REVIEW
Get to know your local ruling class
Barry Healy
27 September 2007
Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand
By Georgina Murray
Ashgate, 2006
252 pages, US$99.95 (hb)
In our liberal democracy those who own and control the economy don’t like to be in the public spotlight. The artificial cult of celebrity gives superstar status to trivial people while those of greater significance are not exposed.
Prime Minister John Howard and the right-wing think tanks supporting him often put it about that Australia is dominated by “elites”, which is their word for liberal intellectuals and their media sympathisers. You would never know that executives of Australian companies earn 74 times the pay of workers — and that is before their bonuses get added on!
Georgina Murray, an academic at Griffith University, has performed a great service with Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand by forensically dissecting the real power structure of Australia and New Zealand. Like a good detective carefully sifting evidence and getting crooks to spill the truth, she exposes a ruling class based on economic domination. These people compete with each other, but they also connive to keep their power and wealth safe.
Not only does Murray dredge through corporate and public records, media accounts and other facts, she has gone into the belly of the beast. Murray has spent the last one-and-a-half decades interviewing top business executives on both sides of the Tasman and their frank opinions populate the book (on condition of anonymity, unfortunately).
For example, one of Australia’s top 30 company directors bluntly exposes the real nationalist attitude of capitalists: “The whole world is our oyster so what is so special about here … We put our money out when we think it’s good for us. That’s all we do. We don’t look for any other reason.” The workers, locked into a prison house of national borders, are marched to war in the name of patriotism while their rulers cruise the globe sucking up profits.
Murray delves into our colonial history and interesting facts and insights leap from the text. Colonial Australia’s GDP was small, but the percentage of it cornered by the ruling class made them seriously rich. Approximately two-thirds of the early colony’s wealthy were free settlers and one-third convicts (at a time when two-thirds of the white population were prisoners).
The socially successful convicts generally came from families with a managerial or administrative background. So, while they were criminals, their social movement was “horizontal” rather than “vertical”. New Zealand’s ruling class history is distinct but is also characterised by cronyism and the sharing of riches and resources with buddies and usually passed on to sons.
Murray goes on to look at how the capitalist class organises and reproduces itself today. While high-fee-paying private schools make up only 3% of Australian schools, 42% of company directors who responded to her inquiries went to such schools. “Bosses know they will share cultural and social norms and trust people who share their elite education”, she comments.
The ruling class gathers for “recreation” at venues like the Melbourne Cricket Club or Perth’s Weld Club. “I run into the same people all the time”, one CEO told Murray. “We are all invited to the same things.” These are scenes for networking and ruthless deals.
For the ruling class, profit-making never stops. Their leisure activities are part of their working life. In fact, profit-making is a vocation for them, not an occupation. It is a lesson for those who want to transform this system; if we’re to succeed we can’t be half-hearted about it.
The interlocking connections between companies are tracked, showing who turns up on what boards and what that says about the centres of power. In the early 1990s, during a period of economic stress, Australian and New Zealand boards were densely interlocked as the rulers combined to protect themselves. Ten years later, things are looser between company executives but financial domination by banks has increased.
Murray is able to identify ruling class “cadre”, leaders drawing the class together: John Gough (ANZ director 1992-95), John Ralph (of the Commonwealth Bank, BHP Billiton and Pacific Dunlop among others) and John Schubert (from Exxon originally). All three are past presidents of the Business Council of Australia, which seeks, Murray says, “to discipline labour, to get more productivity and in return give workers insecurity of tenure, lower real wages and poorer working conditions”.
New Zealand is slightly different in that farming cooperatives have taken a place alongside old landowning dynasties. But in both countries financial capital is centralising wealth. “Like a giant vacuum cleaner, it is sucking up competition”, Murray says.
The book features a chapter on the sexist exclusion of women from boardrooms and on the role of think tanks in propagating ruling class ideas.
This text is sociological, but takes sides. “Rising class inequality, not just between nation states but also within nation states”, Murray writes, “ensures that class struggle is maintained. Whilst there is the necessity for class struggle, capitalism is never safe.”
