How Australia’s economic high priests sold the neoliberal lie

For decades, Australia’s economic commentariat has dressed neoliberal ideology as objective analysis, helping entrench policies that shifted wealth upwards and left workers behind, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven.

FOR OVER FOUR DECADES, Australian economic discourse in major legacy media has been less an exercise in objective empirical analysis and more a performative exercise in secular theology.

At the pulpit of this national cathedral stand two of the nation’s most enduring media clergy: Michael Stutchbury, former long-time editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review (AFR) and Ross Gittins, the veteran economics editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

While their personal styles differ – Stutchbury delivering high-born supply-side dogma from corporate boardrooms, Gittins offering folksy, paternalistic sermons to middle Australia – their foundational premise remains identical: the market is rational, intervention is heresy and the distribution of wealth reflects an immutable law of nature.

Crucially, both commentators' sermons actively manufactured consent for four decades of neoliberal restructuring. Slyly dressing up political choices as objective economic science, they convinced generations of Australians that if we simply deregulate, privatise and discipline labour, a “rising tide will lift all boats”.

In reality, four decades of this doctrine have revealed a far darker truth: the rising tide only lifts all superyachts — and conveniently drowns those left standing on the mudflats without a life-jacket, let alone a marine craft.

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Michael Stutchbury: The uncompromising evangelist of supply-side orthodoxy

If Australian neoliberalism had an inquisitor-general, Michael Stutchbury would qualify for the robes. Across his tenure at The Australian and the AFR, Stutchbury treated economic policy not as a series of trade-offs between competing social interests, but as a moral crusade between the enlightened market faithful and the dark forces of state interference.

In Stutchbury’s world, every economic ailment has the exact same remedy:

Wages too low? Deregulate industrial relations and strip collective bargaining — despite evidence from the Centre for Future Work that destroying worker bargaining power directly precipitated decades of real wage stagnation.
Housing unaffordable? Protect capital gains tax discounts and let private developers run rampant — even though Grattan Institute research proves tax concessions overwhelmingly subsidise wealthy speculators while driving up property prices.
Public infrastructure crumbling? Sell it off to corporate monopolies and subsidise their profit margins with public guarantees.

There is no room in Stutchbury’s worldview for empirical feedback loops. When corporate tax cuts fail to produce the promised tsunami of business investment, the diagnosis is never that the market theory is flawed; it is that the cuts were not deep enough. When real wages stagnate while corporate profits swallow an unprecedented slice of national income, it is framed as a necessary sacrifice on the altar of “competitiveness”.

These same counterfactual arguments could have been made for the Eastern Bloc. Communism only failed because it didn’t go far enough and starvation was the necessary sacrifice on the altar of equality.

This is not journalism — it is mysticism. It reduces the complex reality of national political economy to the cartoonish model of Homo Economicus: a world where human beings exist solely as utility-maximising units of payload and corporate profit extraction is rebranded as “capital efficiency”.

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Ross Gittins: The folksy catechist of “sensible” austerity

If Stutchbury represents the unwavering zealot demanding total submission to capital, Ross Gittins is the friendly parish priest reassuring the flock that their suffering serves a higher purpose.

For over 40 years, Gittins’ columns in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have functioned as the primary translator of Treasury and Reserve Bank orthodoxies for the Australian middle class.

Gittins’ trick is his tone. Reasonable, conversational and peppered with plain-English metaphors, his writing frames radical neoliberal policies as mere “common sense”.

Where Stutchbury thunders, Gittins coos.

But the underlying message remains firmly orthodox:

Unemployment? A structural necessity to keep inflation in check — a mathematical casualty acceptable to preserve the purchasing power of capital, even when inflation is driven by excess corporate profit-taking rather than wage increases.
Public Debt? Framed through the absurd household budget analogy, conditioning voters to view public investment in hospitals, schools and transit not as wealth creation, but as “fiscal profligacy”.
Industrial Policy? A dangerous “picking of winners”, whereas allowing foreign private equity to hollow out domestic manufacturing is simply “allocative efficiency”.

By presenting Reserve Bank interest-rate hikes and Treasury austerity targets as neutral technical necessities, Gittins sanitises the political nature of economic pain. He teaches middle Australia to accept wage suppression and declining public services not as the result of deliberately rigged policy, but as the inevitable bad weather of an unfeeling economic climate.

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The great lie: A tide that lifts yachts and drowns workers

The core deception peddled by both commentators is the myth of meritocratic trickle-down. They have consistently conditioned the public to accept that rewarding the top end of town creates a rising tide that benefits everyone.

Yet when we step out of the seminary of economic theory and look at empirical evidence, the tally sheet tells a radically different story:

Neoliberal dogma peddled in legacy press	The Australian reality	Evidence base
“Privatisation improves service and lowers cost.”	Energy prices soared, public transit deteriorated, and essential utility monopolies extracted super-normal profits from captive consumers.	Independent Australia analysis
“Flexible labour markets boost productivity and wages.”	Real wages suffered historic stagnation despite ongoing labour productivity gains, breaking the historical link between output and pay.	Centre for Future Work productivity report
“Lowering top marginal tax rates drives investment.”	Tax concessions like the 50% CGT discount fueled property speculation rather than productive R&D or housing affordability.	Grattan Institute CGT study
“Corporate profits trickle down to create jobs.”	Post-pandemic inflation was overwhelmingly driven by corporate profit margin expansion rather than labour costs.	Centre for Future Work profit-price report

As wealth concentration reaches staggering levels – with Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and University of NSW (UNSW) data showing the top 10% of Australian households now control 44% of all national wealth – the “rising tide” rhetoric is revealed as a cruel trick.

The tide rose for property speculators, mining oligarchs and banking executives. For the single mother working two jobs, the young worker locked out of housing, or the family watching their real wages eaten by inflation, the tide produced their final bubbles.

Reclaiming empiricism from economic theology

Economics was once understood to be a branch of moral philosophy — a discipline concerned with how a society organises its resources to foster human flourishing, dignity and collective well-being.

Under the stewardship of commentators like Stutchbury and Gittins, it was stripped of its moral anchor and reduced to a ledger for rent-seekers. They taught Australia to judge a nation’s health by the soaring height of stock indices while ignoring the social decay, regional decline and mental health crises left in the wake of “efficiency gains”.

It is time to call out this journalistic legacy for what it truly is: complicity in a four-decade wealth transfer.

Real economic analysis does not start with blind faith in supernatural magic — market or otherwise. It starts with empirical evidence, moral accountability and a simple recognition that human dignity is not something that must be earned on a corporate spreadsheet.

Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven has a career defined by high-level academic rigour, a polymathic approach to research and a commitment to strategic optimisation across multiple disciplines.