Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 26 January 2004

Now that Pauline Hanson is going to retire from the political scene it's time to take another look at her economics. What is interesting is the extent to whicht her economic views mirrored the media's economic thinking, despite the fact that the very same media condemned her as an economic illiterate.

Her attacks on globalisation, free trade, privatisation, competition policy, deregulation, and her defence of tariffs where all voiced by her media critics. Even her funny money policy has been lifted from Rupert Murdoch's Australian. Yes indeed, the media's rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness are marvels to behold at times, sickening as they are. Hanson's opposition to globalisation made it clear that, like her media critics, she has no real understanding of what it means. Now it is time to take another at the economics of some of her media critics.

Writing in The Australian Financial Review (9/12/97) Geoffrey Barker attacked globalisation with the kind of nonsense Hanson parroted. Shortly before that he attacked free labour markets, Jobs policy is failed theology 12/8/97. In the Peril of turning a blind eye (AFR 17/3/98) he once again launched an ill-considered attack on economics.

Each of these article could have been written by Hanson, if only she had the skill. Malcolm McGregor, a particularly nasty version of Barker, also has a pathological loathing of the market, never seeming to miss an opportunity to bag it. He has written several especially vicious and totally dishonest anti-free market articles for The Australian Financial Review.

Once again, there was plenty in them for an economic illiterate like Pauline Hanson to agree with. Hanson-hating left-wing pundit and legend in his own column, Philip Adams, is another whose railings against globalisation and free trade could have come straight out of the Hanson anti-market handbook. But media critics like Steketee ignored Adams' economic stupidity while targeting Hanson's. Now ain't that strange. Equally strange is the fact that though the Australian Democrats admit to sharing Hanson's anti-market views and basically have the same economic policy as One Nation they too escaped censure by these journalists.

Coming back to journalists brings us to Mike Steketee, former national affairs editor for Murdoch's Australian. Though Steketee lacks McGregor's vicious approach to market economics (sneeringly called economic rationalism) he certainly shares his loathing for market processes and is not shy in employing the double standard when it suits him. Almost immediately after Hanson's Queensland success we had Steketee telling his readers that "the consequences of implementing them [Hanson's tariff policies etc] in the Australia of the 1990s would be disastrous." Quite so.

But is this not the same Steketee who attacked proposals for tariff cuts (The Australian 23/5/97), arguing that adjustment costs caused by tariff cuts would lower national income; the same Steketee who attacked labor market reforms, who accused free markets (rational economics) of cutting real wages and creating poverty wages. You bet it's the same Steketee. Yet his own anti-market rantings are actually more culpable than Hanson's. Some were naive enough to expect more from The Australian's national affairs editor — I'm was one of 'em.

Rosemary Neil, a Rupert Murdoch journalist with a loathing of Hanson, is another market-hating scribe. Her anti-market bigotry and economic illiteracy was made quite clear in an appalling article called Disappearing apprentices (The Australian 20/5/97). But this journalistic trash had been preceded by the even more trashy It's The Economy That's Stupid, (The Australian Magazine 10/8/96).

This article will probably rank as one of the most vicious anti-market diatribes published by any leading Australian paper. Rarely have I come across such a mixture of appalling ignorance mixed with self-righteous arrogance masquerading as informed opinion. Yet Murdoch's paper still made this economic ignoramus an editor.

Hanson's anti-market sentiments would easily fit in with the pathological anti-market ideology of these journalists. They have said very little in the way of economics that Hansonites would probably take issue with. Plainly, it would be more accurate, and especially more honest, to talk of Hanson medianomics rather than Hanson's economics

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor