By Ian Verrender
Our pollies love to invoke the Anzac spirit. It tugs at the national heartstrings and generates a warm inner glow about ourselves. John Howard was forever banging on about mateship, even if he didn't quite fit the blokey mould, while our Kev is constantly evoking the image of the HWAF (hard working Australian family) battling on to overcome seemingly insurmountable hardships.
Most Australians proudly espouse the sentiment that, unlike stuffy old England or even the US, this pretty much is a classless society.
It's all a myth of course. And it's all relative. Maybe we aren't as class ridden as other societies but there is still an enormous and growing gap between the rich and poor.
One of the more important measures of our supposedly equitable nature has been the oft-quoted anecdote that Australians have one of the world's highest per capita participation rates on the stockmarket. The wave of privatisations and demutualisations that began in the 1990s - such as Qantas and particularly Telstra - gave ordinary Australians a taste for their own slice of the investment world and a sense of a power over their financial destiny.
Add to that the more than $1 trillion of superannuation money now sloshing through the system - courtesy of the 9 per cent compulsory superannuation payment - and it would be reasonable to assume that there should have been a sizeable swing in the balance of power towards retail investors.
Sadly, that hasn't been the case and, as the year draws rapidly to a close, it is pretty clear that 2009 will go down in history as a period when retail punters really were shown the rough end of the pineapple, when they were actively and openly discriminated against.
For a great many, this year has reinforced the notion that the stockmarket is no place for small investors and that the odds overwhelmingly have been stacked against them.
This growing disenchantment with the system represents a serious danger to our investment psyche and to the health of our economy. It could also come back to bite those investment bankers and corporate types who hope that a recovering sharemarket next year will allow them to begin floating new companies on the stock exchange.
That's when retail shareholders suddenly become important again. Right now, Myer is trying to whip up retail support for its float. A strong retail component forces the big investment houses to push up the price they are prepared to pay for new shares in a float.
But the memories of this year will be difficult to erase. As corporate Australia rushed to repair its balance sheets and pay down debts with a $70 billion capital raising spree, retail shareholders were treated with contempt in almost every issue.
These were desperate times, and in most cases niceties were thrown out the window as companies large and small scraped about for as much cash as possible. Institutional shareholders - who by definition have more influence and more cash at their disposal - were given preference at every point in the capital-raising cycle.
By and large, the institutions received greater allocations at bigger discounts on many of the raisings. It wasn't just the fact of missing out on a discount that aggrieved retail shareholders - the institutions received a far bigger slice of the pie, which diluted their earnings enormously.
UBS, the investment bank that took the lion's share of the business raising all those billions - earning enormous commissions in the process - has now seen fit to alter the capital raising mechanism to minimise the inequalities in its latest offering for CSR.
But it has done little to erase the bitter taste. It is all a little too late.
In the past couple of weeks, we've seen further evidence of the class divisions within the market, where companies strong-arm institutions into voting in favour of issues that on any objective measure appear to be not in anyone's interest.
The great Macquarie Group swindle - whereby Macquarie took $345 million from Macquarie Airports to remove its tentacles - largely was supported by the institutions despite ordinary unitholders being up in arms about the arrangement.
The same will happen with Macquarie Media and Macquarie Infrastructure.
Then of course there is the sticky issue of executive pay. Despite all the hoo-ha about the large protest votes - above 40 per cent - that still leaves a majority of shareholders voting in favour of these bloated salary packages.
The votes are coming from institutions using superannuation funds to vote in favour of an issue that has been almost universally condemned. Who knows what side deals have gone on behind closed doors?