Business kicks two own goals as idiocy reigns

It’s been a big – as in, disastrously bad – week for business, especially big business. First, the ‘certainty’ it was demanding from government in the form of Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg’s ‘National Energy Guarantee’ or NEG turned to complete custard.

Coming out of the week that followed the party room’s “overwhelming endorsement” – to quote the said, ultimately departing Prime Minister – of his NEG, is that the room overwhelmingly endorsed complete mush.

And then, whatever the Turnbull-Frydenberg NEG now is, or isn’t, there’s Bill Shorten and the certainty of his even more monumental disastrous energy uncertainty lurking in the wings ready to go.

Come the end of this NEG week, the already dead, buried and cremated ‘big company’ tax cut was ceremonially put to the Senate sword. There was no way that Pauline Hanson in particular was going to handcuff herself to a devastatingly unpopular policy and an even more devastatingly inept PM and, in this case, treasurer.

Business only has itself to blame, on both fronts. More exactly, business broadly can blame the business leadership both at big company chairman and CEO level and the various business lobby groups headlined by the Business Council.

Now, I’m using the word ‘blame’ a tad loosely. This is because – even with Shorten and even greater Labor energy insanity certainty looming – both business, big and small, and the nation more collectively can all be thankful we missed the NEG bus.

I wrote ten years ago that then-PM Kevin Rudd’s anti-carbon (dioxide) rants were a national suicide note; for the first time in our history a PM had set out to quite deliberately make Australians significantly and permanently poorer.

The TurnbullFrydenberg NEG was essentially an attempt to enforce that suicide note. It is therefore behaviour that is actually worse, because in 2018 we know a lot more than we did in 2008 about the utter stupidity and insanity of both so-called Climate Change and the