Editor's Note: 2009 gets bad press

A belated welcome (in hard copy, at least) to our readers for 2009 - a year that is getting worse reviews than Baz Luhrmann's Australia.

At least the critics had actually seen the film! Honestly, why don't we just skip 2009 and move straight to 2010 if it's going to be so horrible.

I don't recall previous recessions getting such a roasting before the nasty stuff actually started to happen. Our political leaders are more than eager to tell us how crap things are going to be.

Could it be because in these venal, spin-driven times - when we really only have administrators, rather than real leaders - if The End of The World actually happens then it's not their fault - and if it doesn't, then they've fixed it up for us, haven't they?

Imagine Kevin Rudd as wartime Prime Minister of Britain rather than Winston Churchill: "We as a government are doing all we can. But hey, guess what? I'm not going to lie to you, it's all going to get pretty nasty." Today's Melbourne Age leads on the front page with a picture of thunder and lightning and the headline "Batten Down".

Among the portents of doom in the sub-heading are a "collapse" in US retail sales of 2.7 percent and an "ominous" 9 percent reduction in credit card use. In my understanding of English (and engineering) the figure "2.7 percent" and the word "collapse" don't sit honestly together, and on another day you will read in the same paper about the need to reduce the dangerously high levels of credit card debt owed by Australians!

The brief from the editor must have been "cobble together as many facts and figures as you can to prove that Australia is going to hell in a handbasket." And a fine piece or work it was, too. Good newspapers used to temper the need to sell copies with a sense of social responsibility.

Professional economists are also lining up to point the bone at the Australian economy.

"Both the props that supported Australia are being broken," opined Chris Richardson from Access Economics in the same article. Lately he's been all over the airwaves and front pages telling us the economy was "buggered". (These economists and their jargon!)

These people should be made to take out Economic Pundits licences - and if they get too many things wrong in any 12 month period they should be made to shut up for a while.

These are the same people who were totally and utterly blind-sided by the sub-prime mess and then "Global Financial Crisis" or, as its known to its friends, the GFC (This must also be the first recession with a sexy brand name and acronym!) And yet they still expect to be listened to. And paid a salary!

The thing about this economic downturn which distinguishes it from others I have lived through is the perverse eagerness with which it is being anticipated. I simply don't understand why politicians, the media and the economic chattering class find talking up the prospects of a profound economic slump so irresistible. What is the point?

Photo retailers and local distributors are among many thousands of small and larger Australian businesses faced with making all manner of decisions which will be proven right or wrong some time in the future.

Should I take on extra weekend staff? Install another two kiosks? Increase my advertising spend, or cancel everything? Buy a wide format printer? Start importing that new line of geegaws I saw at PMA? Or shut up shop and head for the hills? And consumers likewise make decisions to spend on discretionary things (like photography) when they feel reasonably secure. To some extent the abject gloom emanating from Canberra and the newspaper houses must influence those decisions - and obviously not in a good way.

We are regularly told that economies are largely based on sentiment - how prosperous people feel, how confident they feel about the future. If that's true, then there's more than a whiff of the self-fulfilling prophecy in what we are being confronted with virtually daily in the media. (Perhaps its over - compensation for being so clueless about the GFC in the first place.)

So for goodness sake, Kevin, Wayne, Chris and all you other wise guys, give it a break will you! There are people trying to run businesses out here!