An economic fairytale is being told. Sadly, the facts get in its way

July 19, 2026 — 5:00am

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A popular quote attributed to a long-dead economist, John Maynard Keynes, proposes that, when the facts change, a reasonable person might change his or her mind. It is, of course, rare. Hardly anyone changes their mind just because of evidence.

Instead, there is a concerted effort in Australia to change economic thought to suit a preferred set of facts. One hilariously explicit attempt that has just been launched by the new Green Institute, headed by former Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather, was sent to me this week. It’s created “a course on understanding the economy and how it dominates our lives”. I suppose any comparison to the political and ideological indoctrination programs of the Soviet era would be lost on the young targets of this program. So they won’t pick up that it’s what used to be known as “re-education”; they’ll just conceive of it as education.

It’s an attempt to persuade the next generation of something that a favourite fulminator of mine, Van Badham, has been trying to convive people of through her column for years. For a decade at least, Badham has been making the case to anyone who’ll listen – and the same people (plus me) listen avidly to everything she has to say – that neoliberalism is so over. In one 2018 column, in the wake of what was supposed to be Scott Morrison’s last budget, she foretold that “it’s possible to conclude from auguries like smoke rising from a garbage fire and patterns of political blood upon the floor that history may be hastening neoliberalism towards an end that its advocates did not forecast”.

It was a time in which........

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