One has a bone to pick with Ergas pushing his opinion on various platforms from the Sydney Institute to the ultra right wing rag of the merde-och press, The UnAunstralian...

Today the brave Henry (who, by the way, is far far younger than old Gus-the-Shithead) argues about the waste of Labor's NBN and that of the Collins Class submarine... Well Mr Ergas, one can say that having any weapons or armies of any sort is a waste of money...

As far as the NBN is concerned, there has been a bit of wastage due mostly to the fact that innovations have bugs to sort out, but far less wastage than could (will) be done should the 20 bit-steam engine concoction of the Liberals (CONservative) is put in place with copper and elastic bands at street corners... And of course as a communication expert, Henry sees little need for an improved system, especially improvements that could impinge on the free enterprise of Mr Murdoch monopoly...

I believe Mr Ergas is an expert economist on NOT-SPENDING MONEYS on anything that could have some creative input in it... Investing money to make money is cool in his book despite no-one being able to eat money...

Henry reminds me of the smart accountants of the 1980s who saved money "and posted profits" by investing nothing in future developments, by flogging workers into a pulp so that no work was being done — meaning no expenses on materials were laid out to make nothing... This theory worked for a couple of years until the cupboards were bare...

Actually this reminds me of a long story but here is the short version... There was this cunning clever fellow, Jim Milner, who saw that the tomb raiders and the bottom of the harbour scheme were about to hit his company, Soul Pat. Soul Patterson was not so much a chemist chain as an investor into all sort of stuff including coal mines in Indonesia... It was worth a few billions and had a tempting huge honey pot... So Milner made a cross-share ownership with a firm called Brickworks... This of course stuffed up the corporate raiders at the eleventh hour... As well, Good ol' Jim kept his "rustic" headquarters without plush carpets nor expensive filing cabinets... 

Still stuffing up raiders... Some "investors" are now complaining they can't get the full value of their investment out of the company... They should have known better...