With the far right becoming both so visible and loud across the west, the excesses of their cousins in the neoliberal centre-right are often overshadowed for cultural attention. So I would like to personally thank Gurner Group founder and CEO, Tim Gurner, for making 250 words of casual remarks at an Australian Financial Review conference that were so brutally, selfishly appalling they have managed to shove the clowns of the far right aside and remind everyone that the bad guy doesn’t haven’t to be entertaining in front of a camera to be very, very dangerous.
As I write this, 13 million people on X/Twitter have now viewed the multimillionaire Australian property developer’s remarks at the Fin’s property summit that will go down in history as the “We Need to See Pain” speech. More than 7,000 have quote-tweeted it in rage. In one single spoken minute, the oh-so-very-rich Gurner manages to whine that working people have been “paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years”, resented openly that the lethal threat and lockdowns of Covid convinced workers there was more to life than slaving for a heartless boss, and complained of a “systemic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around”.
