It’s ironic that in the week pioneering Australian journalist Max Walsh dies, the loony ideas he did so much to destroy — protectionism and the political patronage and corruption that it entailed — have been making a comeback, all in the name of national security and sovereignty, courtesy of the ALP, some unions and special interests.
The pandemic, and now Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, have seen the coat tuggers and urgers return from the wilderness to tell us we should have heavy investments in manufacturing, drugs and ships (what about planes?) to help us become self-sufficient in a difficult world. It’s the Menzies-McEwan era all over again (though ScoMo and Barnaby Joyce are pale imitations of those two).
Undermining and then (with the help of Liberal MP Bert Kelly and former AFR editors Peter Robinson and Paddy McGuinness) discrediting these ideals helped set up the reforms of Australian business and economic thinking in the late 1970s and through the 1980s to the point where the right of Australian politics now claim they are the rightful owners of reform.
Their predecessors in politics and business were not reformists. They were statists by virtue of their control and exploitation of the system of protection (aided by unions and, for much of the period up to the late 1960s and early 1970s, the White Australia policy).
Walsh’s time writing and then editing the Australian Financial Review was the centrepiece of the golden age of Australian finance and economic journalism. He encouraged original journalists — Pierpont columnist Trevor Sykes, Bob “whispering” Gottliebsen, Richard Ackland, Valerie Lawson, Colleen Ryan, Anne Lampe.
His time at the AFR should be seen as part of a continuum of great AFR and Fairfax editors — Max Newton (who gave me my first job in journalism in 1969 in a backroom of one of Newton’s two homes in the Canberra suburb of Deakin), Vic Carroll, Peter Robinson, Max Suich, Fred Brenchley, Tony Maiden and PP ‘Paddy’ McGuinness.
Max wrote for the AFR, Sun Herald and The National Times at Fairfax and later worked at Nine on the Sunday program (where I later worked as supervising producer of business Sunday). By then Max had migrated to the ABC and CarWash (with Richard Carlton).
TV is the one area where Max Walsh struggled. On CarWash, Carlton was the better TV performer (his famous “blood on your hands” question to Bob Hawke after he had deposed Bill Hayden as opposition leader). Max was full of facts but at times struggled to turn them into a simple, coherent question like Laurie Oakes could do time and time again on Sunday and Nine News. Oakes is by far the best political reporter and interviewer I have come across in my nearly 53 years of journalism.
Walsh hired me to be a finance writer in 1978 after I came to Sydney as the first finance writer for the Australian Associated Press, and for years I have thought that recognition by an editor I had admired for years was the best thing that had happened to me in my journalism career.
To many in journalism, Walsh was known as “Thanks A Million”, a play on his christian name, Maximilian, and for his ebullient style, especially lunching and celebrating.
One of his few failures in journalism came in the early 1980s (from a vague memory) when Fairfax management asked him to try and revitalise The Sun — Fairfax’s Sydney afternoon paper and a rival to Murdoch’s The Daily Mirror (where Walsh first came to prominence as a police reporter).
Price cut, promotions and other ideas couldn’t save The Sun because it was a victim of changing demographics, the expanding exurbs in Sydney’s west, north and south and the increasing commutes by car and not public transport. It died in March 1988, one day after The National Times closed.
Glenn Dyer worked at the AFR from 1978 to the end of 1985, where he was a finance reporter, finance editor and news editor/chief of staff.
So, Glenn unless I am mistaken, we have in you, a real-life apologist for neo-liberalism here at Crikey. When is comes to ‘loony ideas’, they do not come more demented and corrupt than those associated with the zealots and fanatics who form part of the ‘economic Taliban’. If you want corruption and patronage then economic rationalism and libertarianism provide the ideal fertile ground in which to cultivate it.
I will tell you this Glenny boy, you might get away with passing your toxic neo-liberal propaganda off with the under 50s but you won’t get away with it with me. I am a 74-year-old who lived in a half decent society in the 1950s and 1960s (remember those days before it all turned into an ‘economy’ courtesy of the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand, just to name a few).
Perhaps your selective memory does not allow you to recall the days when unemployment levels of above around 1% would most likely be a cause for a change of Federal government; that when you left school, you could very often obtain not just a job, but a career for life. A career in which you were frequently entitled to permanency, long-service leave, holiday pay, superannuation and sick pay. It was far from a perfect world back then but it was certainly a more civilized and community-based society.
The free-market ‘reforms’ that you speak so glowingly about have poisoned, prostituted and perverted just about every aspect of out society. Most infamously, our education, aged-care and health systems.
I would invite you to consider too, Glenn, the numbers of destitute, mentally ill and homeless who sleep rough in our cities now, compared to what it was like back in the days of Robert Menzies and John McEwen (by-the-way, I think that you will also find that the name of the former leader of the Country Party is spelt with an ‘e’ and not with an ‘a’).
I notice also, that in one breath you seem to be critical of Menzies and McEwen for running what was known then as a ‘mixed economy’ and then in the next breath you seem to praise them by comparing then to the risible ‘ScoMo’ and Joyce. Strange!
There is much, much more that could be said about the ‘free-market’ economic racket which puts more and more money into the pockets of the rich and devious and less into the pockets of ordinary and struggling citizens, but Glenn, I will leave it at that.
Extraordinary placement. A diatribe in support of Socialism in an obituary for a former and well-loved partner in the fight against concentrated power – which Socialism intends to double down on. I cannot name another ideology that has had more victims than yours. Is the capacity for human kindness not present, removed or surrendered to sign up for such mass stupidity.
Give Two Shi(r)ts Bannon our disregards.
Do you mind if I copy that to Word?
It would save me a lot of time when typing my own thoughts, opinions and life experience.
Not a problem Epimenides. I am sure that it (and much more like it) describes the thoughts, opinions and life experiences of many.
One may only hope.
This is spot on- Neo- Liberalism is a cancer and a curse!!! The obituary for Max Walsh was genarally OK but got off to a bad start. Really need to clarify those ‘loony ideas’ !