Written by Schon Condon in February, 2009

That’s the new lingo for the Global Financial Crisis.

Welcome to 2009 and the first issue of “On the Beam” for the year.  The first month is almost over and alas it seems that Christmas was in the distance past which is very sad as it should be a time of year that we can take genuine time to catch up with family, friends and others.  This year was an opportunity for some of our staff to meet one of my relatives who had originally gone into business for herself after her employer had financially collapsed.  Soooooo, I hear you say?

Well let’s actually put this into perspective.  Iris went into her first business at the age of 17 after her then employer, who was also responsible for her training as a seamstress, was wound up.  He had been pursued to closure by the New South Wales Taxation Office (one of the predecessors of the ATO) who had been instructed to ferociously pursue the recovery of monies due to the State to desperately help a then cash strapped New South Wales Government.  At the time there was a significant shortage of jobs and if you were intent on providing for yourself or yourself and your family then your only alternatives were to set up a business or stave.  Where necessary, families despatched children of working age to earn a living from almost any source to fund family needs.  The year was 1930 and the world was definitively in the midst of a depression.  The one we all studied as “The Great Depression,” the one that certainly I was told during my schooling would never occur again.

Iris, and on occasions with some of her sisters, went on to run a number of successful businesses and ultimately retired and has since lived from what she saved and her entitlements to Government pensions.  Iris alas never married as her fiancé was killed in New Guinea during the Second World War.  Iris is still extremely coherent and quite amazing for her age.

Quite interesting to note that after almost a century many of the fundamentals have not changed, small businesses still don’t always pay their tax, the taxation office pursues and shuts down those that don’t, and the New South Wales Government is again cash strapped!!  However, what we do have is GEERs, sources of alternate work (not necessarily in the same line) and a lot of people trying to work out how we got here.

Somewhere buried amongst everything that is going on at the moment are some things that we as society need to change so that we really can prevent future occurrences of this, or at the very least their severity.  If we do not locate the right ones and change them then nothing will change.

What we must ensure is that this becomes a permanent correction and not merely a speed hump which is quickly forgotten once you have gone over it.

Enjoy the read.