In defense of the petty thief

The necessity to pay for accommodation without an income will put him in dire circumstances and he will meet similar people in this situation. He is absorbed into a type of subsurface culture. It is a culture of resentment and survival. Working in pairs the members establish their own economic niche as petty thieves.

Being so outnumbered, the chronically unemployed will view the employed to be lucky rather than deserving. With the passing of time, the perception that those with money to spend don’t deserve what they have grows stronger. Thieving now becomes redefined to be a fairer distribution of the wealth.

Lowlife - or victims of circumstances? If you bother to follow their life histories, you could not help but view these people as victims. Your bike may be gone, but you should feel blessed that you do not have the dreadful life the petty thief has.

When is a thief not a thief?

Strange how we despise the bicycle thief and, yet, have an ambivalent attitude to those who squander millions of dollars of those who trusted them. The gigantic rip-offs are achieved in three ways:

• Set up a company based on dreams and then appeal to the greed in the average person by issuing a glossy prospectus which offers a higher percentage dividend than almost all other companies.
• Set up a company based on dreams and then manipulate a gullible “progressive” government into investing taxpayers’ dollars into it.
• Set up a company based on dreams and then draw banks (who are feeling immense competitive pressure following the deregulation of the Hawke-Keating era) into throwing money into it.

This was not as clear-cut a theft as the pinching of a bicycle outside a shop - as there was always an outside chance that the dream may become a reality. But, is there any real difference? In each case one person has trusted another to duly respect property which has had to be worked for.

The actual theft occurred when the companies based on dreams were manipulated to pay the man on top huge fees for little input and purchase his personal assets at greatly inflated values. As Paul Barry said in The Rise and Fall of Alan Bond - “Clever lawyers and sheer complexity both protected and sanitized that conduct”.

There was in the 1980s what the media labeled as “WA Inc.” Brian Bourke was the premier of the boom state of Western Australia. In Queensland the premier was Jo Bjelke-Petersen - and in that state was operating what the media labeled “The White Shoe Brigade” (of which Christopher Skase was a member).

The dream was sold to the gullible who absorbed the confidence of the man making promises. The master salesmen from humble backgrounds were now the nouveau riche - such as Laurie Connell who knocked down seven mansions-in-line on the Swan River to build his “look at me” statement. Premier Bourke fell for the sales pitch of “the visionaries” and directed public money towards their visions. Connell’s visions lost hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

Then there was Alan Bond. “It would be an entirely perverse concept if we did not recognise the enormous contribution of the Alan Bonds and other risk-takers of our country.” (Bob Hawke in 1987.) We can expect a politician to fall for anything, but “Bondy” even hoodwinked company directors: “All I need to do is get into a boardroom. After that I will have the directors where I want them.“ (Alan Bond).

The debts became so huge that the only chance of retrieving the money lent out was for the grand visions to materialise - so the same people kept lending. And where is Bondy now? Back on the Business Review Weekly list of Australia’s richest and worth about 260 million dollars.

Now, how did the man who eventually went to jail for blatant fraud, and after billions of other people’s dollars had vanished, manage to do that? I suppose that a brilliant man who can produce evidence that he is brain damaged and unable to answer questions at his trial, can manage anything.

Conclusion

It would seem from the above that we respect morality less than we respect talent.