Viv ForbesOur Sacred Land & Other Essays (first published by Business Queensland and Common Sense in 1995), issue no. 105.About the Author»

At the Loveridge Coal Mine in the US on one particular day, the manager counted 32 state and federal inspectors, each looking for reasons to stop the mine, reduce production or increase costs.

On another day, in Victoria, we saw eleven shop inspectors employed by the government giving evidence against Frank Penhalluriack, who employed fifteen people in hardware shop. The inspectors were part of the government army employed to keep shops shut at certain times.

Last century’s heroes were producers, pioneers, builders, explorers, inventors, prospectors, timber getters, miners, squatters and drovers. We still build monuments to their efforts and slap heritage orders on the things they built.

Today’s heroes, however, are those in the anti-industry — those who make well-paid careers out of stopping things. They are anti-business, anti-mining, anti-farming, anti-development, anti-trade, anti-change and anti-foreigners. Their neurotic pre-occupation with the ways and things of the past is destroying prosperity and jobs and creating a generation of of children afraid of change, fearful of risk and suspicious of the productive process which supports them.

The anti-industry flourishes in five great allied empires — education, bureaucracy, the unions, the greenies and the media. It is no coincidence that each of these empires depends heavily or totally on government for their funds, their monopoly power, or their right to exist.

Education has become that greatest negative force in our society. The problem was distilled well by Charles Porter, one of the few Minister for Education who was out of step with his department: “Teachers have moved from the concept of endowing children with the tools needed for living to imbuing them with distrust and almost loathing for the society that bore and sustained them.”

They have fanned a genuine and healthy concern for the past, the environment and the disadvantaged into a hatred of the present, a distrust of all man’s achievements and a disdain for this successful and the productive. They have diverted the natural concern we all have for health, safety and security into a morbid fear of the unknown, the unplanned and the unlicensed.

Instead of preparing children for hope, freedom, risk, discovery and self-regulation in the grand arena of life, they lure them into dark cocoons of conformity, forced equality, compulsory co-operation and government guaranteed security. Or they recruit them to their own crusades — we are becoming overrun with deeply concerned people doing postgraduate studies.

The bureaucracy, of course, prefers to deal with subservient platoons of little comrades. They enforce the anti-industry edicts made popular by their tool-pieces in the captive education system. With all the communication skills of a stop sign, their punitive over-regulation has produced widespread institutionalised timidity.

Unions too have reach their position of dictatorial power by relying on laws drafted by their mates in the bureaucracy and passed by other mates in Parliament to conscript their grey regiments of due payers. Forced amalgamation is designed to weld these diverse regiments into fearful and obedient industrial armies.

Not all unions are wholly anti-business, but their general effect is to be so.

The public sector and welfare unions, by consistently supporting higher taxes, are anti-business. All unions, however, are hostile to those businesses out of their control and this generally means small businesses, farmers, non-union shops, and, most importantly, any new business likely to compete with a unionised industry, business or company.

The greenies are the most dangerous arm of the anti-industry alliance. They have picked up the ideological baton dropped by the comrade societies. Their secret agenda is to manipulate real or manufactured environmental “crises” to enforce their control via a world bureaucracy. They will continue the policies of taxes, regulations, red tape and welfare that have already done so much harm all over the world.

The last arm of the anti-industry is the media and propaganda industry, chiefly those parts funded or controlled by governments. Picking up consumerism and environmentalism like a holy crusade, the media has fed the public a steady anti-business diet of scaremongering stories about doomsday weather, overpopulation, pollution and land degradation, all of which depends for its solution on higher taxes and more money and power for the anti-industry.

The worst aspect of the anti-industry is that its negative influence is heavily focussed on new businesses. Those who oppose change are naturally moved to oppose everything new — new mines, new buildings, new work methods, new industries. Their motivation is usually just grubby fear of competition. Sometimes it is genuine fear of the unknown or opposition to change.

The growth of jobs, the maintenance of wage rates and the vibrancy of our economy depends on the rate of investment in new roads, new tools, new factories, new ideas and new businesses.

Two factors are needed to encourage the formation of new businesses. There must be easy access to the factors of production (land, resources, capital and labour) and minimal legislative or industrial barriers.

Neither of these factors are present in today’s Australia. Despite a million people out of work and more youngsters seeking jobs every year, the anti-industry has made business building an unattractive proposition.

Firstly, they have made it difficult to obtain the factors of production. Land, minerals and timber that could support new businesses are increasingly locked up in nationalised parks, aboriginal homelands or heritage areas. Capital from foreigners is spurned and taxes on production and savings is diverting private capital from new business to capital consumption. Finally, competition from the dole and the public payroll has made it impossible to find workers for arduous, risky or unpopular jobs.

Secondly, they have made it difficult to start new businesses with a daunting thicket of licenses, permits, enquiries and approvals which spring up like brigalow suckers around every good idea.

The anti-industry has committed a great crime against society. They deny hopes, dreams, opportunities and jobs for the new generations.

They have perverted a fascination with the past into a fear of the future. This prevents us from recycling old resources and from generating new ones.

History will judge them, their victims will sentence them and I, for one, will applaud their inevitable execution.

Forbes has long been active in politics, economic education, business and the global warming debate, and was winner of the Australian Adam Smith Award “For outstanding services to the Free Society” in 1986.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5