The Rise and, Hopefully, The Fall of Economic Neo-Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Column‪)‬

I count it a great privilege to contribute the opening essay to this issue of The Economic and Labour Relations Review, which is celebrating its first 20 years. Over that time, the journal has been an outlet for independent and outspoken, often unfashionable views, upholding traditions steeped in the thoughts of Michal Kalecki and Maynard Keynes, and some of Australia's wisest economists. (Even Karl Marx gets a mention.) I am most grateful to the editors for asking me to be their opening bat. Since the 1970s, we have seen the rise to dominance in theory and policy of what Joan Robinson (1964) aptly dubbed 'Pre-Keynesian theory after Keynes'. In the economics profession, these phenomena have been especially associated with the writings of Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Lucas, Jnr. They have spawned many surrogates in the USA, the UK, Continental Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia and, sadly, in the Antipodes as well. In the political sphere, President Reagan, Mrs. (as she then was) Thatcher and, in Australia, first, Bill Hayden and then Malcolm Fraser were instrumental in implementing monetarist policies and, more widely, backing deregulation of financial markets, freely floating exchange rates, lowering tariff barriers, and the removal of domestic and international capital controls. Nor did Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and their successors in the ALP avoid the virus. An era of international capitalism, red in tooth and claw, was ushered in. Ruthless swashbuckling capitalists (industrial, commercial and financial) combined with cowed and quiescent workforces often arising from labour markets euphemistically described as flexible, came increasingly to dominate economic and social life.