The new Shadow Treasurer, Tim Wilson, has been more visible in the few days since his appointment than his predecessor Ted O’Brien managed in nine months.

When Malcolm Turnbull warned of ghosts haunting the Liberal Party, I somehow doubt he had the former Shadow Treasurer in mind.

Anyway.

Tim’s visibility is refreshing. He is challenging Jim Chalmers, the Economic Moron In Residence, throwing out ideas and holding this train wreck of a government to account.

Good. Keep going.

One of Wilson’s apparent policy priorities is promoting small and family business, a legacy probably from his time as Shadow Small Business Minister. He wants to make it easier to set up and run a business.

Worthy goal. Noble instinct. I wish him well but regret that I think it is completely insufficient.

Here is the problem, Tim.

In a normal country, small business is the engine room of an economy, but Australia is not a normal country. Or at least, no longer a normal country. Australia has built a parallel universe where the rational choice, the genuinely smart financial decision, is to never start a business at all.

Think about it. Why would anyone in their right mind take the risk, sink in the capital, work the brutal hours, and carry the stress of running a small business, when they could walk into a government job instead?

Mid-level bureaucrats are pulling $200,000 a year plus 15 per cent superannuation with all the job security of a protected species. No cashflow problems. No BAS statements. No payroll headaches. And if you are a sufficiently obsequious plodder, the ceiling disappears entirely.

Departmental Secretary? A million plus.

Running a loss-making government business? Two million plus.

Presiding over one of the off-budget slush funds this government loves so dearly? Another million, easy.

No customers to please. No market to survive. No competitors to worry about. Just meetings and supplication, all the way to a very comfortable retirement.

And say you ignore all of that and build something anyway. Say by sheer willpower and stubbornness you create a successful small business and decide to sell it. Congratulations. The capital gains tax bill will remind you of your place.

You are now a fat cat. A big end of town type. A threat to inter-generational fairness, according to the very government that spent years making your life harder.

If your business happens to employ people, God help you further. Income tax. Payroll tax. Industrial relations laws written by people who have never met a payroll and designed to serve unions who find small business irritating and inconvenient.

There are simply too many small businesses to bully effectively, too scattered to picket, too independent to herd into pattern agreements. So the system quietly disadvantages them instead, tilting the playing field toward the big corporations where the union influence actually lands.

Tim, tinkering at the margins will not fix this. You cannot make small business attractive while the alternative of working for government remains so much more cushier.

The real reform is not simplifying the rules for business owners. It is making the public sector a less absurdly attractive option. Fewer positions. Working from work. Genuine pay restraint. Accountability tied to outcomes rather than tenure.

A tinker here and a tinker there is not going do it. Australia needs a fundamental economic re-architecture to undo 25+ years of economic and policy insanity. And yes, I did write 25 years because I include the post-2000 Howard government. So while you are at it, put Federation and Commonwealth-state/territory relations reform on the list.

The slow strangulation of the states did not start with Albanese. Howard’s government managed arguably the most consequentially destructive and least understood to Australia by effectively gutting the Federation, and almost nobody noticed. Twenty-five years of compounding insanity does not unwind with a tweak to small business tax thresholds.

Good luck mate. I genuinely wish you well. But I sadly think it not possible.

Too many spivs. Too many grifters. Too many lanyard wearers. Too many vested interests.

You are outnumbered and outgunned.