In praise of John Hyde

In economic policy, as in fashion and music, the 1970s were generally a dreary decade: Keynesianism, stagflation, energy crisis. But out of that miserable era rose a generation of free-market giants in public life — among them the former Western Australian federal Liberal MP John Hyde, whom the Atlanta-based Foundation for Economic Education recently honoured as an international hero. (Read this excellent tribute by Andrew Pickford, the executive director of the Perth-based Mannkal Economic Education Foundation.)

Hyde was a federal backbencher for less than a decade, from 1974 to 1983. But he was a rare thing: a public intellectual and a public figure, whose ideas of tariff cuts and economic reform helped eventually transform Australia from a regulated, protected and highly unionised economy into the envy of the industrialised world.

One reason Hyde’s ideas were successful is that they were grounded in data, hard facts and evidence-based public policy. The former farmer, who lost his right arm in a farm accident, was a classical liberal because he believed in the power of free markets and free trade. But he was also a conservative because he believed that Canberra’s attempts to transform the nation via regulation and centralisation was something the federal government does at its own peril — and everyone else’s.

Hyde was not always popular with his fellow Coalition parliamentary colleagues. That’s because he publicly called out the likes of Malcolm Fraser, agrarian socialist then-Country Party politicians and even paternalistic Liberals as defenders of economic protectionism that had long been a pillar of Australian nationhood. Hyde led the ‘dries’ against those ‘wets’; and in 2002 he wrote Dry: In Defence of Economic Freedom, an intellectual memoir dedicated to the ground-breaking episodes in Australian economic history.

In recognising John as an international hero, FEE observed he was “the farmer who freed Australia’s economy” and he “never let political affiliation get in the way of doing the right thing.”  Count CIS and our supporters among his many admirers.