By Michael Stutchbury
11 Dec 2018 — 2:27 PM
Choosing Australia’s top business figures over the past half-century turned into an obsession for some at The Australian Financial Review. What were the criteria? Once we had structured the exercise around the idea of leaders, builders, pioneers and stirrers, it became clearer. This is the story of those who shaped today’s Australian business landscape. While the story has no ending, it still reaches a conclusion: more than we recognise, Australia is a nation of doers who now feel comfortable building global businesses.
Australia in the early 1960s was a land of new opportunities. The old family dynasties – such as the Darlings, the Baillieus and the Myers – were giving way to a new breed of self-made entrepreneurs, many of them starting from scratch in a new homeland. The economy was powered by immigation, a mining boom geared to Japan’s post-war industrialisation and a spectacular nickel frenzy. Truckies, builders and miners laid the foundations of modern Australian business.
This list recognises not only those who amassed personal fortunes or achieved high office over the past five decades, but those who shaped today’s Australian business landscape. It excludes politicians and public servants who also steered Australia’s development. It is a business list.
It begins with the defining 20th-century story of Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy , who arrived virtually penniless in Australia in 1952 before building the world’s biggest shopping centre developer and manager, Westfield . It includes dinky-di prospector Lang Hancock , who in the 1950s discovered the vast iron ore deposits in Western Australia’s Pilbara that now feed Australia’s biggest export industry.
And it covers captains of industry from resource giants BHP and Rio Tinto , sugar refiner and then building products maker CSR , conglomerate Wesfarmers , banks NAB and Westpac , and supermarket giant Woolworths . Many of Australia’s top company men have made important contributions to public life. Hooker chairman Keith Campbell’s inquiry led to the financial deregulation of the 1980s and the growth of the home-grown Macquarie finance house set up by David Clarke and others.
These business figures shaped many aspects of Australian life. Kerry Packer revolutionised world cricket in the late 1970s, Graeme Samuel and a clique of Melbourne business leaders entrenched the AFL as the dominant national football code in the ’90s and Frank Lowy established the modern national soccer league in the 2000s. Quiksilver’s Alan Green took Australian surf culture to the world, while Carla Zampatti brought European style here as an immigrant female fashion pioneer.
The economic boom of the 1960s hit the wall in the 1970s amid high inflation, wages blowouts and high unemployment, though successive oil shocks stimulated a Queensland-based coal boom. But this boom, too, went bust, sending Australia into a deep recession.
So the 1980s was all about opening up the Australian closed and over-regulated economy under Labor’s Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The new business opportunities were grabbed by a breed of stirrers such as Alan Bond , Robert Holmes a Court and John Elliott . These “entrepreneurs” mostly ended up crashing – and Bondy ended up in jail. But, by exploiting the new access to debt financing, they shook up Australia’s lazy corporate structures. Before Bondy, Australia’s beer market was state-based. So, perhaps controversially, they make our list along with stirrers such as mortgage market buster John Symond , waterfront warrior Chris Corrigan and larrikin ad man John Singleton .
While Australian business was modernised in the 1980s and 1990s, it was fundamentally reshaped in the 2000s by a massive China-based resources boom. This bookend to the 1960s Japan-based boom turned Lang Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart , into one of the world’s richest women; allowed Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest to build Australia’s third iron ore major; and cemented BHP and Rio Tinto as two of the world’s great resources companies. Oil and gas producer Woodside , underwritten by Melbourne stockbroker Geoff Donaldson in the 1950s, expanded the massive North West Shelf liquefied natural gas project to kickstart a new export boom that is now expanding into Queensland. In the process, Australia developed a world-class and global-scale mining services sector led by WorleyParsons , built up over 30 years by Sydney engineer John Grill .
Amid this mother of all resources booms, enterprising Australians were building global ventures in other fields. While the media, shopping centre and trucking empires begun by Rupert Murdoch , Frank Lowy and Lindsay Fox were still expanding globally, Australians showed they could match the world in other lines of business. Paul McNamee took the old Commonwealth Serum Laboratories out of government hands and turned it into a $5 billion international blood serum company. Paul Trainor’s , pioneering of the medical device industry in the 1960s led to Cochlear becoming the world’s leading hearing implant maker. And SEEK , the digital disruptor set up by Paul and Andrew Bassat , captured the local classified jobs market from the traditional newspaper empires while expanding into Asia and the Americas.
Our list is spread more or less evenly across the past five decades. Though dominated by the Australian staples of mining, finance, media, construction, retail and transport, it extends to technology, health, fashion and tourism. It confirms the extraordinary contribution of immigrants to the Australian story, particularly those from eastern Europe. It includes the mercenary American executives such as Bob Joss and Paul Anderson who saved Westpac and BHP. But it excludes Australians who have made a big corporate mark offshore, such as Charlie Bell who ran McDonald’s before his early death aged 44 in 2005. South African-born Westpac chief Gail Kelly is the exception that highlights the paucity of women at the top of Australian corporate life over the past 50 years. Surely that will change over the next 50.
While headed by the usual candidates, the list outrageously excludes others as it springs some surprise inclusions. Yet any ensuing debate will confirm the story’s conclusion that, amid our egalitarian traditions, modern Australia – share-owning, aspirational and multicultural Australia – rewards those with enterprise, welcomes new ideas and is keen to exploit our place in the world.
