Amused by the now familiar angry interventions of the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, on behalf of his acolyte and sycophantic follower Jim Chalmers, attempting to save him from the quicksand of the 2026 Federal Budget, Kookaburra has been taken back in time to December 1983.
At that time, Kookaburra, who has been self-employed since 1979 in various guises, was operating a bookshop, library supply and textbook sales business in Glebe (in the days prior to ‘gentrification’) – the ‘real Glebe’, in the days when it was as important to buy those tickets to the ‘policemen’s ball’ as it was to provide free photocopying to the prisoners’ halfway house for ‘insurance’ and when a wharfees’ strike could be avoided by the provision of a cash donation to the union support fund. It worked. But I digress.
Since 1982, Kookaburra had been working to provide some competition to the dominant University Co-Op Bookshop which had long lost its purpose of providing a plentiful and cost-effective supply of textbooks to students. Instead, the Co-Op (such a misnomer by then) had become a monopoly setting high prices and under supplying courses.
Kookaburra was out to change that by supplying those students the Co-Op left unsupplied and by offering good discounts. Gradually developing trust amongst students and lecturers, Kookaburra was expanding into different tertiary institutions, primarily the University of Sydney and the NSW Institute of Technology (as it was then known), but further afield as well.
To supply this burgeoning demand, Kookaburra travelled to the United States in October 1983 to ensure that bulk supplies of textbooks would land on Australian shores by the start of the textbook selling season in 1984.* Returning to Australia, Kookaburra managed what for him was the equivalent of the D-Day, or perhaps better described as B(ook)-Day landings. Container ships were tracked from ports of embarkation – Baltimore, Louisville, etc – across the Pacific to their destination port of Sydney. Then the final leg to Glebe – see above re wharfees’ strikes.
This was all going well until Monday, December 12th 1983 – a date to be remembered in the annals of political infamy. Without warning, Keating sank the Australian dollar. Kookaburra refuses to use the term ‘float’ for the catastrophic rebalancing which effectively wiped out the long worked out plans not only of Kookaburra but also of many, many entrepreneurs, farmers, investors, and countless others.
Over a period of weeks, after an initial rise, the Australian dollar sank from a value of around USD0.92 to around USD0.77 effectively wiping out Kookaburra’s anticipated profit and those of many others as the time came to pay accounts, not least of all those farmers who had been encouraged by their own banks to take out borrowings in USD. Remember, these were the days before ‘hedging’.
This is not an argument about the benefits or otherwise of the floating the Australian dollar but it is an argument against governments ambushing their own populations without warning.
Now they are doing it again. Changing the investment and risk taking landscape without warning or consultation.
Even Andrew Charlton, the Minister for Science, and himself a very successful businessman, has alluded to the problems this new set of rules pose for entrepreneurs when he refers to ‘it depends upon what you inflate off’ – which is exactly the point about Chalmers and Keatings empty statements about ‘wealthy people’ and ‘concessions’ demonstrating how little they understand about starting and running a business. Oh, I forget Paul did manage a band – how did that go?
When one starts a business it has zero value. So the understated inflation rate will have little demonstrable impact upon saving an entrepreneur from the crushing rate of 30 per cent (or more) of Capital Gains Tax being proposed by the Treasurer (who has never worked outside the iron lung of the public sector, always an employee) and the Prime Minister (ditto) and the former Prime Minister (ditto) and who are all participants in the generous parliamentary superannuation/pension schemes and have property portfolios enabled by that same tax payer funded system and which are protected from the current proposed changes. Not much risk in that.
The ALP tradition of ambushing the entrepreneur continues.
* On a sale or return basis, so the exact debt was not known until after the completion of the selling season.
