"If you see a snake, just kill it -- don't appoint a committee on snakes". These words from Ross Perot weren't about the AWB -- but they may as well have been.
There's not much to be gained by the federal government delaying a decision that should have been made years ago. There will be howls of outrage, regardless of whether the single desk is abolished next week, next year, or next century.
If, in the wake of hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes paid to Saddam Hussein, the AWB's monopoly powers are not removed, then they never will be. It's a tribute to the National Party that it has been able to keep alive this anachronism of the 1920s for so long.
The problem for the Nationals is that they have allowed the maintenance of the single desk to become the issue that justifies the party's continued existence. Many of the growers who support the continuation of the monopoly are, unfortunately for them and unfortunately for the Nationals, not the future of the industry. Small-scale farmers on marginal land are those who are more likely to see their salvation in the current scheme. Understandably they fear the unknown.
As the Iraq affair has unfolded, most of the attention has been devoted to the corporate culture that was the spawn of the AWB's monopoly privileges. As yet there's been relatively little discussion of the effects of the AWB's monopsony privileges as the single buyer of wheat from Australian farmers.
A single desk negates the advantages that bigger-scale operations have over their smaller rivals. There's no incentive for efficiency or innovation. This result will always eventuate when governments limit to protect firms, or in this case farms, from competition. Tariffs cosseted local manufacturers against overseas imports, while the single desk cossets small domestic farmers against larger domestic farmers.
The idea that the AWB itself should decide on the timescale for the end of the single desk is ridiculous. The company's special benefits have been bestowed by the government, and they are benefits that the government should give or withdraw.
Supporters of the AWB believe that somehow they are different from everyone else. For anyone who doesn't grow wheat it would be a dream come true if they could determine the conditions under which their competitors were allowed to operate. And for most businesspeople, their idea of a perfect world would be to have no competitors at all. The taxpayers' perfect world would be one in which they could decide for themselves how much tax they paid. But, sadly for the AWB and fortunately for the rest of us, this is not reality. Sometimes laws do serve a purpose, and sometimes even trade practices laws are useful.
No doubt Australian steelworkers and shirt makers in the 1980s would also have liked the luxury of deciding whether tariffs should have been reduced, and over what period. But steelworkers and shirt makers didn't get a choice, and neither should AWB.
Twenty years ago the Labor government acted in the national interest to cut tariffs, and now in 2006 the Coalition should also act in the national interest to abolish the single desk.
From the AWB morass a victory for the national interest might emerge.
In the next few months a takeover of Qantas, funded by a private equity deal, might provide another triumph for the national interest. Assuming, of course, that cheaper air travel is in the national interest -- which it is.
In exchange for maintaining services to Australian regional centres, the federal government grants Qantas protection against competitors on certain routes. Think of it as a sort of single desk for airline travel. The principle is the same.
The AWB prevents farmers from getting the highest possible price for their wheat. Qantas prevents travellers from buying the cheapest possible airline tickets.
The cant about "national carriers" can be ignored. A change of the company's ownership presents an ideal opportunity for the federal government to tell Qantas that its monopoly rights won't last forever, and that in fact those rights will be extinguished as soon as possible.
It shouldn't have taken a scandal of AWB-like proportions to force the government to shut down the single desk, and it shouldn't take a takeover of Qantas to bring about competition between airlines.
Still, there's no time like the present, and there's no better way to kick-start another round of micro-economic reform.
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