Financialization Finance Rationality and the Role of Media in Australia

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Media, Culture & Society

DOI: 10.1177/01634437070761832007; 29; 415Media Culture Society

Cathy Greenfield and Peter WilliamsFinancialization, finance rationality and the role of media in Australia

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Financialization, finance rationality and the role ofmedia in Australia

Cathy Greenfield and Peter WilliamsRMIT UNIVERSITY

In February 2004, the Australian Federal Government announced the formationof a Consumer and Financial Literacy Taskforce (CFLT) with a brief to developan 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 priorityplaced 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, andthat improving financial skills and education for all Australians is the key toeconomic prosperity (Coonan, 2004a: 1). In a newly cemented metonymy fromindividual financial circumstances to the national interest, we are told that theability of all Australians to make sensible judgements about their personalfinances is essential for our national well-being(Coonan, 2004b: 1). The settingup of the Taskforce indicates the central role allocated by the government toschooling in this area. How this rides on the back of and formalizes an informalmedia education we note below. We open with the Taskforces statement of the

significance of finance, how it reaches deeply and necessarily into everyoneslife, simply as an indicator of the priorities in Australian national governanceafter 20 or so years of financialization. A brief account of this phenomenonestablishes 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

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vulnerable to financial markets (Bell, 2001: 475). Financialization has shapedthis environment and affected the patterns of and pressures on participation in

it over the last two decades. It is a growth regime organized essentially aroundincrease 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 aschanges 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 toa given entity, the market,2 to take its natural course and giving it priority inorganizing social relations.3 Prosperity and appropriate reward for individualand 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 thisaccount, if governments have a role in assisting this development, it is to clearaway the contrived regulations and red tape stifling the action of free mar-kets: what is incumbent on government is to conduct a policy towards societysuch 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) GovernmentTreasurer put his case in 1995 for selling the State energy utility, its almostinevitable that the private sector will run the industry better (The Bottom Line,1995). Hand in hand with changes to policies governing the operation of diversefinance and other markets that have ushered in new players, forms and volumesof exchange, has been an extension of what could be called the axis of financialindividualization.5 This has entailed an accelerating demand for all individualsto accustom themselves to and take responsibility for finance matters such asthe financing of their needs in retirement previously handled by governments

in historically established practices of social insurance.6 In Australia, the Howardgovernment, borrowing from the British Thatcher government before it, claimsthis as shareholder democracy in which all working people participate throughsuperannuation 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, asthe particular perspective of neo-liberalism, the broader political frameworkdriving financialization. In other words, financialization and the massivelyexpanded 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

416 Media, Culture & Society 29(3)



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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 ofdigital communication technology applications, bank and investment houseinnovators of new financial instruments, a burgeoning range of conservativeand neo-liberal think-tanks and associated business, academic and lobbyistexpertise. Not least among these actors are public, commercial and specializedmedia 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 simplyreflect changed priorities; it has promoted and helped secure the new central-ity of the finance sector and logic of shareholder value. Forms of attentionand concepts previously familiar to institutional investors and a privilegedclass 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 populationseducation. Rather, it marshals previously uncoordinated, disparate informalpractices and limited if effective efforts from a variety of mainly commercialorganizations into a concerted push for financialization in the curriculum. TheTaskforce, with its government imprimatur and rhetoric of national interest,

and Chair Paul Clitheroes popular and populist broadcast persona of MrMoney, marks the recruitment of a credible ally to a previously commercialcause, ratcheting up to a new level the persuasive conscription of individualsto responsibility for their own financial situation.10

This self-responsibilization the expected acquisition by each individual ofthe disposition to self-finance their needs for housing, health care, educationand retirement income is the hallmark of neo-liberal culture and governance.Presented in a rhetoric of choice and freedom, neo-liberal government obligesthe population to be free (Rose, 1990: 213), to fulfil our political role as active

citizens, ardent consumers, enthusiastic employees, and loving parents as if wewere 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 tochoose, is thus a major work and condition of neo-liberal governance.

No less than in the formation of peoples libertarian dispositions, rhetoricalpersuasion is also entailed in the formation of policy positions guiding thisvision of a world of self-financing individuals. For example, Bryan identifiesa key element of the setting up in the 1980s and 1990s of the superannuationfunds that are crucial to financialization as the notion of self-perpetuating

wealth creation in capital markets (2004: 103), that capital markets actuallyserve 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 tosolve the generational funding crisis produced by ageing populations. In other

Greenfield, Financialization 417



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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 policiesas much as the calculations, decisions and actions of those on whom policysimply bears.

The neo-liberal policies and constitutive policing of minute aspects ofeveryones daily lives can be seen in the Taskforces recommendations. Thesescrutinize, assess and work to normalize the financial health and desires ofindividuals, their capacity to undertake morally approved finance strategiesversus bad decision-making. As Minister Coonan puts it: many of theissues that we face are behavioural ones rather than regulatory ones wecannot rely on legislation to stop people wasting or mismanaging theirmoney (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 ofheavily 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, theinformal 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). Ourinterest is how broadcast media and television in particular have played a partin the formation of a finance rationality. The role of media in financializationand the new widespread finance culture it has ushered in has not been widelydiscussed (but see Frank, 2001; Greenfield and Williams, 2001; Thrift, 2001),

despite the importance of finance (not simply financing) within contemporarymedia environments (Craig, 2001; Palmer et al. 1998; Thompson, 2003).

To redress this, we have sought to trace how Australian audiences have beenaddressed in programming dealing with finance issues. What discursive fea-tures, what developments and changes in how finance matters are selected andpresented are discernible in the Australian media environment during theperiod of financialization? To put it simply, in the 1980s finance becamedeemed 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 discourseshave been naturalized. Following Anderson (1983) and Mercer (1992), ourinterest in such discourses, compositional forms and techniques of address istheir constitutive role: how, through daily iteration in pervasive cultural tech-nologies, particular forms of address can play a key role in shaping audiences




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and populations so that, located within particular social relations, peopleunderstand and comport themselves as having a particular identity, set of inter-

ests, dispositions. In the case of finance matters, our sense is that a burgeoningfinance culture is not one that expresses the Australian populations wish tobe better off and independent from the vagaries of government, the fruit ofsome innate national trend towards self-sufficiency (Shanahan, 2000), butthat it is a historically developed culture of material practices and knowledges,social relations and power, that has as one of its recognizable achievements theforming and mannering (Mercer, 1992: 27) of a financialized we, posses-sors of an identity as shareholders or would-be shareholders, characterized byfinancial independence (or the struggle to attain it), seized by aspirations anddisposed to consider events as opportunities for investment.12

In considering the role of media as formative cultural technologies in thismannering of Australians, our examples here are taken from archival televi-sion footage from the 1980s and 1990s.13 This selection is partly built on anunderstanding of broadcast media as the pre-eminent nation-building com-munication technologies of the late 20th century, the period coinciding withfinancialization. Partly it results from a concern to complement descriptionand analysis of work undertaken elsewhere on finance journalism in theAustralian print media.14 Before turning to some media examples, let usestablish 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 alsobe mapped.

Audiences and finance rationality

Our argument is that populations have been equipped, over time, with afinance rationality, an intrinsic part of the reorganization of finance activity

and social relations of power and knowledge. This is the name we assign tothe capacity to make sense of the myriad practices and relations assembledunder the omnibus term the economy, in particular as it is dominated byfinance. We are interested in a finance knowledge that has shaped peoplesagency in particular ways, as investors and as consumers, but also as audiencesfor particular government and organizational policies, as decision-makers orin formulating their interests in workplaces, community groups, families andhouseholds. Contrary to the literature that assesses the capacity greed as akey 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 peoples sense-making capacities, their inescapablyhistorical and institutional nature, is outlined in Hindesss concept of actor,which unpicks the common understanding of capacities as the expression or




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property of either an autonomous individual or a social structure transmittedthrough socialization. Actors make decisions and act accordingly, but they do

so under conditions that are only partly under their control, and on the basisof 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, makeassessments of a situation, and come to decisions are built up through for-mal and informal institutional trainings and are radically plural: there is nonatural hierarchy or overarching Reason that supplies the basic pattern forparticular rationalities.

For us, media products are a key condition of the formation of peoplesrationalities, though there is nothing functionalist or inevitable about this for-mation and uptake of rationalities: like all communication, a gamble as to itssuccess is involved. Print and broadcast media have familiarized diverse audi-ences with particular common-sense ways of knowing about the economy interms of finance: how you finance individual lifestyles. Finance rationalitycomprises the techniques of calculation and the assumptions (e.g. the neo-classical concept of waiting)15 that enable neo-liberalism to be enacted. It isa 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 tofinancial 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 Reasons counterposition to false knowledgeor ideology. Our concern with finance rationality is political-economic,unlike that of the CFLT: while the Taskforce begins with the dominance offinance 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 thathas 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 nearimpossible for radio). With few complete or easily searched indexes we

selected available programme episodes on the basis of major financial eventssuch as the floating of the Australian dollar, the 1987 stock market crash, theintroduction of the Goods and Services Tax. In the 1980s, a decade that sawfinancial deregulation under the Hawke Labor government, introduction ofcompulsory superannuation and the first rounds of privatization, finance was




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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 YourLife, The Bottom Line) appeared alongside these. In the 2000s, apart from anumber of public television and radio broadcast programmes dealing withbusiness and finance (ABC Radio Nationals The Business Report; SBSs The

Business Show; ABCTVsInside Business andBusiness 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 marketinformation once again to business-oriented programmes and routine currentaffairs 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 economicdiscourses and assumptions. We describe these documents of the recent paston their own terms, but from a definite position in the present, marked by theproblematic of financialization.

The commentator

During the 1980s a key figure helping to promote finance as something theordinary person could and would want to be interested in was RobertGottleibsen, with his Finance segment on nightly ABC television news. Hisparticular forte was the dramatization of finance events through an urgent,sotto voce delivery, an intimate personalization of key business players Kerry, Rupert, Alan, John, Robert16 involved in audacious takeoversand massive borrowings, and a compelling narrative thrust that turned thecomplex relations and previously esoteric activity of high finance into an

unfolding play of human aspiration and daring into which the viewer wasbeing allowed a privileged view.

One example of Gottleibsens 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 directimportance to the television viewer.

Australia was hammered on two fronts today. Our stock market took yet anotherpasting and our dollar was crunched. The action on the currency front started in NewYork, 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 toAustralia. Against other currencies weve had a real pasting (ABC News, 1987)

Gottleibsens relentless use of a community of address in which, in this instance,stock markets and currencies are synonymous with the we of the Australian




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national people, beset here by gathering momentous events but routinely caughtup in the more commonplace round of financial dealings, helped shape an under-

standing of finance relations and activity as something in which everyone wassomehow 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 discernthe makings of a more complex disposition towards or framework for think-ing about finance. The week-nightly Carleton Walsh Reporton ABC televi-sion (19857), aired at 9.30 p.m., dealt with political and economic storiesthrown up by the Hawke Labor governments neo-liberal reforming agenda,heralded by the decision to float the Australian dollar (1983) and deregulatethe Australian banking industry (1984). The host, Max Walsh, with his author-itative persona, and armed with considerable economic knowledge, not leastof economic history, had an interviewing style that, by allowing a long-termrather than simply adversarial view of the governments economic policies,helped stage the tutelary explanations of key shifts in the countrys economicand financial landscape routinely provided by the Prime Minister and, espe-cially, the Treasurer (see discussion below).

Walshs editorials were typically composed within a neo-classical economicframework, with its assumptions of free trade, the need for balanced budg-ets, and the national economyas its touchstone. From this position, he would

praise Treasurer Keating as working within the tradition of conservative andorthodox economics (Carleton Walsh Report, 1986b), comment favourablyon the Treasurers neo-liberal departures from this tradition, but also policethe extent to which these departures could be approved. This is exemplifiedin the following interview where Walsh is probing the Treasurer about thebudget deficit immediately following Keatings (in)famous banana republicstatement in response to bad balance of payment figures:

You tend to be dismissive of anybody who questions the wisdom of the route youve

taken with respect to floating the dollar, deregulating the financial sector and lettingin 16 foreign banks all of which I agree with but arent you sometimes havea certain amount of fear that were moving into a Latin American situation where alot of overseas money is being pushed into this takeover game trying to buya 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 Cornerhas 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 Walshs helped fashion what couldbe called the relatively humane, social neo-liberal framework that character-ized this first phase of financialization in Australia.17




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Market populism

Both Gottleibsen and Walsh were regulars on the authoritative but, comparedto commercial television stations, lower-rating national broadcaster. Whilethe ABC observed its charter by providing serious, informed journalism, onthe commercial channels a lighter, populist approach to serious stories saw anew discourse emerge. Thus, on Sunday (1987), Channel 9s flagship weeklycurrent affairs programme, the 1987 stock market crash is presented in theterms of market populism.18 Frank describes the propositions this recent andvirulent variant of populism comprises:

The market and the people both of them understood as grand principles of social liferather 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 ofsupply 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, themarket [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)

Sundays feature story on the stock market crash is narrated by CharlesWoolley, a figure whose populist, ingnue 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 threatposed to Australia by the crash in America, is carefully inscribed. The storybegins with insistent cross-cutting between the story locations of the UnitedStates and Australia. Four times the scene shifts between, on the one hand, CBSanchor Dan Rathers concerned reporting in dramatic terms on the events ofBlack Tuesday and of the next three days, as well as various pieces of NewYork stock exchange actuality, and, on the other, actuality of the floor of theAustralian Stock Exchange and, variously, ordinaryAustralians listening to the

radio for news, speculators, expert commentators and celebrity stockbroker ReneRivkin. On the fourth cross, delivering us to the actuality of the Sydney BankersTrust (BT) trading floor, Woolleys voice-over begins, Am I a bear or a bull, andwhat of my leverage, my wraps and my cross-rates? These people are specu-lating withyourmoney. Then, in a piece to camera Woolley confides: I dontknow whats going on. I havent got a clue Just, of course, like us.

After an interview in which one of BT Australias highest fliers fails toanswer Woolleys simple question: what is the futures exchange and whathappens here?, Woolley answers himself, that it is maybe the biggest casino

in the world, almost metaphysical, intangible. Giving up on his quest tocomprehend the effect of Black Tuesday on the trading floor, Woolley tells ushe couldnt do anything, so I went to lunch with four young, educated traders,who enact for Woolleys ordinary person scrutiny the stereotype of the




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financial elite, speaking of their massive transactions as dealing in monopolymoney. Against this foil, Woolley meets the trader who provides the story

with its moral point, Cabramatta Fatsor Cabby, from the wrong side of thetracks, overweight, working class, full of real-world wisdom. From him welearn the market is like soccer riots (that is, a crucible of human emotions) andthat the share market is no different to the fruit market. For Woolley, and sofor the interpellated viewer, Cabby is a rare creature a stockbroker whomI can understand. Again Woolley lunches, this time with Cabbys colleagues,all male, all similar Australian hard-drinking types. When Woolley asks aboutthe risks of a system marked by booms and crashes Is there not a better way to run the world? Cabbys colleagues defend the way of the free mar-ket; Well, we know what the alternative is. Through Cabby, the acceptanceof risk is presented as a patriotic duty in taking the risk I believe Ive donesomething for my country matched by a down-to-earth understanding ofwhat really matters: I hope no one does anything silly its only money.

Woolleys closing peroration cements the figure of the stockbroker as work-ing-class hero. Against a night shot of Cabby alone on the trading floor Hewas still up there in his corporate tower, alone with the worries of the world Woolleys voice-over: I dont know if they know what theyre doing but itsthe way of the ignorant to trust the experts but Id been relieved just to meetCabramatta Fats, a big man with a big heart.

In Woolleys market populism, the human key to the market has beenfound. The particularity of this framework for understanding finance is clari-fied by contrasting it with the different populist stance taken by journalistGeorge Negus in another segment on the same Sunday programme. Negus,interviewing Ralph Willis, Minister for Industrial Relations in the HawkeLabor government, and Simon Crean, Australian Council of Trade Unionspresident, probes the possibility of a relation between the stock market crashand workers wages through the National Wage Case: Is it a fact that theAustralian worker could be caught up in the crash asked to pay for the

bosses losses? Here, Neguss populism is sceptical of the way of the freemarket and ranged againstthe stockmarket. By contrast, Woolleys populismacts as an inoculation which, as Barthes puts it, consists in admitting theaccidental evil of a class-bound institution the better to conceal its principalevil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of asmall 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-obviousfaade, the heart of the market resides in the principles of patriotic effort and

fundamental verities of exchange (just like at the fruit market), andit is theguarantor of our democratic system.

Of course this is one exemplary story, but its lesson in how to reallyunderstand or trust the market and those who work there, while in theseearly days of financialization taking some effort to present, is later more




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pithily inscribed, as in the educational broadcastEconomic Australia (1995),[c]onsumers cast dollar votes. By 2004, one observers reflection on the

Australian federal election indexes the by-now-established phenomenon ofmarket populism:

[Re-elected Prime Minister] John Howards message throughout the campaign hasbeen: this is not really a country it is an $800 billion corporation and the CEOand board of directors are doing a first-rate job. This is not really an election rather an extraordinary general meeting to confirm the directors remunerationpackages. (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 dispositionstowards finance in 1980s Australia can ignore the figure of the Treasurer. Notonly does TV economic news routinely resort to the figure of the Treasurer aseconomic actor and specifically manager (Corner, 1998: 65) to renderintelligible a field of events notoriously difficult to shape as news, but in

Keating, TV producers found particularly good talent. To understand this, asMorris has exhaustively analysed, you have to know about:

Paul Keating, Federal Treasurer (19831991) of the Australian Labor government famed for his suits and his eloquence. The elegance is Italian, the eloquenceAustralian, and it comes in two main stories gutter invective (the workingclass 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 oneprogramme 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 pedagogiceffect that accompanied it (Gittins, 2004; Megalogenis, 2005). This was aTreasurer 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 socialmeaning. Thus, on (one component of) radical tax reform introduced in the1985 budget (encouraging investment through shareholding), Keatingresponds to a TV interviewer:




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its a huge radical change in the income tax system. We said to the businesscommunity, theyve wanted imputations for years on dividends, that is, a rebate onthe tax paid by shareholders upon receipt of dividends. Were 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. Welltheyre going to get one. Instead of thinking that theyre taking the brunt ofeveryones cheating and tax minimization, its going to be a lot fairer out there andwe cant hope to have a fair country and a fair go and all the rest of the stuff thatAustralians 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 andthe non-banking sector with what it means for the viewer, when answering a

question about his momentous policy to deregulate housing interest rates:

Because theyll 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 accountswhich underpin the banks deposits here cost them 12 percent but the cash manage-ment trusts, for instance, are offering 16.5 percent. So theres an enormous haemor-rhaging of funds out of the savings bank system and theres no way they could copewith housing demand watching these deposits evaporate in front of their eyes.[T]he government has acted on two fronts. Weve a social obligation to have peo-ple, were 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 forthese crucial early years of financialization the regular, expansive, visuallyand linguistically engaging performance of the Treasurer repeatedly providedimplicit pedagogic opportunities for audiences to be, at the least, sensitized toa new status for finance activity, cognizant of arguments around marketizationand, perhaps, made familiar with an argument about the reasons for movingaway 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 socialneo-liberal framework in the direction of a more market fundamentalist neo-liberalism, through the prominent figures of Treasurer Keating and shadowTreasurer and then Opposition leader John Hewson. Hewson, former econom-ics professor, became the putative alternative, his academic theoreticaldemeanour contrasting with a reputedly economically auto-didactic Keating,who mainly took oral briefings from Treasury officials. In an early piece of

educational television ( Australias Balance of Payments, 1985) ProfessorHewson and Treasurer Keating present strikingly similar, emerging neo-liberalpolicy advocacy and explanation. But by the time Hewson is a parliamentarypolitical player, things start to diverge, in a contestation of neo-liberal theoret-ical purity, policy pragmatics and electoral appeal. The socially oriented




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aspects of Treasurer Keatings economic reforms could be easily contrastedwith the industrial and taxation stringencies of Hewsons Fightback tome of

policy doctrines. As commentator Paul Kelly puts it, contrasting onLateline(1991) the difference between Keating and Hewson and identifying the pres-sure Hewsons economic position was exerting in the area of monetary policy,the Labor Party has been forced to adopt a new economic model differentfrom the growth model which the Labor Party was pushing during the period86 to 89. Despite Hewsons success in this regard, when, as Oppositionleader, he lost a putatively unloseable election, it was in no small measurebecause of the connotations of his evangelical economic fervour that were con-veyed audio-visually. The personality packagingof economic discourses andthe (dis)positions they enable has played an important role in the forming, andshifting, 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 1970sand 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 othernarrational devices, and in the variably positioned speech of interviewees,guests and other subjects. However, there is no straightforward replacementof one discourse by another, or even unchallenged dominance of one discourseor disappearance of another. The picture is rather more one of continuing anduneven contestations between discourses, though reasonable evidence ofrel-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 thisperiod of financialization. Woolleys report on the 1987 stock market crash,discussed above, laboured long and graphically to establish the understandingthat Australia follows Wall Street. By the time Channel 9s Willesee pro-gramme reports on the 1997 crash, the relation between the Australian andUnited States finance markets and the fact of globalization can be handledin a sentence. Thus Channel 9s finance editor, Michael Pascoe, echoes pro-gramme host Willesees opening remark that For about 5 years now theAustralian 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 onthe international context tapers away to a focus on the nation and the nationalinterest, in the 1997 story, the commentators concern with the extent andspeed of this [market correction]and its effects on interest rates is presented




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as equally applicable to New Zealand and Japan as Australia. This change inframing assumptions from the late 1980s to the late 1990s demonstrates the

shift in predominant frameworks from neo-classical economic discourseswhich, amongst other assumptions, take the nation-state as an invariable, toneo-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-evidentnecessity of economic deregulation and privatization, government as primarilyan 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 orreactionary tenor or a watershed moment assisting it, is captured in an ABC

Lateline programme (1991). Bank Fiasco provides a striking retrospectivehistory of finance and deregulation in the 1980s, with contributions from aca-demic, journalist, Reserve Bank and business guests. Through an investigationof the remit of the Reserve Bank, the programme presents its target audienceof relatively highly informed citizens with a narrative of huge and inevitable change from the early 1980s, when banking was a closed shopand the Reserveassisted government to create employment through fiscal policy, through to thederegulation of the banking system in 1984, the ensuing lending binge andsubsequent 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 tothe traditional watchdogs: how and why did the Reserve fail to exert anyauthority over the banks, and, as host Kerry OBrien asks: Where is govern-ment? The articulation of some kind of watershed moment begins when jour-nalist Max Suich says theres a debate going on amongst insiders not anattack on deregulation. People are still speaking with certainty [for thederegulationist position] but privately [are] uncertain about how to fix thingsnow. 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 shiftthe Labor government is being pressured to make away from a growth eco-nomic model, underpinned by the Reserve Banks charter to secure fullemployment (a legacy of the 1940s post-war reconstruction policies), to a pol-icy of labour deregulation, in line with Opposition leader Hewsons push forchanges to the Reserve Bank Act such that its charter be limited to pursuinganti-inflationary policies.

Recounting this detail about the iteration and questioning of economicframeworks lays out the material discursive constituents of what, at the time of

broadcast, was part of how the positions on finance and economics taken20

bypolicy-makers, businesspeople, ordinary citizens and so on were shiftingand/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 relationit is activated by the reader but its structuring effect is its own (1993: 121).




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Another genre of programming where shifts in economic discourses can beconsidered 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 shiftfrom an economic to a business studies perspective. One example is the con-trast between an episode ofOpen for Business (1994) on business finance, stillframed in a neo-classical economic discourse in which the finance sector ispresented as articulating with other economic sectors such as manufacturing,services and design, compared to an episode ofTaking 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 disseminationof neo-liberal finance rationality, as it is given impetus by government offi-cials and affiliated experts, extends beyond this nations border. In 2004, theAustralian Howard government began exporting this rationality and demandsfor compliance with its stringencies to neighbouring failed states of PapuaNew Guinea (PNG), the Solomon Islands and Nauru. For example, with thediagnosis of PNGs problems given as corruption and that people had notbeen using the land as rational individuals, the Howard government deter-mined that if aid was to continue it would be accompanied by highly informedeconomic intervention, by sending Australian finance experts to deal with thePNG budget. Thus is globalization, at least to the extent that it is synonymouswith neo-liberalism and financialization, enacted. Our interest has been toconsider 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 locatingarchival material.

1. Distinguished from other growth regimes such as the post-war Fordist growthregime 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-economicdynamic (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); forwork complicating the concept at the heart of neo-classical economics and arguing itsperformative aspect see Callon (1998).




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3. For example, discussing the legacy of the neo-liberal policies of the HawkeKeating Labor governments (198396), the economics editor of theAustralian FinancialReview 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 ofa Goods and Services Tax.

5. Following Foucaults 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 suchactivity, and to take on the role, opportunities, forms of calculation and risks ofinvestor, 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 Coalitions aim of consolidating Australiasposition as the leading share-owning democracy (2000).

8. As Hay notes of the overload thesisand its diagnosis of the mid-to-late-1970scrisis of the British state: The thesis, as diluted and refracted by the think tanks ofthe new right and in the pages of the tabloid and broadsheet papers alike, offered aspectacular, rhetorically rich and ultimately persuasive narration and dramatization ofthe events of the crisis, helping to swing the intellectual pendulum from left toright, 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 fromLatours (1990) generative account of the rhetorical power of inscriptions. One suchcurrent 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 aremerely claims on future production, but someone else has to produce the future out-put for consumption all individuals cannot be rentiers (2004: 109).

12. Were more financially independent than ever (Shanahan, 2000, emphasisadded), precede to feature on the float of the demutualized National Royal MotoristAssociation.

13. Elsewhere we have considered print and broadcast advertisements in 200001(Greenfield and Williams, 2001).

14. See Greenfield and Williams (2004) for an early report on a longitudinal study(19712001) of print finance journalism.

15. The growth of wealth involves in general a deliberate waiting for a pleasurewhich a person has (rightly or wrongly) the power of commanding in the immediatepresent (Marshall in Robinson and Eatwell, 1973: 38).

16. Kerry Packer, Channel 9 and publishing owner; Rupert Murdoch, News Ltdowner; Alan Bond, purchaser of Channel 9, later imprisoned for business fraud; JohnElliott, leading investor in Elders pastoral services company; Robert Holmes Court,renowned for his mineral wealth.

17. Until 1991, the Labor government pursued a kind of mixture of bastardKeynesianism 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




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rather than expert perspectives. See Corner (1998: 59) on the extent of differentiationin 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 inour longitudinal print study.

20. In the sense emphasized by Bourdieu in discussing how people take publiclyavailable positions on issues, against the liberal-individualist assumption of publicopinion technology that people simply have an opinion (1979: 128).

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Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMITUniversity 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 concerningthe latter is Limiting Politics: Howardism, Media Rhetoric and NationalCultural Commemorations (Australian Journal of Political Science, 2003),with Peter Williams. Address: School of Applied Communication, Bldg 6Level 3, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia.[email: [email protected]]

Peter Williams is a Senior Associate (Research) in the School of AppliedCommunication, 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 ofApplied Communication, Bldg 6 Level 3, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V,Melbourne 3001, Australia.


Financialization Finance Rationality and the Role of Media in Australia

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