15 Jan 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive
If our political leadership practises listening to and acting upon
legitimate investor and industry concerns, we might get as 'lucky' as
Australia, writes Tony Leon
THE famous description of
Australia is "the lucky country". Superficially, this is a perfect
characterisation for the world’s 12th-richest country, boasting vast resource
wealth, hedonistic living standards and far from the world’s trouble spots, yet
within reach of its major trading partners, China and Japan. But on a recent
visit there, I was reminded of the crucial rider with which Donald Horne
qualified this phrase in 1964: "Australia is a lucky country, run by
second-rate people who share its luck."
Quite what Horne would
have made of the current crop of Australian leaders is open to speculation.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s disapproval rating of 48% slightly exceeds her
47% approval rating, while opposition leader Tony Abbott has the dubious distinction
of enjoying 60% disapproval from the voters who could put his Liberal Party
back in power later this year.
Yet in the smart suburbs
of Sydney and in its gleaming and expensive shopping arcades and on its
pristine beaches, an endless affluence and feel-good factor shrugs off the
limitations of the country’s Lilliputian leadership. While in Australia, I
could not but help contrast its prosperity and seeming indifference, even
disdain, towards the political elite with our obsession with finding the local
equivalent of Dostoevsky’s good Czar to lead us into a golden age. The media
rapture here at the African National Congress’s canny move to install Cyril
Ramaphosa as party deputy president mirrors our preoccupation with finding a
leader to meet the challenges of the times.
Leadership, of course,
matters at moments of crisis. The hinge of history could have swung very
differently, for example, had Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk not led SA in the
1990s, or if Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had not led the
democratic pushback against fascism and Nazism during the Second World War. But
in more prosaic moments of national and international affairs, it is arguable
that durable institutions and sound policy matter quite as much — and, in
Australia’s case, even more than the limitations of politicians.
Australia and SA have
many things in common: mining and resources as a bedrock of national wealth is
one of them. Despite a huge row in the "lucky country" at its
government’s imposition of a mineral resource rent tax on super-profits of iron
ore and coal mining, industry pushback there has cut the levy down to an
effective 22.5%.
Despite the grumbling of
the mining houses, which have yet to pay over a cent under the new tax, there
is no suggestion there that the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton,
will cut its exposure to Australia, or that its shares could be worth 20% more
if it divested from the Antipodes.
The law might be
unpopular but it provides certainty, makes no provision for a state mining company
and is independent of ministerial whim.
Yet the local weekend
headline was "Anglo pushed to quit SA". Not so long ago, for better
or worse, Anglo American was SA and much of SA was, in fact, owned by Anglo.
Now the country with
which the mining behemoth is most historically associated is seen by analysts
as a drag on the corporation.
The first non-South
African to head the company, Cynthia Carroll, made a hash of it, but greater
things are now expected of her replacement, Australian Mark Cutifani.
Among his other virtues,
Cutifani, when head of AngloGold Ashanti, at least reversed the flow of
expertise from SA to Australia, where Helpmekaar and Pretoria University
graduate Marius Kloppers heads BHP Billiton and another Australian and global
mining giant, Xstrata, is headed from Europe by another South African, Mick
Davis.
Then again, resource king
Glencore’s Ivan Glazenberg is simultaneously both the richest man in Australia
and SA.
But, of course, Anglo
American is today neither headquartered in SA nor owned by South Africans. One
former Anglo bigwig suggested to me that the company’s crisis of identity, too
big for SA and too small for London, was part of its existential problem.
But while the estimable
Cutifani ponders putting the company to rights, perhaps the South African
government could lend a hand. There was such palpable relief when the ANC
removed nationalisation from its recent conference resolutions that most people
missed the Christmas package delivered on December 27 by Minerals Minister Susan
Shabangu, more recently famous for her expensive bidding for questionable art.
The detail of her draft bill amending the investor-unfriendly Minerals and
Petroleum Resources Development Act suggests huge state control over the mining
industry and even greater discretionary powers for ministerial intervention.
Perhaps if our political
leadership now practises listening to and, crucially, acting upon legitimate
investor and industry concerns, and vice versa, we might also get lucky. As
Gary Player famously observed: "The harder I practise, the luckier I
get."
• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA
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