Piles of money raining from on high – hard to resist
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
The Cole Enquiry handed down its report yesterday and it was tabled in Parliament.
The gnashing of teeth from the opposition was audible here in Melbourne as the Government and its Ministers were exonerated of any criminal charges. AWB and it leadership on the other hand have been dealt a stinging rebuke which is (likely) going to result in ugly, painful, personally damaging legal action.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of fellows far as I can see.
The report concludes that the employees of AWB knowingly paid money to Saddam Hussein's regime and actively sought ways to get around the UN Sanctions against Iraq and Australian Business and International law. They actively engaged in analysis to find ways to skate as close legal line as possible - and clearly they skated over it.
As dreadful as this seems, even in with the hindsight provided by being at this end of the WMD-less Iraq war, why is this so surprising?
Does anyone really think that corporations are paragons of virtue? That they don't attempt to manipulate situations, the law and government to their advantage? That business wont do whatever it takes to make a profit?
It seems that the current business climate is more about what you can get away with, rather than what is right or honourable. And that for business the horizon for planning doesn't extend much further than the current financial year, or the next reporting period.
When there is so much money on the table, when senior executives stand to make such enormous personal profit, is it surprising to see corporate misconduct like Enron, Halliburton and Parmalat; and now like AWB?
I don't agree with it, I don't think it's right, but it just doesn't surprise me. The western capitalist system is set up to encourage greed, so lets not fool ourselves that results like this are anything other than expected. Not that I am suggesting that the alternative is any less intrinsically corrupting, that is if there is actually an alternative in play at the moment.
When piles of money are raining at you from on high, I suspect that its hard to resist. Even though, lets face it, there is actually only so much money needed to get you to happy. More money, doesn't make you more happy. Its just more money. Don't get me wrong, I like nice things, and I like to live well, but if two years as a (very) poor student taught me anything, it was that I could live and be happy on very little.
A lesson I suspect the folks from AWB are about to need to learn.
