In an incredibly bizarre and paternalist move, Gina Rinehart has this week said she wanted to propagate Thatcherism in Australia.

It should be obvious that Australia needs Thatcherism as much as it needs a billionaire telling us that their interest is the national interest. It is bad enough that Rinehart organises secret trips to mingle with the likes of senators Michaelia Cash, Cory Bernardi and Bronwyn Bishop, or that she flies Liberal ministers off to a wedding in India at her own expense. Is Rinehart’s love for money, acquired through selling our under-taxed minerals, greater than her love for the country? After all, we already have another billionaire in parliament, and we hear far too much from those with 10 digit net–worths in our public policy discussions.

Thatcher, the “milk snatcher”, destroyed the British social contract as established by the 1942 Beveridge report – and to this day, millions of Britons are not better off for it. Does Australia want to turn its cities into the worst parts of northern England? Do we want a Glasgow, where 30% of children live in poverty and where, in 2008, life expectancy for men had plummeted to 54 years?

Thatcher was the wrecking ball destroying the wealth of communities which once had proud mines, steel, car and ship building industries. In the period she was in power, the proportion of people with incomes below 60% of the median income grew from 13.4% in 1979 to 22.2% in 1990. Unemployment reached 12%, and the top 20% of Britons had their share of wealth grow from 35% in 1979 to 43% in 1990-91. Are these things to be proud of?

Sadly, signs of this brand of Thatcherism are already at play Down Under. Sacked Adelaide and Geelong plant workers will soon be applying for jobs that don’t exist (there’s an 800,000 gap between unemployed Australians and job advertisements; adding more low skilled workers to the dole queues will not help). Most of these workers left school at 16 and have had little opportunity to up-skill in order to enter a growth industry, and most have the added barrier of functional illiteracy.

That’s not to mention that Australian unions are at their weakest point in history – something which would have greatly pleased the Iron Lady. Not since the Maritime Union of Australia almost had its back broken by the Howard government’s Workplace Relations Act in the 1998 Waterfront dispute has a union been successful in standing up to a significant corporate spend or attack on worker’s rights. Unions had little success in countering the $22m mining companies spent to water down the mining tax in 2010.

Australians sympathetic to Rinehart should ask themselves if they want to see the huge transfers of wealth to the ruling class that happened during the Thatcher years replicated here. As the late historian Professor Tony Judt reminded us:



In the course of the Thatcher-era UK privatisations, the deliberately low price at which long-standing public assets were marketed to the private sector resulted in a net transfer of £14bn (AU$26bn) from the taxpaying public to stockholders and other investors. To this loss should be added a further £3bn (AU$5.5bn) in fees to the banks that transacted the privatisations. Thus the state in effect paid the private sector some £17bn (AU$31bn) to facilitate the sale of assets for which there would otherwise have been no takers. These are significant sums of money—approximating the endowment of Harvard University or the annual gross domestic product of Paraguay or Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In this light, let’s not forget that the Australian mining sector is on the taxpayer’s teat, sucking all the milk it can get – we are talking $4.5bn per annum in mining company subsidies, and the $10bn in annual fossil fuel subsidies. Let’s also not forget that compared to countries like Norway, it’s arguable that the Australian government does not appropriately tax its assets compared to other mineral-rich countries.

The privatisation of Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank were both deliberately sold at a loss. Australia should never see this Thatcherite privatisation again, and now that Medibank Private is in the Tories’ sights, it’s time to pay close attention.

Any exhalation of Thatcher’s vivisection of England should be scorned. Australians must be wary to make sure prime minister Abbott does not splay Australia on the butcher’s block and perform his own vivisection, as Thatcher did decades earlier.