Singapore For The Wealthy

Why Is It The Entitled Are So Obnoxious?

It must be all that entitlement, right?

Gina "daddy's Money Is Good Money" Rinehart offered up her opinion column today in the SMH arguing that Australia could do better by being more like Singapore.

Despite the country's small size, low population, and lack of resources and local water supply, Singaporeans benefit significantly from the country's policies. Its neighbour Australia is the complete opposite despite wealth generated from vast resources. Why this striking difference?

- We make ourselves less attractive to investment. Think of those 300-plus Australian companies investing in West Africa, together with multinational companies that have been the largest investors in Australia over decades (for example BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto), that are now making major investments and commitments offshore.
- Australia drowns in red and green tape. Fifteen hundred or more permits, approvals and licences are required to start major projects in Queensland, for instance. We have both state and federal environmental department duplication. Small companies, which were once the backbone of Australia, are increasingly finding the load too onerous.
- Taxes make us less competitive. After the introduction of the GST, which was meant to reduce other taxes, we now face a messy MRRT and carbon tax, making Australia even less competitive on world markets. This will greatly affect our own citizens, particularly those on lower incomes. Why so? If you add tax to thermal coal, which accounts for 80-85 per cent of Australia's power generation, electricity prices will rise to cater for the cost increase, hurting those on low incomes the most. And the problem does not stop with our electricity bills going up. Every item that requires electricity, be it for production, distribution or storage, which encompasses most items we use, will rise in price under MRRT and/or carbon tax imposed on thermal coal. This again not only hurts our export competitiveness, but Australians on low and medium incomes, which includes a very large number of people.
- Our crime record is unacceptable: we should all be able to live safely in our homes and suburbs. Taxation monies that should be spent on more, better paid, better resourced and better trained police are wasted – think of the recent federal government wastage on over-priced school kitchens (that don't even cater for pie warmers in winter), expensive insulation bungles, and dare I repeat, duplication of environmental departments.
Australia needs guest labour. Just think where Australia could be if we welcomed guest labour, even if limited to hot or remote areas or to unskilled and semi-skilled positions. This should be considered on humanitarian grounds alone. Please consider the terrible plight of very poor people in our neighbouring countries in Asia. We should, on humanitarian grounds, give more of these people the opportunity of guest labour work in Australia, so that they can feed and clothe their families and pay for medical and other pressing needs. Singapore, Dubai and even Europe have had guest workers for decades. Also, think about the lack of adequate services for our own war veterans, the elderly and the disabled, and how much better their lives and their carers' lives would be if we gave guest workers temporary visas to assist.
- Skilled guest labourers are also badly needed in Australia. Media reports mention almost daily that major projects are being delayed due to lack of skilled labour and long delays in processing guest labour visas.
- Australia has too much debt. We live beyond our means and continue to discourage and delay business development that could provide more revenue. We'll continue to grow debt for our children to be burdened with until our attitude changes.

So, that's what Australia's richest woman thinks is a good idea. Turn Australia into an oligopoly like Singapore through a flat tax and minimal checks and balances for industry so they can ave a free rein to go and pollute and destroy the environment as much as they like.It's really pathetic how each point can only be understood as being a good idea for all of Australia through the eyes of somebody who wants to make a tonne of money digging up more resources come what may. Let's not forget this is the person who bankrolled the ad campaign that led to Kevin Rudd's collapse in the polls, but also somebody who does not believe in climate change - and therefore somebody we can count amongst the willfully stupid of humanity.

The reason it got my attention more than all the silliness and the egotistical manner in which her own self-interest was dressed up as Australia's general interest (gag me with a spade), was this notion of 'green tape'. The expression occurs more than 3 times in her opinion piece and it made me wonder what kind of brain space invents a term to concertina the entire oversight on behalf of the environment as "green tape". Clearly this woman thinks that all the apparatus of the state that attempts to shore up the interests of the Australian environment is somehow a negative thing that must be overcome and stripped away from the law and simplified out of existence.

And it was at this point I thought, "well, this woman has enough money to not ever have to earn another cent through mining in her life. She couldlive off her vast assets easily." But no, she would like to do some more mining and preferably without any government oversight or public scrutiny, and when she makes even more of a motza, she wants to pay less tax; but what little tax she pays, she wants it to go towards hiring more policemen to fight crime instead of fitting out school kitchens.

On top of all this ill-conceived bullet point half-baked notions, she wants to admonish us that Australia has too much debt. Surely it's not that much debt given that Australia is far from any kind of sovereign risk, and is headed back for surplus by 2013, and frankly is the kind of debt that extracting a bit more tax from the likes of Rinehart couldn't fix. As a general point, it can readily be said if this woman gets to have a public forum to have her stupid entitled say in this manner just because she's the richest woman in Australia, then there's an argument to be made that she is already a danger to Australia as a whole.

I mean, really, this clap trap about government debt is idiotic, but these wealthy people are always carrying on like it's some moral failure if the government takes out a loan to do something constructive like build universities or hospitals. It's not like Rinehart's company never took out a loan to build a mine, is it? On principle we should tax the rich, because they're rich. That will definitely fix the deficit. They might bleat and call it wealth redistribution, but that is the point of good government. That it doesn't allow individual citizens to become so powerful that they interfere with affairs of state through the weight of their money - like Gina Rinehart and Andrew Twiggy Forrest did when they campaigned against the Mining Resources Rent Tax. A good society doesn't let rogue crazies with money scare itself into self-destructive positions.