Tony Abbott and the BCA: the best kind of opposition
With enemies like these, Albanese doesn’t need friends.
This week I'm coming to you from sunny Cabo, Mexico, where – hand on heart – Rampart has important business.
My column for The Australian Financial Review went live this morning, and this month I've explored the breathtaking double standards when it comes to the relative apathy regarding Fortescue Metals Group's ruthless steamrolling of the Yindjibarndi traditional owners at its Solomon mines in the Pilbara compared to the community and investor outrage directed at Rio Tinto over Juukan Gorge.
Andrew Forrest is a rich ore body for any satirist. He and Fortescue maintain they "have always accepted that fair and proper compensation should be paid to the Yindjibarndi people and consistently sought to reach an agreement outside the courts." That isn't particularly relevant, given Forrest's idea of fair is paying about 20 per cent of what his peers BHP and Rio pay traditional owner groups.
Joe Aston
Forrest and I fundamentally disagree on this point, and that won't change. In February 2023, I sat down with him at length and wrote a feature about it, which you may find worth revisiting.
I've been reading an advance copy of Paul Barry's new book on international steel shyster Sanjeev Gupta (spoiler alert: it's great). Plainly, any substantive comparison between Forrest and Gupta fails miserably. Twiggy built an awe-inspiring enterprise in Fortescue, whereas Gupta's labyrinth of uneconomic "assets" was always a shell game.
Yet at the superficial level, there are striking similarities – particularly that both men trade in undeliverable promises, which are repeatedly swallowed whole and regurgitated by gormless journalists and politicians long after their impossibility has become apparent.
I'd also encourage you to check out the latest review by Rampart's food writer Alexandra Carlton on a restaurant I personally consider to be among the five best in Australia. It's called Bistro Livi, and dining there is worth the trip to the NSW Northern Rivers alone.
Alexandra Carlton
In case you missed it, I launched Rampart's second subscriber survey last week. The first survey was conducted in July last year and the feedback we received led us to immediately launch our vodcast Rampart Talks and to build the functionality on our website for subscribers to gift articles to non-subscribers.
We've already received hundreds of responses to this second survey but if you haven't completed it, I'd be really grateful if you'd take 5 minutes to do so.
Any hope business leaders or industry groups had of talking sense into Anthony Albanese or Jim Chalmers over wholesale change to Australia's capital gains tax regime has faded. I was highly amused to see the Business Council of Australia wait a full fortnight after the Budget to find their angry voice. The legislation was already being rammed through the Parliament. The horse had not merely bolted, it had disappeared over the horizon.
