When politicians get on their high horse about tariffs, company taxes, payroll taxes, or environmental levies, they love to pretend they’re sticking it to ‘big business’.

The fantasy is that these costs magically evaporate somewhere between the boardroom and the shop floor.

In reality, businesses are not enchanted money trees shaking down gold coins for the public good. Every cost they incur, whether from taxes, red tape, or plain old inefficiency, gets quietly stapled to the final price tag. Which means, congratulations, you, dear consumer, are paying for every single tax, every single time.

The government sends in men and women with guns to collect its revenue; businesses just send you a bill. Different uniforms, same outcome.

Take tariffs, for example. Yes, those Donald Trump-style tariffs everyone loves to hate. Slap an extra cost on imported parts and, shockingly, manufacturers will either jack up prices or quietly cheapen the product. Raise company taxes, and the effect is the same: higher prices, skinnier pay packets, fewer jobs, or slower growth.

Whether it’s a cup of coffee or a new ute, you’re the one picking up the tab while politicians act like they’ve heroically punished ‘corporations’.

Which brings us to the Australian government’s current pearl-clutching over Trump’s tariffs. They’ve been furrowing their brows and warning about the horrors of protectionism for American consumers. Fair enough – tariffs are bad economics. But you’ll want to be sitting down for this…

The same Labor government that’s scolding Washington for distorting trade is quite happy to preside over our own home-grown version.

And no, it’s not a formal tariff. It’s much worse because it’s a hidden one.

Our ports and docks, darlings of the union movement, are some of the most heavily unionised and least efficient in the developed world. ‘Restrictive work practices’ is the polite term for it; ‘painfully slow and overpriced’ might be more accurate.

Delays, featherbedding, and wage bills fat enough to make a CEO blush all add cost to importing and exporting. And those costs don’t vanish, they’re quietly embedded in the price of your sneakers, your new TV, and even your groceries.

Read this piece from Aaron Patrick in the AFR from barely two years ago:

Australia’s most overpaid, under-worked employees. At one company, tugboat crews are paid not to work. When they do, they often don’t do much.

In Sydney, Svitzer tugboat captains and mechanics cost the company a minimum of $250,000 a year. Unskilled deckhands cost $162,000 a year. Each day, in Sydney, only two-thirds of the captains, engineers and deckhands turn up to work. The others are paid to visit friends or go to the football.

Will this be mentioned at Jim’s Productivity Jamboree? HELLZ NO!

Functionally, Australian port cronyism and inefficiency is a tariff. It makes everything in Australia more expensive and strangles productivity. The only difference is that an actual tariff sends its revenue into government coffers where, theoretically, it could pay for hospitals or roads. The hidden port tax? That flows straight into the pay packets of a small, privileged slice of unionised workers, then into union bank accounts, and finally, with a wink and a nudge, into the coffers of the Labor Party.

It’s a neat little money-go-round: higher costs empower unions, unions bankroll political campaigns, politicians defend the status quo, and nothing ever gets fixed. And who gets the political contributions from Unions? Oh yeah. That’s right. The Labor Party and its friends in the Labor government.

For us consumers, it’s just another invisible tax. For them, it’s a very lucrative arrangement.

So, the next time you hear Canberra weeping about the injustice of foreign tariffs, remember: they’re not against tariffs in principle. They’re just against tariffs that don’t benefit their mates.

Until someone has the spine to reform our docks, Australians will keep paying inflated prices. Not because of some abstract trade policy overseas, but because of a very real, very domestic racket right here at home.

Fret not though. The Cowards of the Coalition won’t say anything. They are still working out what they stand for.

First published on Substack, which you can read here…