The Business Council's recipe won't be to everyone's tastes Source: ThinkStock THE Business Council's monumental exercise can be boiled down to one simple but all-encompassing proposition. It is a challenge to Australia: do we sincerely want to build a prosperous future? Understand what we detail. Accept what we lay out. And we can have that future. This is the recipe for building a bigger cake. That is the crucial pre-condition for giving everyone a bigger slice. This challenge though, and the massive changes and, bluntly, hard work, that it demands, has a dark side. It is also a stark and ominous warning of a bleak future that Australia is sliding towards as the benefits of earlier reforms and the "free lunch" of the extraordinary China-driven resources boom now fade. What the BCA sets out is a roadmap for achieving and sustaining future prosperity. But the alternative is not less prosperity, if still relatively good times - a sort of benign second-best; the alternative is something far more unpleasant. Something that is almost certainly incomprehensible to most Australians who have basked in the good times of the past 20 years. Even at the worst of the global financial crisis, we were still getting our cheap flat-screen TVs. Now, it would obviously be all too easy to dismiss the BCA exercise as a "wish list" from the big end of town. Yes, of course they'd like the corporate tax rate slashed. Yes, of course, they'd like more "flexible" industrial relations. Read: cutting wages and conditions. And so on and on. Yes, of course, seen narrowly, it's such a wish list. There's an undertone to the exercise of "what's good for business is good for Australia." Mostly, because it's true. Not only in terms of what the BCA is proposing, but more fundamentally. But the critical qualifier, which the BCA plan endorses explicitly, is that business should also be constrained in the broader public interest. This is as much about sharing the cake as growing it. The second risk in what the BCA has done, is that it is just too big and sweeping to be comprehended -- that it is all but impossible to get your mind around. So the "easiest" way to respond is to send it straight into the too-hard basket. It would have been much cleaner for the BCA to have come up with, say, 10 policy dot points. Cutting corporate tax, setting up an infrastructure fund, doing something narrow and specific with industrial relations. This, though, would not have achieved what the BCA set out to do, apart from the fact that it would have looked even more graphically like just such a business "wish list." The BCA's intent was to really lay out, in a comprehensive way, how we were doing things wrong; the complex, wide-ranging and serious challenges we faced; and then a cohesive, realistic action plan for the country. As the BCA said yesterday, it had prepared this action plan with the overarching vision of securing enduring prosperity for all Australians. This crucially encompassed three interconnected goals: a strong, growing economy with full employment; a strong society with improving living standards; and growing the economy efficiently and sustainably. The BCA nominated nine things that this meant we had to get right. Some could be seen as statements of the bleeding obvious. Getting a better - indeed, optimum - tax system. Fixing the budget. And reforming commonwealth-state financial and governance relations. But also statements of the bleeding impossible. If it was so easy to get our tax system "right," why hadn't it happened before? Self-evidently, any discussion of changing the tax system opens a hornets' nest. Anyone for doubling the GST, for example? Some could be seen as motherhood statements -- that we should aim at realising the potential of people and workplaces, or embracing global engagement. The statement of the ambition is easy and worthy enough, but how do you actually do it? And what about the conflicts between different ambitions? To say nothing of the sobering, practical reality, that it all has to go through the political process and election cycles. As we've seen over the past few years, one man's resources tax to share the wealth of the boom, is another man's - and woman's - crippling burden that will destroy the core driver of our economy. Indeed, something as focused as an inquiry into the tax system produced only that one tax, which was promptly discarded, along with everything else in the tax report. And here's the BCA asking us to embrace 93 dramatic, sweeping proposals that run right across our economy and our society, and would require sustained commitment not simply over a number of years but, indeed, decades. And further, not to put too fine a point on it, would spark massive and entrenched opposition. Yes the shining ambition might be to grow the overall cake; and yes, that should enable everyone to get a bigger slice. But the harsh reality is that some would end up with smaller slices. In that sense, it really is a "wish list." It asks Australians - and even more pointedly, interest groups - to rise above their narrow personal or sectional interests to pursue the greater common good. The challenge is that such a bigger cake is out there, possibly in the distance, but the individual loss is immediate and real, while the easy money of the resources boom has enabled us to postpone facing the longer-term reality. Bluntly, but realistically, the BCA's plan is not going to be embraced. Certainly not in its entirety or even in its sentiment. It's too easy to dismiss it as being too business-centric or too ambitious. It doesn't help that it has surfaced in the white heat of the election campaign. So its greatest and hopefully continuing value will be as a benchmark - both in overall terms and in specifics - to judge policies and processes against, and, more brutally, to turn to when the country gets into serious trouble.