The Australia-French Business Disconnection

If you’re a small business owner and an introvert – why?

I mean, really. My words were always better suited for the page, where I get to edit them and no one is allowed to reply to my face.

In real life, I fumble all over myself when talking, taking in glances that say, “How the hell are you a writer, exactly?”

I’m like Homer Simpson after he loses his vocabulary tapes. “Where’s that metal dealie… you use to dig… food?”

Hey, I write for a living, not talk for a living. (That’s my excuse.)

Which comes to business networking; the small business owner’s slap in the face to their unearned LinkedIn magnificence. Here’s what my cat dying taught me about B2B sales, said no one out loud ever.

In a “lunch and learn” where you bring your own lunch and struggle to understand why you even agreed to it; an affable accountant presenter asked us what the top tax rate in Australia is.

“Forty seven percent,” I said, guessing.

A little higher, he ventured.

I could almost hear a troupe singing the Internationale marching towards us. I was also thinking, “did we lose a war?”

Fifty? Fifty-five?

“When you factor in the top marginal rate, the Medicare levy, and the surcharge it’s forty-nine percent. If you earn over one hundred and ninety thousand in a financial year, it can be as high as sixty-six percent.”

All confidence in the room deflated as he spoke. How do the nation’s perennial back-seat drivers (and thieves) get the lion’s share of our sweat, blood, tears, and toil? Two-thirds of my pay goes to empty suits while I drive over my fifteenth pothole of the evening? Screw this.

Speaking of war losing, I struck up a conversation with a French photographer at another exquisite networking function. This time, it was held in a jewellery shop (yes, this really happened.)

Hell, she might have even thought I spoke English properly. I asked why she got into business in Australia rather than her native France.

“You want to start a business in France?” She batted the notion away with fabulous Gallic flair. “Forget it!” Measuring out an invisible yet hefty tome of compliance documents, she said after a couple of years, the taxes and compliance become so onerous you may as well pack it all in.

“They take about 25% of what you earn, then they tax you on the rental value of where you work after a year or two, then you have to pay social taxes, and the registration taxes,” she says, as if she was remembering a bad dream.

“Here it’s not great but it’s much better than France.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests if you want to make €300,000 each year as a sole trader, you better be billing in excess of €600,000.

Sounds better than trying to bill €900,000. I can’t even absorb the Alboministration SurChalmers ban on credit card processing fees with that amount of fromage.

In 2025, business insolvencies in Australia hit a twenty-five year high, recording 14,722 insolvencies – and as of the 30^th of June, we’re sitting at 14,153. That means owners, employees, and their families hitting the curb; hard.

France has three times the population that we have. In the first eight months of 2025, 68,400 French businesses became insolvent, putting 253,000 jobs at risk. There are 5.9 million businesses in France and about 2.81 million in Australia.

In France, that’s a 1.1% failure rate among all businesses; in Australia, 0.52%.

We’re still “ahead” when it comes to per capita numbers, but I wouldn’t jet off to a Pacific island and pat myself on the back for it. Our photographer friend is slightly better off residing here when playing the lottery of business insolvencies. I guess.

Of all Australian businesses, 16.9% of them started during the 2025-26 Financial Year and 13.8% exited – not all because they couldn’t keep up with Grim Jim and his all-dancing line up of crap taxes – some people wanted to retire, move on, or presumably sell up. Of which the Government takes HOW much?

It’s almost like our society doesn’t want people who are productive to win. No, it’s exactly like that.

What does that say for the next generation of entrepreneurs? For those that dream big, Australia says no. Australians ought to be ashamed of themselves for having it good for so long – and shouldn’t have even had anything at all. I mean, it’s what we teach our children.

As I sit back and gulp down the third glass of free chardonnay I already paid for in membership dues, I wonder what the business culture of Australia will look like in five to ten years.

Huddled underground as the Political Correctness bots above whip anyone even thinking of making a profit, I suspect. Merde.