Thirty one years ago, on this day, July 15th, 1994, a former Treasurer admits that there is a “good cop bad cop” routine going on with the peak business body.
The Business Council of Australia was the dominant influence on Labor’s reform agenda in the past decade, at the expense of other employer groups and the party’s traditional union supporters, according to the former Treasurer Mr John Dawkins.
Such was the intimacy of the relationship, Mr Dawkins claimed, that it had been useful on occasions to have the BCA appear to be a critic of the Government’s performance.
Williams, P. and Ellis, S. (1994) DAWKINS KISSES AND TELLS ON BCA. Australian Financial Review, July 15.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 359ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that the ALP had always had a “complicated” relationship with business, and if its leadership got too determined to do anything, well, there could always be a change of leadership, either by elections dominated by propaganda or, as a last resort, the Governor-General… This is a story repeated with social democratic parties everywhere…
The specific context was that Australia’s economy had been “opened up” (tariffs down, dollar floated etc) from the mid-1980s onwards, in the name of “reform”, which somehow magically morphed into the rich getting richer and the poor really getting the picture. The BCA, set up in 1983, played a key part in all this.
What I think we can learn from this is that the means by which policy is made – and the way nominally independent political parties are shaped – is not theorised very well by academics, who are not nearly as bright as they think they are.
What happened next – the wealth inequality in Australia, already accelerating under Keating, became turbo-charged under Howard (1996-2007). And the emissions kept climbing, though hidden behind accounting tricks and dodgy numbers – and the atmospheric concentrations kept climbing.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
July 15, 1968 – first(?) UK government attention to the possibility of climate
July 15, 1977 – “Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate”
July 15, 2005 – The “Stern Review” into #climate is announced…