Elite Economists and the Neoliberal Ascendancy in Australia: The Case of Dr John Hewson

Worsening inequality worldwide has stimulated a renewal of scholarly work on the dynamics of elite recruitment, notably Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s large-scale UK study (2024), which found only modest change in the make-up of Britain’s elite between the 1890s and today. Cumulative advantage is shown to accrue to those who pass through more than one of Britain’s “precise channels of elite recruitment”. Reeves and Friedman’s underlying motivation is to identify how these channels “might be remade so the elites we get are the ones we need”—implicitly, elites interested in reversing current trends in inequality. Australia presents an opportunity to consider their findings in a situation where, compared with Britain, elite recruitment is more nebulous. Drawing on the life and transnational career of Australian economist John Hewson, this article responds to Reeves and Friedman’s invocation to evaluate “how elites think, and what elites do, rather than simply who they are”. The dynamics of Hewson’s elite recruitment and its relationship to his role in constructing consent for neoliberalism in Australia in the late 20th century—in the academy, the media and politics—is contextualised in the national and global history of neoliberalism.