THERE has been quite a bit of reporting lately about the "Canberra bubble", and specifically it is in reference to the love lives and intimate stories of our politicians and their close colleagues. And whilst it might be titillating to focus on the salacious details that is not the Canberra bubble that should concern us, particularly not in the Hunter.
What should be worrying us all is the Canberra bubble of the disconnection of Canberra from the rest of Australia, and particularly from the remainder of the Australian working landscape.
Two recent events highlight the problem. Both non-events have major implications for all of us working in the Hunter. The first non-event was a comment from a government minister when participating in a public forum. The minister was asked to define a medium-sized business, replying that a company with more than 400 employees would fit the bill.
I felt a cold wind rush past. The real Canberra bubble - isolation from real industry, real businesses, and real jobs. Could there be a more obvious level of ignorance of the actual profile in sizes of Australian businesses? The ancient economics rules (yes, I am an aged and grey monolith) written into commerce textbooks from the 1970s stated that a medium sized business would normally have 500 or more employees, and big businesses more than 5000 employees. That material is 40 years out of date.
Real data from the latest version of the relevant report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS: 8165:2020) on actual Australian businesses shows that as of June 30 last year there were 884,821 trading and employing businesses. Of those, 569,187 (64.3 per cent) had one to four full-time equivalent employees. Another 254,528 (28.8 per cent) had five to 19 workers, 56,835 (6.4 per cent) had 20 to 199 staff and only 4271 (0.5 per cent) employed 200 or more.
In Australia, there are about 4000 businesses with more than 200 fulltime employees. And when you take out the foreign owned multinational corporations, and the corporately and privately owned large mining companies and other ASX 200 businesses it is even smaller. Yes, it plays well above its weight in terms of economic mass and total employment, but if we focus too much on this tiny group of companies, we miss out on the real lessons from the data. The real lesson is that most businesses in Australia are small to medium. The medium sized category is just 6 per cent of the total and that includes the specialised, niche operators. That is most of the remaining manufacturing sector in the Hunter, which are mainly small to medium enterprises. And a great number are family owned businesses.
And that leads me to the second notable event, which was the resignation from the Opposition frontbench of Hunter identity, Joel Fitzgibbon MP. Mr Fitzgibbon left his post over the policy fight on climate change policy because, as he put it, the focus was too much on climate without a sufficient focus on working people and jobs. The simple reality is that green jobs are few and far between. They are often with government or statutory authorities (nothing wrong with that). Those green jobs are not generating wealth for Australians. The focus of the media was climate change, whereas I believe the correct focus (of Mr Fitzgibbon) is real jobs for real Australians, and particularly in the Hunter Region.
Our quality of life improves with a better environment, but it gets harder to enjoy the improvement if the jobs are destroyed and most people end up unemployed and on the dole. Bad decisions on climate change policies will negatively impact manufacturing companies in the Hunter and make us less competitive. We need to recognise that the majority of jobs are with the small to medium enterprises, where innovation is kindled, job expansion becomes possible, new wealth is created and the whole of our community wins. If those businesses are damaged through poor policy led by a narrow bubble within the Canberra bubble, then the real cost is to jobs and future hope, to mental health and an array of social issues arising from unemployment.
We need to recognise that the majority of jobs are with the small to medium enterprises, where innovation is kindled ... and the whole of our community wins.
As a local Hunter Region manufacturer, we endorse the position taken by Mr Fitzgibbon. It is our genuine hope that both sides of politics, and the large and dormant Canberra public service, get out of the bubble and visit the real world, and the real workforce.
Let's not lose sight of the importance of our environment and let's try to not have the debate as a binomial option of the environment versus jobs. If both can win, and then the Hunter Region will also win, for all of our environment and out communities.
Dr Greg S Whiteley is the executive chairman of the Whiteley Corporation, the 2020 Hunter manufacturer of the year.
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