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.
