With memorial services for Andrew Peacock and John Elliott today in Melbourne, we’re farewelling two important figures in the establishment of the Australian neoliberal model.
They’re part of a broader loss of the cast of the dramedy that was Australian public life in the 1980s, which is increasingly hard to tell apart from The Gillies Report that caricatured it so devastatingly — a feeling not helped by the fact that both were so easily impersonated by Max Gillies. Peacock the Melbourne Liberal from central casting complete with tan and Gucci luggage, Elliott the spivvy, beer-chugging corporate raider. Pig’s arse.
Both now are barely known to anyone under 40 — even Elliott’s stint at Carlton Football Club ended 20 years ago.
It was Peacock’s fate to twice do electoral battle against the most formidable political force Australia ever saw in Hawke and Keating, as they set about deconstructing and rebuilding Australia’s economic and social model while keeping an electorally successful political model running.
Instead Peacock really functioned as a key internal transitional figure from the genuinely liberal party of Malcolm Fraser to the neoliberal party of John Howard — after years of infighting between wets and dries and Peacock and Howard, particularly in Peacock’s home state of Victoria where the dries drove out moderates and replaced them with the likes of David Kemp and Peter Costello.
Indeed, conservative politics was in complete chaos for much of the 1980s, with the absurd Joh-for-PM push from the Nationals derailing John Howard’s first stint as leader and Elliott acting as a controversy magnet as federal Liberal president.
Labor was politically dominant in the major states other than Queensland for most of the decade, until a young Nick Greiner found victory in NSW in 1988. Peacock himself, after failing in 1990 — eviscerated by some of Keating’s most memorable lines — would make way for John Hewson, the complete neoliberal, though it took another six years for the Liberals to return to government.
The turmoil among conservatives was crucial to Hawke and Keating’s success in establishing an Australian form of neoliberalism — one that rejected the aggressive anti-unionism to be found in the US and the UK among Thatcherites and Reaganites and offered Australians an effective safety net on health care and superannuation.
Without the constant infighting between Howard and Peacock and the Joh-for-PM absurdity, Hawke’s repeated election wins would have been much tougher, and a loss would have seen the removal of fundamental elements of the contemporary Australian economic settlement.
After 13 years of Labor, John Howard had to shift from wanting to gut Medicare to boasting he was its greatest friend, and settled for slowing down the expansion of compulsory superannuation, not rolling it back as so many Liberals still dream of (it would take another 17 years and the Coalition’s 2007 defeat to stymie its obsession with destroying unions).
John Elliott, however, was a neoliberal ahead of his time. He might have begun his corporate raiding in the 1970s, but the 1980s were his heyday, as he took advantage of the deregulation of financial markets and the lack of an effective corporate regulator to make deal after deal, at least one of which should have landed him in jail.
In his business dealings, Elliott demonstrated exactly what neoliberalism would become — mostly unmoored from the moral philosophy of individualism, small government and competition that spawned it, instead focused on unproductive financial manipulation, concentration of industries, the destruction of wealth by poorly regulated boards and corporate management, poor judgment by financial institutions and the exploitation of political influence to achieve corporate ends.
That Elliott was typical, rather than atypical, of neoliberalism wouldn’t become fully clear for another two decades, when the financial crisis revealed how the biggest corporations had rigged the system in their favour and then blew it up with greed.
Both men — strikingly different but in their own ways fundamentally Melbourne figures — represent lessons that have been learned and, just as often, forgotten in the decades since they trod the stage.
