Gordon Barton
Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur
By Sam Everingham, Allen & Unwin, 432pp
Reviewed: 7 March 2009
Australia today owes more to the structural reforms of the 1970s and 1980s than to the superficial rebel-hip that younger people like to imagine characterized the 1960s. The entrepreneur Gordon Barton, while never holding any public office, played an extraordinary role in catalyzing social and economic change in Australia.
He was a buccaneering self-made capitalist who repeatedly challenged comfortable industry cartels that loafed along under government protection. His epic legal challenges to government regulation set precedents that ultimately led to major micro-economic reforms, particularly of Australia’s transport industries.
Barton founded, funded, and for many years led the Australia Party, whose socially-progressive but non-socialist agenda created the first effective third force in Australian federal politics. It was Australia’s first political party with no Class War history.
Barton also bankrolled and protected first the Sunday Oberver, then the Sunday Review, then Nation Review, which in the pre-Internet world provided Australia’s most important non-establishment journalism in a period of concentrated, conservative control of the mass media. Along the way, he gave the Australian publishing industry a timely kick in the tail during a turbulent period of ownership of Angus and Robertson.
Barton had to mount challenges all the way to the Privy Council in London to strike down state-based laws that prevented his interstate road haulage business competing with the state-owned railways.
Many more years and colossal legal costs were expended in challenging Federal aviation regulations that prevented introduction of airfreight services – again, to protect the incumbents. Later there would be challenges to Post Office monopoly privileges on courier services, and to the coastal shipping cartel that gave power to the seamen’s and waterfront unions as well as the uncompetitive shipping lines.
In many cases the reforms Barton forced through, against vested interests with entrenched political support, opened up opportunities for other market entrants and precipitated structural reform we now take for granted.
Over time, Barton’s addiction to risk and to personal drama undid much of his personal life and his fortune. Repudiated by the corporations he had built, he spent his declining years pottering about a small villa in Italy looked after by a son and daughter, dying in 2005.
Richard Thwaites worked in publishing and in journalism through the 1970s
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