Directors and Officers - Strategic Leadership or Bondage?

Abstract

Scholarly empirical analyses provide guidance to policy makers in Australia’s ascent from the viral abyss to entrepreneurial sunlit uplands on which post-Covid prosperity might be built. These analyses provide regulatory options which can substantially diminish or lengthen the damage inflicted by the present crisis. They are policy choices only exercisable by the federal government. Damage reduction rests upon releasing the entrepreneurial spirits of directors, most of whom control SME’s of various corporate forms. Present regulatory policy and the posture adopted by the regulators is achieving the opposite ― being responses to demonstrated egregious behaviours of the past. In the present environment, this is akin to fighting the last war. Present policy initiatives focus on tax and economic policy rather than the removal of the dead-hand of spirit-crushing regulation. This paper proposes three options to facilitate entrepreneurship ― to increase business capital availability, consistency in definitions, and to address the insurability of directors and officers. Each are consistent with Hayne’s law simplification proposals and none re-open opportunities for a return to egregious behaviours.