Extract Opinion AUST today: Corporate follies: the year business...

Extract Opinion AUST today:
Corporate follies: the year business bosses lost the plot
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
Any decent review of 2022 has a category for Dunce of the Year. Last year there were rich pickings, including, of course, in the individual division, Scott Morrison.
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Australian big business, we salute you. For eye-watering gullibility and downright stupidity in 2022, Australia’s biggest corporates cannot be beaten. Their two strongest performances came at the Jobs and Skills Summit/multi-employer bargaining event and during the more recent energy crisis price-capping fixture.
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Similarly, imposing permanent price regulation of gas, after the end of what was promised to be an interim fixing of prices to deal with a short-term issue, was an act of bad faith by the government. It snuck permanent price fixing into a mandatory code of conduct at the last minute when it thought nobody was looking.
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The rising suspicion is that there are plenty of board members who would struggle to know who Adam Smith was, let alone have read his work or even summaries of it. The likely reaction you would get to suggesting to a modern director that the invisible hand could have a benevolent effect on society is a grimace.
Stakeholders have replaced shareholders in the affections of many corporations. You don’t have to be Milton Friedman to think the pendulum has swung way too far.…..