As Gillard shops for time, retailers are playing a disingenuous blame game

AUSTRALIA'S retail sector is in all sorts of bother. After almost 20 years of buying up big, and borrowing to pay the bills, Australians are saving again. In most comparable countries, the global financial crisis burst domestic property bubbles. But here, the housing bubble has remained intact. Property prices in Australia, even at entry level, are outrageously high. Having looked overseas and seen what can happen to families and societies when they are too exposed to debt, Australians are doing the prudent thing - putting some of their earnings away and trying to maximise the value of every dollar they spend.

Many are going online to shop or making do with the apparel and appliances they already use.

As a result, many bricks-and-mortar retailers such as David Jones are finding the going tough. And do you know who's to blame for David Jones's woes? Julia Gillard. Not just the federal government, but Gillard herself. We know this because the company's chief executive, Paul Zahra, said so when announcing a reversal in DJ's sales and profit outlook. Zahra said consumer confidence had been hit by the levy on high-income earners to pay for the rebuilding of Queensland after the floods and by the debate over the carbon tax. In this way, Gillard had apparently been robbing David Jones of income.

''So the reality is she has hit our customers directly,'' he said this month. ''That aspirational customer has actually stopped shopping and people are just not confident about the year ahead. Customers are choosing not to shop, they are saving their money and paying down debt, and there is a real level of uncertainty locally as well as internationally.''

Notice the use of the word ''she''? ''She'' - the unpopular Prime Minister who would lose an election in a record landslide, the polls tell us - is the villain. Not the people who run the company. Not the consumers who have changed their behaviour. It's all Gillard's doing.

Business, like politics, is a jungle. The predators hunt in packs and go for the kill if they find a wounded creature. Anyone who has been paying attention to the condition of traditional retailing, which has been heading for trouble for years, will know that Zahra's attempt to put his company's problems all on the Prime Minister's shoulders was disingenuous. But he felt he could get away with it because the government, and Gillard especially, is so weakened.

For the business community, it's open season on Gillard. At a business leaders' forum last week, executives from a wide range of companies piled in, attacking the government from all conceivable directions. A few weeks before that, another group, which included Harvey Norman chief Gerry Harvey, who earlier this year called for the government to make overseas online purchases dearer by applying the GST, called for an early election.

The criticisms of the government are, variously, that it doesn't have a policy vision, or that it has too much policy, or that it should never have repealed WorkChoices, or that its carbon tax is creating too much uncertainty - although Labor went to the 2007 and 2010 elections pledging to put a price on carbon.

What the business leaders especially hate is the government's minority status. It's interesting to speculate on whether they would have been calling for an early election if Tony Abbott, not Gillard, had prevailed in last year's post-election negotiations with the crossbenchers.