Gotti’s Irony

Interesting piece in today’s Business Spectator (aka BS), which sees Gotti foaming at the mouth about “Dutch Disease” and the demise of the manufacturing sector, the banks, tourism, education and pretty much anyone with a job, as the rocketing $A and a contraction in business lending puts the skids under the non-resource sectors.  All of which begs the question as to whether we as a nation are extracting sufficient value from our once in forever boom in the demand for and price of our resources, given the collateral damage that it’s obviously causing.

However, it seems like only yesterday that Gotti was leading the charge of the anti-RSPT cadre, bellowing to all and sundry about the evils of the government’s attempts to claw back more of the minerals wealth:

“When new Prime Minster Julia Gillard announces a completely revamped mining tax it will be an enormous victory for the nation”, he wrote back in July 2010 (see “An RSPT Victory”), and went on to boast that

Here at Business Spectator, Alan Kohler, Stephen Bartholomeusz and myself realised that Rudd and Swan had made a diabolical mistake soon after it was announced. We decided to highlight every aspect of this terrible measure until it was changed. In all the KGB wrote some 80 commentaries on the tax and I think that, with a few print journalists, including Matthew Stevens on The Australian and Terry McCann on the Herald Sun, we led the push for the government to act in the national interest. Our readership soared to 400,000 as the business community turned to Business Spectator to understand what was happening. This is the first time I have been involved in an exercise like this and I have found that electronic communication is more powerful than print.

Perhaps Gotti would now be kind enough to define “national interest”.