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”.
Workers realising their own worth to corporations that cannot function without them?! Inconceivable!
These are not even the worst parts of the speech. “We need to see that change,” he offers as remedy to his own complaints, with the truly brain-popping suggestion that “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy.”
Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become "arrogant" since COVID and "We've got to kill that attitude." https://t.co/lcX3CCxGuj pic.twitter.com/f9HK2YZRRE
— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) September 12, 2023
Pain for thee, of course, and not for he. Tim Gurner is not talking about restraining his own material aspirations. He’s not suggesting he reinvest profits in his workforce to encourage productivity. He doesn’t plan to offload anything like the lovely blue Porsche he’s photographed with in a Daily Mail article, or cut back bonuses to executives, or in any way restrict the greed of the corporate class he represents so elegantly.
He’s engaging in that ancient neoliberal habit of dehumanising working people as some kind of acceptably expendable other. These people inflict the pain of unemployment on the rest of us as one might torture a rat with an overcharged electrode – except they don’t even oblige themselves to drop the body in a bin if the rat happens to die. For rich-listers like Gurner, the desire of working people to live lives of dignity and comfort is “arrogant”. By comparison, their multimillion-dollar lifestyle is a state of nature, something akin to the divine right of kings.
According to a piece last year about his investments in an exclusive luxury wellness brand, Gurner has apparently been on a “personal wellness journey” these last few years. As he brags about “mass layoffs” delivering “less arrogance” from the employment market, no less than the president of the Australian Medical Association, Professor Steve Robson, has suggested Gurner may be encouraging his victims on a “wellness journey” in the opposite direction. “Unemployment is associated with a range of adverse health outcomes including suicide,” Robson wrote on X/Twitter. “I say this with some confidence having studied suicide and unemployment.”
Having been unemployed myself, and grown up with a father who had bouts of painful unemployment, I can vouch from lived experience this is true. But the truth rarely comes into the equation when it comes to the neoliberal mania for crushing the upstarts of the labouring classes. Gurner’s claim that declining productivity demands this pain is false. The statistics show – consistently – that workers in Australia have never been more productive while capitalists have never swallowed up so much of that gain for themselves, taking more in profit than they give back in wages. “He is flat-out wrong,” said pollster Kos Samaras, wielding openly available Australian Bureau of Statistic data. “Australian workers have never been so productive, yet they are not being rewarded for it.”
One is obliged to wonder what business logic is informing the Marriott chain’s recent decision to partner with Gurner, as unemployed and underpaid workers are notorious non-users of hotel rooms.
But the risk of someone like Gurner influencing policy discussions isn’t limited to degrading markets, or even to the ruin of individual human lives, their families or communities.
Contrary to popular assumption, it’s not impoverished and demobilised workers who become the engine of extremist movements. It’s a well-resourced middle class terrified of visible misery growing beneath them that radicalises the “lumpenbourgeoisie” towards any hierarchical cause that might solidify their position.
For those of us whose fears are growing of the hard right’s political heft, a need to box the economic sadism of neoliberals unhinged is a priority to keep very firmly in view.
On 14 September 2023 Tim Gurner said in a statement that he deeply regrets his remarks and they “were wrong”.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
