At a recent WA Business News boardroom lunch, the heads of some of Australia’s oldest and most successful private owned and operated companies discussed issues and opportunities facing their business on local, state and federal government levels.
Phillip Marsh:
Marsh Civil, managsing director
In the land development industry, the layers of bureaucracy to get a piece of land before you can even get to a point where you can build a house on it are ridiculous. The timeframe from conception through to the actual lot being available and the cost that puts onto the piece of land, is just ridiculous, and it’s becoming unaffordable
House-and-land packages are starting to get to a point where it’s ... I don’t think our kids are going to be in the same position we were – the affordability ... it’s becoming unaffordable. The land prices hasn’t really gone up, it’s the levels of bureaucracy that lead to the outcome that’s really made a big difference
Some of its been good for us too – the contaminated sites register, we do a lot of clean up for that, we get a lot of work out of that, but when the government holds things up its really costly.
Chris Galvin:
Galvin Engineering, managing director finance/marketing
It’s about the war for labour and talent, getting people, because two to three years ago it was absolute hell.
(More recently) it’s been nice but we knew it wasn’t going to last long, and it’s already becoming difficult to get people. And it’s not a skills shortage, it’s a people shortage across the board – you can see it coming and we’re battening down the hatches and doing everything we can to look after people but no matter what you do when there are these huge forces thrown at them, typically by the big companies and so on, it’s very hard to retain that. I don’t know what the answer is but we need to start working on it.
Stephen Samson:
Sadleirs Transport, director
From a government perspective – while we’ve been here for 181 years, we took it upon ourselves over the last three to five years when there was a downturn to reinvent ourselves because we could see it was just a downturn and that it would pick up again, and the government, both federal and state have missed that opportunity. They haven’t really seen beyond ... they should’ve been building more infrastructure to be ready for a turn in the marketplace and I think they’ve failed. It’s where that model doesn’t work, and that’s where it plays out – it’s about the next election, not looking 10 years ahead but looking two years ahead.
Gordon Martin:
Coogee Chemicals, chairman
In terms of the [federal] government my one request would be, for goodness sake don’t forget about WorkChoices. We had individual workplace agreements with AWU and we rolled that into a five-year deal, we did that on June 27 I think, just before that drop dead date. At the end of that five years it’s going to be hell for most companies and private companies, and unfair dismissal laws are chronic. I think it’s bloody absurd where we are heading in that area, and sure enough the Liberals have dropped it but I hate to think it’s gone forever.
Julian Walter:
JWH Group, managing director
On the government side, get rid of layers and layers of bureaucracy because our costs of running the business, and I’ve been in it for 35 years, as far as applied overhead has risen quite dramatically and it’s all to do with all the crap we have to put in. We might have five sheets of drawings for a house years ago, now you might have 35 drawings because of all the rubbish you have to go through.