'Lazy complacency'
Tanarra Capital's John Wylie has a new mission — rallying support for Australia's new economy to reduce the country's reliance on 'comfortable oligopolies'.
Investment banker and nonprofit board director John Wylie is about as establishment as they come in corporate Australia. But this week he uttered the kinds of words you don’t often hear from members of the national business elite.
As Jack Derwin reported, Wylie told an audience of institutional investors in Melbourne on Tuesday that Australian business must emerge from “a lazy complacency of collecting rent from comfortable oligopolies or digging holes in the ground to fill northbound ships”. In a nation where business is still dominated by comfortable oligopolies and companies digging holes in the ground, it’s quite the statement.
Wylie these days runs Tanarra Capital, a $3 billion activist investment firm which, ironically, has taken stakes and agitated for change at companies that arguably fit into that category, including Telstra, Lendlease, Boral and Nine Entertainment. He made the comments at Tanarra’s inaugural Entrepreneurs Forum, which Jack attended and covered for Capital Brief.
The words take on added significance at what feels like another moment of national introspection over the future of the Australian economy, in the wake of the seismic federal election which saw a thumping win for Labor and triggered a split in the historically pro-business Coalition.
