I deeply regret and were wrong,” Gurner said in a statement released on Thursday.
“There are clearly important conversations to have in this environment of high inflation, pricing pressures on housing and rentals due to a lack of supply, and other cost-of-living issues,” he added.
“My comments were deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families across Australia who are affected by these cost-of-living pressures and job losses.”
During Gurner’s appearance at the property summit on Tuesday, where he said “we need to see pain in the economy”, he took aim at tradies.
“Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. You know, they have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change,” he said.
However, Gurner, whose company holds a portfolio reportedly worth more than $9.5bn (US$6.09bn), also imparted advice to make Australia’s broader workforce more productive.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said.
“There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy.
“We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40, 50%.”
In his statement apologising for the remarks, Gurner said: “I want to be clear: I do appreciate that when someone loses their job it has a profound impact on them and their families and I sincerely regret that my words did not convey empathy for those in that situation.”
Gurner’s comments were quick to be condemned, and even drew fierce reaction from the US Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter/X, after a video of Gurner’s comments were circulated online.
The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you would “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the CEO of a company in 2023”.
“Mr Gurner should spend more time running his company, instead of using a public forum to regurgitate his dastardly economic theories,” Laxale wrote.
