Financialization Finance Rationality and The Role of Media in Australia

Media, Culture & Society
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Financialization, finance rationality and the role of media in Australia

Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams
Media Culture Society 2007; 29; 415
DOI: 10.1177/0163443707076183
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Financialization, finance rationality and the role of
media in Australia
Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams
RMIT UNIVERSITY
In February 2004, the Australian Federal Government announced the formation

of a Consumer and Financial Literacy Taskforce (CFLT) with a brief ‘to develop
an overarching national strategy to reduce poverty, increase economic opportu-
nity, bolster national savings and create well-informed consumers’ (CFLT,
2004). The Taskforce is an ambitious policy initiative, registering the priority
placed by the Howard coalition government on finance and financial know-
how. As the various documents available on the CFLT website demonstrate, the
assumption is that finance articulates most other aspects of life, or ‘lifestyle’, and
that ‘improving financial skills and education for all Australians is the key to
economic prosperity’ (Coonan, 2004a: 1). In a newly cemented metonymy from
individual financial circumstances to the national interest, we are told that ‘the
ability of all Australians to make sensible judgements about their personal
finances is essential for our national well-being’ (Coonan, 2004b: 1). The setting
up of the Taskforce indicates the central role allocated by the government to
schooling in this area. How this rides on the back of and formalizes an informal
media education we note below. We open with the Taskforce’s statement of the
significance of finance, how it reaches deeply and necessarily into everyone’s
life, simply as an indicator of the priorities in Australian national governance
after 20 or so years of financialization. A brief account of this phenomenon
establishes the parameters of our interest in media and finance.
Financialization
Australia can be understood as a state embedded in a globalized finance

environment, where government decision-making and action are particularly
Media, Culture & Society © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New
Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 29(3): 415–433
[ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443707076183]

416 Media, Culture & Society 29(3)
vulnerable to financial markets (Bell, 2001: 475). Financialization has shaped

this environment and affected the patterns of and pressures on participation in
it over the last two decades. It is a growth regime organized essentially around
increase in equity defined as ‘shareholder value’.1 It entails a range of ele-
ments, including neo-liberal economic doctrines such as deregulation, priva-
tization, user pays, the rise of pension funds or superannuation, as well as
changes in information and communication technology and its various con-
tributions to financial innovation (e.g. Aglietta and Breton, 2001; Frankel,
2001; Heertje, 1988; Minns, 2001).
This growth regime has been routinely presented as a reality-driven liberal-
ization of markets, that is, a more or less ‘common-sense’ giving permission to
a given entity, the market,2 to take its natural course and giving it priority in
organizing social relations.3 Prosperity and appropriate reward for individual
and corporate ingenuity and enterprise are seen to flow from the act of unchain-
ing the heart of the market and enabling its unfettered expression.4 In this
account, if governments have a role in assisting this development, it is to clear
away the contrived regulations and ‘red tape’ stifling the action of ‘free’ mar-
kets: ‘what is incumbent on government is to conduct a policy towards society
such that it is possible for a market to exist and function’ (Gordon, 1991: 41).
This enables what is triumphally described as a ‘democratization’ of the mar-
ket. From such ‘common-sense’ positions, arguing for the radical changes
involved in financialization is straightforward: as a State (Liberal) Government
Treasurer put his case in 1995 for selling the State energy utility, ‘it’s almost
inevitable that the private sector will run the industry better’ (The Bottom Line,
1995). Hand in hand with changes to policies governing the operation of diverse
finance and other markets that have ushered in new players, forms and volumes
of exchange, has been an extension of what could be called the axis of financial
individualization.5 This has entailed an accelerating demand for all individuals
to accustom themselves to and take responsibility for finance matters – such as
the financing of their needs in retirement – previously handled by governments
in historically established practices of social insurance.6 In Australia, the Howard
government, borrowing from the British Thatcher government before it, claims
this as ‘shareholder democracy’ in which all working people participate through
superannuation and other forms of investment.7
Neo-liberal culture and governance
This account, and the sense it promotes of a finance-led nation being both an
inevitable and welcome state of affairs, needs to be understood, however, as
the particular perspective of neo-liberalism, the broader political framework
driving financialization. In other words, financialization and the massively
expanded finance culture it entails (Greenfield and Williams, 2003), is the out-
come of political decisions by governments and the work of a host of other

Greenfield, Financialization 417
organizational actors, such as central banks, paranational bodies (e.g. GATT

[General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], WTO [World Trade Organization]),
overseas corporate investors, state and national stock exchanges, developers of
digital communication technology applications, bank and investment house
innovators of new financial instruments, a burgeoning range of conservative
and neo-liberal think-tanks and associated business, academic and lobbyist
expertise. Not least among these actors are public, commercial and specialized
media organizations, where the arguments and assumptions of contesting pol-
icy directions are circulated, defeated or normalized,8 and where economic,
business and finance information of different kinds is provided for investors.9
In other words, media attention to and coverage of finance does not simply
reflect changed priorities; it has promoted and helped secure the new central-
ity of the finance sector and logic of ‘shareholder value’. Forms of attention
and concepts previously familiar to institutional investors and a privileged
class of wealthy individuals have been inculcated in a much broader popula-
tion. So, the Taskforce and its insistence on all Australians becoming ‘finan-
cially savvy’ (Coonan, 2004a: 1) is not the start of the Australian population’s
education. Rather, it marshals previously uncoordinated, disparate informal
practices and limited if effective efforts from a variety of mainly commercial
organizations into a concerted push for financialization in the curriculum. The
Taskforce, with its government imprimatur and rhetoric of national interest,
and Chair Paul Clitheroe’s popular and populist broadcast persona of ‘Mr
Money’, marks the recruitment of a credible ally to a previously commercial
cause, ratcheting up to a new level the persuasive conscription of individuals
to responsibility for their own financial situation.10
This self-responsibilization – the expected acquisition by each individual of
the disposition to self-finance their needs for housing, health care, education
and retirement income – is the hallmark of neo-liberal culture and governance.
Presented in a rhetoric of choice and freedom, neo-liberal government obliges
the population to be free (Rose, 1990: 213), ‘to fulfil our political role as active
citizens, ardent consumers, enthusiastic employees, and loving parents as if we
were seeking to realise our own desires’ (1990: 258, emphasis added). The for-
mation of those desires and indeed the disposition to be ‘free’, to be able to
‘choose’, is thus a major work and condition of neo-liberal governance.
No less than in the formation of people’s libertarian dispositions, rhetorical
persuasion is also entailed in the formation of policy positions guiding this
vision of a world of self-financing individuals. For example, Bryan identifies
a key element of the setting up in the 1980s and 1990s of the superannuation
funds that are crucial to financialization as the notion of ‘self-perpetuating
wealth creation in capital markets’ (2004: 103), ‘that capital markets actually
serve to create wealth and hence provide in principle the foundation of self-
funded retirement’ (2004: 102).11 Recruitment to this ‘theoretical faith’ (2004:
102) underpins the dominant commitment to superannuation as the way to
solve the generational funding crisis produced by ageing populations. In other

words, the culturally communicated work of persuasion to particular disposi-

tions and assumptions occurs at all levels of the population, shaping the cal-
culations, decisions and actions of those forming and implementing policies
as much as the calculations, decisions and actions of those on whom policy
simply bears.
The neo-liberal policies and constitutive policing of minute aspects of
everyone’s daily lives can be seen in the Taskforce’s recommendations. These
scrutinize, assess and work to normalize the financial health and desires of
individuals, their capacity to undertake morally approved finance strategies
versus ‘bad’ decision-making. As Minister Coonan puts it: ‘many of the
issues that we face are behavioural ones rather than regulatory ones … we
cannot rely on legislation to stop people wasting or mismanaging their
money’ (2004a: 5). As the government streamlines its regulatory role by leg-
islating for self-regulation, and encourages a very competitive finance serv-
ices providers market – with the emergence, for example, of a plethora of
heavily promoted mortgaging and refinancing providers – it meets the con-
cern about ensuing ‘irrational’ debt decisions with plans for a formalized edu-
cation policy to discipline individuals into making ‘rational choice’ decisions.
The role of media
This lengthy introduction sets the scene and purpose for our main focus, the
informal education apparatus of the media and the way in which it has con-
tributed to financialization. As Hartley has put it, the activities of media, gov-
ernment and education are ‘inexplicable viewed in isolation’ (1999: 7). Our
interest is how broadcast media and television in particular have played a part
in the formation of a finance rationality. The role of media in financialization
and the new widespread finance culture it has ushered in has not been widely
discussed (but see Frank, 2001; Greenfield and Williams, 2001; Thrift, 2001),
despite the importance of finance (not simply financing) within contemporary
media environments (Craig, 2001; Palmer et al. 1998; Thompson, 2003).
To redress this, we have sought to trace how Australian audiences have been
addressed in programming dealing with finance issues. What discursive fea-
tures, what developments and changes in how finance matters are selected and
presented are discernible in the Australian media environment during the
period of financialization? To put it simply, in the 1980s finance became
deemed more newsworthy than previously, in the 1990s programmes dedi-
cated to finance and money emerged, and in the 2000s this dedicated finance
programming has now mainly dispersed as neo-liberal economic discourses
have been naturalized. Following Anderson (1983) and Mercer (1992), our
interest in such discourses, compositional forms and techniques of address is
their constitutive role: how, through daily iteration in pervasive cultural tech-
nologies, particular forms of address can play a key role in shaping audiences

and populations so that, located within particular social relations, people

understand and comport themselves as having a particular identity, set of inter-
ests, dispositions. In the case of finance matters, our sense is that a burgeoning
finance culture is not one that expresses the Australian population’s ‘wish to
be better off and independent from the vagaries of government’, the fruit of
some innate national ‘trend towards self-sufficiency’ (Shanahan, 2000), but
that it is a historically developed culture of material practices and knowledges,
social relations and power, that has as one of its recognizable achievements the
‘forming and mannering’ (Mercer, 1992: 27) of a financialized ‘we’, posses-
sors of an identity as shareholders or would-be shareholders, characterized by
financial independence (or the struggle to attain it), seized by aspirations and
disposed to consider events as opportunities for investment.12
In considering the role of media as formative cultural technologies in this
mannering of Australians, our examples here are taken from archival televi-
sion footage from the 1980s and 1990s.13 This selection is partly built on an
understanding of broadcast media as the pre-eminent nation-building com-
munication technologies of the late 20th century, the period coinciding with
financialization. Partly it results from a concern to complement description
and analysis of work undertaken elsewhere on finance journalism in the
Australian print media.14 Before turning to some media examples, let us
establish what is for us the touchstone of their significance – the way they can
be understood as helping to build a particular rationality. In doing so, our con-
ception of media audiences, as active but by no means autonomous, will also
be mapped.
Audiences and finance rationality
Our argument is that populations have been equipped, over time, with a
finance rationality, an intrinsic part of the reorganization of finance activity
and social relations of power and knowledge. This is the name we assign to
the capacity to make sense of the myriad practices and relations assembled
under the omnibus term ‘the economy’, in particular as it is dominated by
finance. We are interested in a finance knowledge that has shaped people’s
agency in particular ways, as investors and as consumers, but also as audiences
for particular government and organizational policies, as decision-makers or
in formulating their interests in workplaces, community groups, families and
households. Contrary to the literature that assesses the capacity ‘greed’ as a
key to the success of capitalism because it is ‘the only consistent human moti-
vation’ (Schumaker, 2004: 31), finance rationality is historically and cultur-
ally particular, formed and exercised under definite conditions.
The contingency of people’s sense-making capacities, their inescapably
historical and institutional nature, is outlined in Hindess’s concept of actor,
which unpicks the common understanding of capacities as the expression or

property of either an autonomous individual or a social structure transmitted

through socialization. ‘Actors make decisions and act accordingly, but they do
so under conditions that are only partly under their control, and on the basis
of the techniques, ways of thinking, and means of action available to them’
(Hindess, 1988: 97). The ways of thinking available to actors – the sets of dis-
cursive techniques they are able to use to formulate their interests, make
assessments of a situation, and come to decisions – are built up through for-
mal and informal institutional trainings and are radically plural: there is no
natural hierarchy or overarching ‘Reason’ that supplies the basic pattern for
particular rationalities.
For us, media products are a key condition of the formation of people’s
rationalities, though there is nothing functionalist or inevitable about this for-
mation and uptake of rationalities: like all communication, a gamble as to its
success is involved. Print and broadcast media have familiarized diverse audi-
ences with particular ‘common-sense’ ways of knowing about the economy in
terms of finance: how you finance individual lifestyles. Finance rationality
comprises the techniques of calculation and the assumptions (e.g. the neo-
classical concept of ‘waiting’)15 that enable neo-liberalism to be enacted. It is
a relentlessly bourgeois way of knowing (i.e. defined by relations of owner-
ship), organized in the terms of possessive individualism.
This finance rationality overlaps with the finance literacy that is the con-
cern of the Consumer and Finance Literacy Taskforce with which we began.
Finance literacy here, however, is a normative concept, counterposed to
‘financial illiteracy’, and connotes a capacity that will put its bearer on a cor-
rect or improving path. Our take on literacy or rationality is broader: a par-
ticular rationality does not share Reason’s counterposition to false knowledge
or ideology. Our concern with finance rationality is political-economic,
unlike that of the CFLT: while the Taskforce begins with the dominance of
finance and sees its job as helping people to deal with its make-or-break sig-
nificance in their lives, we do not take that dominance of finance as given but
interrogate it as constituted in part by a finance rationality, a rationality that
has narrowed an earlier economic rationality so that an already crimped atten-
tion to social policy in the earlier rationality has been further attenuated.
Finance on television
Gathering archival material is difficult for Australian television (and near

impossible for radio). With few complete or easily searched indexes we
selected available programme episodes on the basis of major financial events
such as the floating of the Australian dollar, the 1987 stock market crash, the
introduction of the Goods and Services Tax. In the 1980s, a decade that saw
financial deregulation under the Hawke Labor government, introduction of
compulsory superannuation and the first rounds of privatization, finance was

dealt with on television chiefly through financial segments on generic news,

current affairs and business programmes. By the 1990s, dedicated finance or
money shows (e.g. Money, Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, Your Money and Your
Life, The Bottom Line) appeared alongside these. In the 2000s, apart from a
number of public television and radio broadcast programmes dealing with
business and finance (ABC Radio National’s The Business Report; SBS’s The
Business Show; ABCTV’s Inside Business and Business Breakfast), the dedi-
cated programmes on commercial broadcasters have given way to more niche-
oriented programmes focusing on property (e.g. Hot Property, Auction),
coinciding with the government-induced housing boom, leaving hard market
information once again to business-oriented programmes and routine current
affairs segments.
In constructing some kind of genealogy of the currency of finance ration-
ality from this archival material, several categories emerged: the commenta-
tor, market populism, the figure of the Treasurer, and shifts in economic
discourses and assumptions. We describe these documents of the recent past
on their own terms, but from a definite position in the present, marked by the
problematic of financialization.
The commentator
During the 1980s a key figure helping to promote finance as something the
‘ordinary person’ could and would want to be interested in was Robert
Gottleibsen, with his ‘Finance’ segment on nightly ABC television news. His
particular forte was the dramatization of finance events through an urgent,
sotto voce delivery, an intimate personalization of key business players –
‘Kerry’, ‘Rupert’, ‘Alan’, ‘John’, ‘Robert’16 – involved in audacious takeovers
and massive borrowings, and a compelling narrative thrust that turned the
complex relations and previously esoteric activity of high finance into an
unfolding play of human aspiration and daring into which the viewer was
being allowed a privileged view.
One example of Gottleibsen’s presentational style is his piece on the begin-
ning of the stock market crash on 29 October 1987. Consider how he estab-
lishes that forces shaking the stock markets in another country are of direct
importance to the television viewer.
Australia was hammered on two fronts today. Our stock market took yet another
pasting and our dollar was crunched. The action on the currency front started in New
York, where the US dollar continued to be under pressure because of the indecision
of President Reagan over his budget deficit.… Then the currency crunch moved to
Australia.… Against other currencies we’ve had a real pasting … (ABC News, 1987)
Gottleibsen’s relentless use of a community of address in which, in this instance,

stock markets and currencies are synonymous with the ‘we’ of the Australian

national people, beset here by gathering momentous events but routinely caught
up in the more commonplace round of financial dealings, helped shape an under-
standing of finance relations and activity as something in which everyone was
somehow bound up.
Turning from the immediacy and short-termism of the news commentator
to the more elaborated commentary of the current affairs host, we can discern
the makings of a more complex disposition towards or framework for think-
ing about finance. The week-nightly Carleton Walsh Report on ABC televi-
sion (1985–7), aired at 9.30 p.m., dealt with political and economic stories
thrown up by the Hawke Labor government’s neo-liberal reforming agenda,
heralded by the decision to float the Australian dollar (1983) and deregulate
the Australian banking industry (1984). The host, Max Walsh, with his author-
itative persona, and armed with considerable economic knowledge, not least
of economic history, had an interviewing style that, by allowing a long-term
rather than simply adversarial view of the government’s economic policies,
helped stage the tutelary explanations of key shifts in the country’s economic
and financial landscape routinely provided by the Prime Minister and, espe-
cially, the Treasurer (see discussion below).
Walsh’s editorials were typically composed within a neo-classical economic
framework, with its assumptions of ‘free trade’, the need for balanced budg-
ets, and the ‘national economy’ as its touchstone. From this position, he would
praise Treasurer Keating as ‘working within the tradition of conservative and
orthodox economics’ (Carleton Walsh Report, 1986b), comment favourably
on the Treasurer’s neo-liberal departures from this tradition, but also police
the extent to which these departures could be approved. This is exemplified
in the following interview where Walsh is probing the Treasurer about the
budget deficit immediately following Keating’s (in)famous ‘banana republic’
statement in response to bad balance of payment figures:
You tend to be dismissive of anybody who questions the wisdom of the route you’ve
taken with respect to floating the dollar, deregulating the financial sector and letting
in 16 foreign banks – all of which I agree with – but aren’t you sometimes … have
a certain amount of fear that we’re moving into a Latin American situation where a
lot of … overseas money is being pushed into this takeover game … trying to buy
a share of the Australian market…? (Carleton Walsh Report, 1986b)
Throughout this period, Walsh provided this steady voice of reason, approv-
ing of neo-liberal economic directions and their stimulus to the finance sec-
tor, but concerned about what they might bring upon the nation. As Corner
has noted of television economic journalism, with its ‘special difficulties in
“showing”’, correspondents in this area have ‘a crucial role of synoptic inter-
pretation’ (1998: 69): such commentary as Walsh’s helped fashion what could
be called the relatively humane, social neo-liberal framework that character-
ized this first phase of financialization in Australia.17

Market populism
Both Gottleibsen and Walsh were regulars on the authoritative but, compared
to commercial television stations, lower-rating national broadcaster. While
the ABC observed its charter by providing serious, informed journalism, on
the commercial channels a lighter, populist approach to serious stories saw a
new discourse emerge. Thus, on Sunday (1987), Channel 9’s flagship weekly
current affairs programme, the 1987 stock market crash is presented in the
terms of ‘market populism’.18 Frank describes the propositions this recent and
virulent variant of populism comprises:
The market and the people – both of them understood as grand principles of social life
rather than particulars – [are] essentially one and the same. By its very nature the mar-
ket [is] democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of
supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet. In fact, the market
[is] more democratic than any of the formal institutions of democracy – elections, leg-
islatures, government. The market [is] a community.… Most importantly of all, the
market [is] militant about its democracy. It [has] no place for snobs, for hierarchies,
for elitism, for pretence, and it [will] fight these things by its very nature. (2001: 29)
Sunday’s feature story on the stock market crash is narrated by Charles

Woolley, a figure whose populist, ingénue style was familiar to 1980s television
viewers. ‘Our’ representative, he plays the role of the ‘ordinary person’ strug-
gling to make sense of the chaos of the stock market. This chaos, and the threat
posed to Australia by the crash in America, is carefully inscribed. The story
begins with insistent cross-cutting between the story locations of the United
States and Australia. Four times the scene shifts between, on the one hand, CBS
anchor Dan Rather’s concerned reporting in dramatic terms on the events of
‘Black Tuesday’ and of the next three days, as well as various pieces of New
York stock exchange actuality, and, on the other, actuality of the floor of the
Australian Stock Exchange and, variously, ‘ordinary’Australians listening to the
radio for news, speculators, expert commentators and celebrity stockbroker Rene
Rivkin. On the fourth cross, delivering us to the actuality of the Sydney Bankers
Trust (BT) trading floor, Woolley’s voice-over begins, ‘Am I a bear or a bull, and
what of my leverage, my wraps and my cross-rates? … These people are specu-
lating with your money.’ Then, in a piece to camera Woolley confides: ‘I don’t
know what’s going on.… I haven’t got a clue …’ Just, of course, like ‘us’.
After an interview in which ‘one of BT Australia’s highest fliers’ fails to
answer Woolley’s ‘simple question: what is the futures exchange and what
happens here?’, Woolley answers himself, that it is ‘maybe the biggest casino
in the world’, ‘almost metaphysical, intangible’. Giving up on his quest to
comprehend the effect of Black Tuesday on the trading floor, Woolley tells us
he ‘couldn’t do anything, so I went to lunch’ – with four young, educated traders,
who enact for Woolley’s ‘ordinary person’ scrutiny the stereotype of the

financial elite, speaking of their massive transactions as dealing in ‘monopoly

money’. Against this foil, Woolley meets the trader who provides the story
with its moral point, ‘Cabramatta Fats’ or ‘Cabby’, ‘from the wrong side of the
tracks’, overweight, working class, full of real-world wisdom. From him we
learn the market is like soccer riots (that is, a crucible of human emotions) and
that ‘the share market is no different to the fruit market’. For Woolley, and so
for the interpellated viewer, Cabby is ‘a rare creature … a stockbroker whom
I can understand’. Again Woolley lunches, this time with Cabby’s colleagues,
all male, all similar Australian hard-drinking types. When Woolley asks about
the risks of a system marked by booms and crashes – ‘Is there not a better way
… to run the world?’ – Cabby’s colleagues defend ‘the way of the free mar-
ket’; ‘Well, we know what the alternative is.’ Through Cabby, the acceptance
of risk is presented as a patriotic duty – in taking the risk ‘I believe I’ve done
something for my country’ – matched by a down-to-earth understanding of
what really matters: ‘I hope no one does anything silly – it’s only money.’
Woolley’s closing peroration cements the figure of the stockbroker as work-
ing-class hero. Against a night shot of Cabby alone on the trading floor – ‘He
was still up there in his corporate tower, alone with the worries of the world’ –
Woolley’s voice-over: ‘I don’t know if they know what they’re doing … but it’s
the way of the ignorant to trust the experts … but I’d been relieved just to meet
Cabramatta Fats, a big man with a big heart.’
In Woolley’s market populism, the human key to the market has been
found. The particularity of this framework for understanding finance is clari-
fied by contrasting it with the different populist stance taken by journalist
George Negus in another segment on the same Sunday programme. Negus,
interviewing Ralph Willis, Minister for Industrial Relations in the Hawke
Labor government, and Simon Crean, Australian Council of Trade Unions
president, probes the possibility of a relation between the stock market crash
and workers’ wages through the National Wage Case: ‘Is it a fact that the
Australian worker could be caught up in the crash – asked to pay for the
bosses’ losses?’ Here, Negus’s populism is sceptical of ‘the way of the free
market’ and ranged against the stockmarket. By contrast, Woolley’s populism
acts as an inoculation which, as Barthes puts it, ‘consists in admitting the
accidental evil of a class-bound institution the better to conceal its principal
evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a
small inoculation of acknowledged evil’ (1973: 150). Thus the elite, expert,
unfathomable, foreign nature of the world of high finance is at first fore-
grounded by Woolley only to reveal that, beneath this first and too-obvious
façade, the heart of the market resides in the principles of patriotic effort and
fundamental verities of exchange (just like at the fruit market), and it is the
guarantor of our democratic system.
Of course this is one exemplary story, but its lesson in how to really
understand – or trust – the market and those who work there, while in these
early days of financialization taking some effort to present, is later more

pithily inscribed, as in the educational broadcast Economic Australia (1995),

‘[c]onsumers cast dollar votes’. By 2004, one observer’s reflection on the
Australian federal election indexes the by-now-established phenomenon of
market populism:
[Re-elected Prime Minister] John Howard’s message throughout the campaign has
been: this is not really a country – it is an $800 billion corporation and the CEO
and board of directors are doing a first-rate job. This is not really an election –
rather an extraordinary general meeting to confirm the directors’ remuneration
packages. (Mant, 2004)
For neo-liberal discourse the relative social equity of political democracy is

dissolved into the rhetoric of a more exclusive form of economic ‘democracy’.
The figure of the Treasurer
No consideration of the role of media in encouraging new dispositions

towards finance in 1980s Australia can ignore the figure of the Treasurer. Not
only does TV economic news routinely resort to the figure of the Treasurer as
economic actor – and specifically manager (Corner, 1998: 65) – to render
intelligible a field of ‘events’ notoriously difficult to shape as ‘news’, but in
Keating, TV producers found particularly good ‘talent’. To understand this, as
Morris has exhaustively analysed, you have to know about:
Paul Keating, Federal Treasurer (1983–1991) of the Australian Labor government

… famed for his suits and his eloquence. The elegance is Italian, the eloquence
Australian, and it comes in two main … ‘stories’ – gutter invective (the working
class ‘boy from Bankstown’ story) and economic jargon (the ‘corporate story’) …
the Treasurer doing economics live on talk shows was really something to be seen.
(1992: 19)
So effective was this performance that the ‘Keating thing’ (Morris, 1992: 47)
helped the Treasurer become social neo-liberal economics incarnate, with one
programme ‘trying’ (an absent) Keating for the death of the Australian econ-
omy during the recession the Treasurer had said ‘we had to have’ (A Current
Affair, 1992).
But while Morris deals particularly with the affect incited by the Keating
persona (‘eroticizing economics’, 1992: 50), there was also a pedagogic
effect that accompanied it (Gittins, 2004; Megalogenis, 2005). This was a
Treasurer committed to the effort of explaining – in the demotic – the radi-
cal, market-oriented policies he was introducing, both at the level of mone-
tary and fiscal detail and at the level of their wider economic and social
meaning. Thus, on (one component of) radical tax reform introduced in the
1985 budget (encouraging investment through shareholding), Keating
responds to a TV interviewer:

… it’s a huge radical change in the income tax system. We said to the business
community, they’ve wanted imputations for years on dividends, that is, a rebate on
the tax paid by shareholders upon receipt of dividends. We’re going to give it to
them.… The thing the public have got to know out of this, they wanted a govern-
ment that had a bit of courage to go in and give them a fairer tax system. Well
they’re going to get one.… Instead of thinking that they’re taking the brunt of
everyone’s cheating and tax minimization, it’s going to be a lot fairer out there and
we can’t hope to have a fair country and a fair go and all the rest of the stuff that
Australians believe they have while we have a tax system which is being abused.
(Carleton Walsh Report, 1985)
Or again, mixing financial detail on the relations between savings banks and
the non-banking sector with what it means for the viewer, when answering a
question about his momentous policy to deregulate housing interest rates:
Because they’ll have an adequacy of funds Richard. I mean they just never had ade-
quate funds because, in the current climate, you see the savings investment accounts
which underpin the banks’ deposits here cost them 12 percent but the cash manage-
ment trusts, for instance, are offering 16.5 percent. So there’s an enormous haemor-
rhaging of funds out of the savings bank system and there’s no way they could cope
with housing demand watching these deposits evaporate in front of their eyes.…
[T]he government has acted on two fronts.… We’ve a social obligation to have peo-
ple, we’re not going to see people living in garages and shared accommodation and,
in some places, substandard rental accommodation when they could otherwise, if the
financial system was working properly, get a house. (Carleton Walsh Report, 1986a)
Our point here is that a staple feature of television coverage of finance for
these crucial early years of financialization – the regular, expansive, visually
and linguistically engaging performance of the Treasurer – repeatedly provided
implicit pedagogic opportunities for audiences to be, at the least, sensitized to
a new status for finance activity, cognizant of arguments around marketization
and, perhaps, made familiar with an argument about the reasons for moving
away from a ‘failed’ bastard Keynesian economic framework and towards a
(relatively socially responsible variant of a) neo-liberal globalist framework.
In addition, TV viewers could follow, and interviewers and commentators
could encapsulate for viewers, movement around and beyond this social
neo-liberal framework in the direction of a more market fundamentalist neo-
liberalism, through the prominent figures of Treasurer Keating and shadow
Treasurer and then Opposition leader John Hewson. Hewson, former econom-
ics professor, became the putative alternative, his academic theoretical
demeanour contrasting with a reputedly economically auto-didactic Keating,
who mainly took oral briefings from Treasury officials. In an early piece of
educational television (Australia’s Balance of Payments, 1985) Professor
Hewson and Treasurer Keating present strikingly similar, emerging neo-liberal
policy advocacy and explanation. But by the time Hewson is a parliamentary
political player, things start to diverge, in a contestation of neo-liberal theoret-
ical purity, policy pragmatics and electoral appeal. The socially oriented

aspects of Treasurer Keating’s ‘economic reforms’ could be easily contrasted

with the industrial and taxation stringencies of Hewson’s ‘Fightback’ tome of
policy doctrines. As commentator Paul Kelly puts it, contrasting on Lateline
(1991) the difference between Keating and Hewson and identifying the pres-
sure Hewson’s economic position was exerting in the area of monetary policy,
‘the Labor Party has been forced to adopt a new economic model … different
from the growth model which the Labor Party was pushing during the period
’86 to ’89’. Despite Hewson’s success in this regard, when, as Opposition
leader, he lost a putatively ‘unloseable’ election, it was in no small measure
because of the connotations of his evangelical economic fervour that were con-
veyed audio-visually. The personality ‘packaging’ of economic discourses and
the (dis)positions they enable has played an important role in the forming, and
shifting, of economic and finance rationalities for the Australian citizenry.
Shifts in economic discourses and assumptions
These shifts – from a dominant neo-classical economic discourse in the 1970s

and into the 1980s, jostling with a bastard Keynesian discourse; through over-
lapping monetarist discourse in the mid 1970s and 1980s; to an emerging neo-
liberal economic discourse in the early to mid 1980s developing into orthodoxy
by the late 1990s – are evident in the television programmes, both in the pow-
erful framing commentary provided by programme hosts, reporters and other
narrational devices, and in the variably positioned speech of interviewees,
guests and other subjects. However, there is no straightforward replacement
of one discourse by another, or even unchallenged dominance of one discourse
or disappearance of another. The picture is rather more one of continuing and
uneven contestations between discourses, though reasonable evidence of rel-
ative dominance in particular periods has been gathered.19
Television treatment of two stock market crashes, ten years apart, gives a
good example of shifts in economic discourses and assumptions during this
period of financialization. Woolley’s report on the 1987 stock market crash,
discussed above, laboured long and graphically to establish the understanding
that Australia ‘follows’ Wall Street. By the time Channel 9’s Willesee pro-
gramme reports on the 1997 crash, the relation between the Australian and
United States finance markets and the fact of ‘globalization’ can be handled
in a sentence. Thus Channel 9’s finance editor, Michael Pascoe, echoes pro-
gramme host Willesee’s opening remark that ‘For about 5 years now the
Australian stock exchange has been following the lead set by America’,
adding ‘the Australian stock market is now just part of the international mar-
ket’ (Willesee, 1997). And while in the Woolley report the opening focus on
the international context tapers away to a focus on the nation and the national
interest, in the 1997 story, the commentator’s concern with the ‘extent and
speed of this [market correction]’ and its ‘effects on interest rates’ is presented

as equally applicable to New Zealand and Japan as Australia. This change in

framing assumptions from the late 1980s to the late 1990s demonstrates the
shift in predominant frameworks from neo-classical economic discourses
which, amongst other assumptions, take the nation-state as an invariable, to
neo-liberal discourses, which do not.
This shift to a fully formed and prevailing neo-liberal economic discourse –
with its assumptions of the priority of global finance markets, the self-evident
necessity of economic deregulation and privatization, government as primarily
an enforcer of the existence and operation of free markets, the primacy of mon-
etary over fiscal policy, imbricated with a social philosophy of either liberal or
reactionary tenor – or a watershed moment assisting it, is captured in an ABC
Lateline programme (1991). ‘Bank Fiasco’ provides a striking retrospective
history of finance and deregulation in the 1980s, with contributions from aca-
demic, journalist, Reserve Bank and business guests. Through an investigation
of the remit of the Reserve Bank, the programme presents its target audience
of relatively highly informed citizens with a narrative of huge – and inevitable –
change from the early 1980s, when banking was a ‘closed shop’ and the Reserve
assisted government to create employment through fiscal policy, through to the
deregulation of the banking system in 1984, the ensuing lending ‘binge’ and
subsequent business collapses. Against an apparent consensus among the pro-
gramme guests that it was the rapidity of the deregulatory change that did the
damage, the segment culminates with questions about what had happened to
the traditional watchdogs: how and why did the Reserve fail to exert any
authority over the banks, and, as host Kerry O’Brien asks: ‘Where is govern-
ment?’ The articulation of some kind of watershed moment begins when jour-
nalist Max Suich says ‘there’s a debate going on amongst insiders … not an
attack on deregulation.… People are still speaking with certainty [for the
deregulationist position] but privately [are] uncertain about how to fix things
now.’ Following this image of a time of significant policy indecision, the pro-
gramme segues to political commentator Paul Kelly, who, as mentioned above
in relation to the adversarial figures of Keating and Hewson, identifies the shift
the Labor government is being pressured to make away from a growth eco-
nomic model, underpinned by the Reserve Bank’s charter to secure full
employment (a legacy of the 1940s post-war reconstruction policies), to a pol-
icy of labour deregulation, in line with Opposition leader Hewson’s push for
changes to the Reserve Bank Act such that its charter be limited to pursuing
anti-inflationary policies.
Recounting this detail about the iteration and questioning of economic
frameworks lays out the material discursive constituents of what, at the time of
broadcast, was part of how the positions on finance and economics taken20 by
policy-makers, businesspeople, ‘ordinary’ citizens and so on were shifting
and/or consolidating. As Smith puts it, ‘[t]he text itself is to be seen as organiz-
ing a course of concerted social action. As an operative part of a social relation
it is activated … by the reader but its structuring effect is its own’ (1993: 121).

Another genre of programming where shifts in economic discourses can be

considered is educational television, with its more formally pedagogic state-
ments concerning economic and finance issues and clear target audiences.
Here, as well as the jostling of economic discourses – with neo-classical dis-
course perhaps persisting longer than elsewhere – what is discernible is a shift
from an economic to a business studies perspective. One example is the con-
trast between an episode of Open for Business (1994) on business finance, still
framed in a neo-classical economic discourse in which the finance sector is
presented as articulating with other economic sectors such as manufacturing,
services and design, compared to an episode of Taking Care of Business (2001)
where business investment is not simply a key focus but the start and end point.
Conclusion
While we have focused on financialization in Australia and the cultural for-

mation of finance rationalities amongst Australian citizens, the dissemination
of neo-liberal finance rationality, as it is given impetus by government offi-
cials and affiliated experts, extends beyond this nation’s border. In 2004, the
Australian Howard government began exporting this rationality and demands
for compliance with its stringencies to neighbouring ‘failed states’ of Papua
New Guinea (PNG), the Solomon Islands and Nauru. For example, with the
diagnosis of PNG’s problems given as corruption and that people had not
been using the land as ‘rational individuals’, the Howard government deter-
mined that if aid was to continue it would be accompanied by highly informed
economic intervention, by sending Australian finance experts to deal with the
PNG budget. Thus is globalization, at least to the extent that it is synonymous
with neo-liberalism and financialization, enacted. Our interest has been to
consider how this had been made a ‘natural’ development for Australian audi-
ences and constituencies.
Notes
Thanks to Rosanne Bersten and Diana Bossio for invaluable assistance in locating
archival material.
1. Distinguished from other growth regimes such as the post-war ‘Fordist’ growth
regime where the yoking of productivity gains and real wage increases fuelled con-
sumption, investment and enterprise growth. By contrast, the finance-led regime, with
its doctrine of shareholder value, is characterized by a ‘self-fulfilling macro-economic
dynamic’ (Aglietta, 2000: 155).
2. Though the market is by no means a natural feature of the social world. On the
historical and cultural particularity of the concept see, for example, Carrier (1997); for
work complicating the concept at the heart of neo-classical economics and arguing its
performative aspect see Callon (1998).

3. For example, discussing the legacy of the neo-liberal policies of the Hawke–
Keating Labor governments (1983–96), the economics editor of the Australian Financial
Review presents their adoption not as contributing but as ‘responding to fundamental
changes in Australian society’, to the fact that ‘[s]ociety had become more individu-
alistic’ (Mitchell, 2004).
4. A metaphor used memorably in a Howard government television promotion of
a Goods and Services Tax.
5. Following Foucault’s description of the ‘axis of individualization’ (1977: 192).
While individual investors have invested in the share market in the past, the prolifer-
ating opportunities and encouragement for individuals of all classes to engage in such
activity, and to take on the role, opportunities, forms of calculation and risks of
‘investor’, is a phenomenon of the last few decades.
6. See Ewald on the older insurantial model of social cohesion and well-being,
where ‘insurance … constitutes a mode of association which allows its participants to
agree on the rule of justice they will subscribe to’ (1991: 207).
7. The government has claimed pre-eminence in the ranks of financialized
economies: Shanahan documents ‘the Coalition’s aim of consolidating Australia’s
position as the leading share-owning democracy’ (2000).
8. As Hay notes of the ‘overload thesis’ and its diagnosis of the mid-to-late-1970s
‘crisis’ of the British state: ‘The thesis, as diluted and refracted by the think tanks of
the new right and in the pages of the tabloid and broadsheet papers alike, offered a
spectacular, rhetorically rich and ultimately persuasive narration and dramatization of
the events of the crisis’, helping to swing ‘the intellectual pendulum … from left to
right, from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism’ (2004: 512, 509).
9. On global specialist finance news see Craig (2001).
10. The notions of ‘credible allies’ and persuasive ‘conscription’ are drawn from
Latour’s (1990) generative account of the rhetorical power of ‘inscriptions’. One such
current inscription is ‘super’, as in: ‘Yes, I want my super to perform’ (Sunday Age,
2004).
11. Bryan argues that the individual framing of capital generating a stream of pay-
ments (‘my super working for me’) ‘avoids the point that dividends and interest are
merely claims on future production, but someone else has to produce the future out-
put for consumption … all individuals cannot be rentiers’ (2004: 109).
12. ‘We’re more financially independent than ever’ (Shanahan, 2000, emphasis
added), precede to feature on the float of the demutualized National Royal Motorist
Association.
13. Elsewhere we have considered print and broadcast advertisements in 2000–01
(Greenfield and Williams, 2001).
14. See Greenfield and Williams (2004) for an early report on a longitudinal study
(1971–2001) of print finance journalism.
15. ‘The growth of wealth involves in general a deliberate waiting for a pleasure
which a person has (rightly or wrongly) the power of commanding in the immediate
present’ (Marshall in Robinson and Eatwell, 1973: 38).
16. Kerry Packer, Channel 9 and publishing owner; Rupert Murdoch, News Ltd
owner; Alan Bond, purchaser of Channel 9, later imprisoned for business fraud; John
Elliott, leading investor in Elders pastoral services company; Robert Holmes à Court,
renowned for his mineral wealth.
17. Until 1991, the Labor government pursued a kind of mixture of bastard
Keynesianism and neo-liberalism, in which the aim of deregulation could be pre-
sented as creating jobs as well as share-holder value.
18. While there are differences to note between the national (public) and commer-
cial sectors, we are not implying commercial coverage of finance only offers populist

rather than expert perspectives. See Corner (1998: 59) on the extent of differentiation
in economic reporting.
19. The patchy nature of the television archive makes impossible the content analy-
sis and quantitative assessment of the relative incidence of discourses undertaken in
our longitudinal print study.
20. In the sense emphasized by Bourdieu in discussing how people ‘take’ publicly
available positions on issues, against the liberal-individualist assumption of public
opinion technology that people simply ‘have’ an opinion (1979: 128).
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Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT

University and researches the relations between media, politics and the gov-
ernment of populations. Current work focuses on media populism, financial-
ization, and media rhetoric and neo-liberalism. A recent article concerning
the latter is ‘Limiting Politics: Howardism, Media Rhetoric and National
Cultural Commemorations’ (Australian Journal of Political Science, 2003),
with Peter Williams. Address: School of Applied Communication, Bldg 6
Level 3, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia.
[email: cathy.greenfield@rmit.edu.au]
Peter Williams is a Senior Associate (Research) in the School of Applied

Communication, RMIT University and researches relations between cul-
ture and power, especially in Australia since the 1930s. Current work focuses
on histories of various communication technologies. Address: School of
Applied Communication, Bldg 6 Level 3, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V,
Melbourne 3001, Australia.

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In February 2004, the Australian Federal Government announced the formation

Australia can be understood as a state embedded in a globalized finance

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vulnerable to financial markets (Bell, 2001: 475). Financialization has shaped

Neo-liberal culture and governance

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organizational actors, such as central banks, paranational bodies (e.g. GATT

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words, the culturally communicated work of persuasion to particular disposi-

The role of media

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and populations so that, located within particular social relations, people

Audiences and finance rationality

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property of either an autonomous individual or a social structure transmitted

Gathering archival material is difficult for Australian television (and near

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dealt with on television chiefly through financial segments on generic news,

Gottleibsen’s relentless use of a community of address in which, in this instance,

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Sunday’s feature story on the stock market crash is narrated by Charles

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financial elite, speaking of their massive transactions as dealing in ‘monopoly

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pithily inscribed, as in the educational broadcast Economic Australia (1995),

For neo-liberal discourse the relative social equity of political democracy is

The figure of the Treasurer

No consideration of the role of media in encouraging new dispositions

Paul Keating, Federal Treasurer (1983–1991) of the Australian Labor government

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aspects of Treasurer Keating’s ‘economic reforms’ could be easily contrasted

Shifts in economic discourses and assumptions

These shifts – from a dominant neo-classical economic discourse in the 1970s

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as equally applicable to New Zealand and Japan as Australia. This change in

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Another genre of programming where shifts in economic discourses can be

While we have focused on financialization in Australia and the cultural for-

Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at Universidad de Sevilla. Biblioteca on June 14, 2010

Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at Universidad de Sevilla. Biblioteca on June 14, 2010

ABC News (1987) Finance Segment, 29 October, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Craig, G. (2001) ‘The Global Financial News, Information and Technology

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Schumaker, J.F. (2004) ‘Greed: Capitalism’s Necessary Evil’, Weekend Australian

Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT

Peter Williams is a Senior Associate (Research) in the School of Applied

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