The Way Ahead

Election 07 has arrived beckoning 13 million Australians to the polls today. With so many people thinking about the future government it has inconveniently fallen in the middle of my time thinking about future micro-economic development at Gilkatho in 2008.

The Australian economy is at full production, extra labour is virtually zero and inflation likely to increase in the next year. The management challenge is to still service the economic growth given these constraints.

Price rises are going to be inevitable over the next year. Unfortunately a higher inflation economy rewards poor management, allowing mistakes and poor decisions to be recovered by price rises. We need to make suppliers fully justify any price increase.

The first step of business expansion is to add more labour to the business mix. This is not going to be an option over the next year. Business growth is going to come by achieving more with the same headcount. Gilkatho will need to use technology to allow each person to be more productive. Technology need not just be "computers". We can also use the latest research to make sure our employees perform and interact with the latest approach to business. We plan to subsidise the further study of one third of our fulltime staff in 2008.

Regardless of which party finds itself on the government benches on Monday the facts will remain 2008 will be a tough year not for the lack of business opportunity but for the lack of extra people to do the work.