Robert Duffield, Rogue Bull: The Story of Lang Hancock, the King of the Pilbara (Sydney: Collins, 1979), ch. 2, pp. 21-32.
Including many of Hancock’s own words.

Australia is not a democracy, in any shape or form. It is run by four of five big pressure groups, and the biggest of these are the government bureaucracies. Then come the communist-controlled unions, and after that the huge business lobbies, always with their hands in the public purse, always trying to influence governments, always looking for handouts and tariffs and concessions. Fourth come the media, and as a very poor fifth, the elected representatives of the people.

Thus does Lang Hancock rail against the forces which have denied him his own iron ore mine, and thereby threatened the future of his dynasty. He wants an Australia in which the influence of these pressure groups is decimated, literally decimated, and replaced by the overweening influence which this book calls “mining uber Alles” — mining above everything. Hancock’s vision of Australia is a maverick’s vision, incomplete and immature, for in politics and economics he leaps from peak to peak; only in an ore seam does he find synthesis. Nevertheless he has dared to argue to an audience of Malcolm Fraser’s Melbourne peers that the Prime Minister should set Parliament to the task of scrapping laws, not making them, and seeking to instil the principle that “governments do not create wealth; they consume it.” Thus would he remove high company taxes, variable deposit requirements and foreign exchange restrictions, and instead create tax-free zones for entrepreneurs and workers alike in the mineral-rich wastes of the North. It sounds like the Workers’ Party, but Hancock would go much further. He would not only destroy the Welfare State and the tariff cocoon, he would split Australia into two, so that Western Australia and possibly Queensland (together or vice versa) could, through secession, provide the minerals-based impetus would drag the haughty Establishment of Melbourne and the sullied supremacists of Sydney out of the tariff-bound, union-directed, unemployment-orientated lethargy and get Australia on the move before it is too late. He wants an Australia cast in his own image — a bulldozing, entrepreneurial, brash, unapologetic Australia unashamedly making money out of minerals and pouring it back to find and develop more; an Australia free from fear of foreign money and of investing its own; an Australia in which power is taken from the bureaucrats and given, not to the people but through the people, to leaders who can wield it on their behalf without pandering to their conservatism.

Implicit in this is Lang Hancock’s complete lack of faith in democracy as we know it today. It would be easy to say that what he seeks is an anachronistic return to laissez faire, in which the doers do it and the rest of us let them — and indeed that is the core of his thinking. The man is in fact more complicated than such analysis suggests, yet more simple than his detractors allege. In Hancock’s Australia not only bureaucrats but politicians, including ministers of the Crown, would be reduced to minor roles. But so, too, would the grey-suited minions of the multi-national companies, with their safe, lowest-common-denominator decisions in the boardrooms of Sydney or Melbourne. In all these areas he wants action, action freed from the confines of consensus, action decided by men who have not only vision but the power to implement it. In Hancock’s view, you cannot depend on the apparatchiks of the multinationals to have both, any more than you can depend on the Russian bureaucrats who are called by that name. Hancock abhors the “them” — “they” being the people, whether the boardroom majority or the majority of the Australian electorate — you and me — who will vote against progress in favour of lowest-common-denominator negativism, hereinafter referred to as LCD. Thus, from a conversation with the author.

LH: You have to be conscious where the power lies. And no matter how difficult the task, or how unsavoury the task, you have to keep shooting at them, holding them up to ridicule, showing them they are selfish and have their own interests at heart — however you go about it, I think it should be done. In my position I don’t have to be popular, so I can do it. It is one of the faults of our democratic system that a man running for elective office cannot afford to be unpopular. He may know that the majority is always wrong and yet he has to toady to them. This is the great tragedy of Australia.

RD: You really think the majority is always wrong?

LH: Absolutely, there are no two ways about it.

If the majority is always wrong, Lang Hancock can only get his way by subverting it, which makes him by definition a subversive, a sort of big business Bolshevik. Hancock showed surprise when the author laid that tag on him, since subversives in his view are communist trade union officials and communist-influenced “eco-nuts”. Nevertheless he does admit that he wants to overthrow the present form of government, and he puts it this way:

LH: I want to alter the form of government back to what it should be. I’m not subversive like those people who want to stop industry, stop the growth of power. I regard as subversives the people who live in this country and take foreign money to propagandize, to frighten women and children, to imbue children with a line of thought that can cause this country much harm. Somebody who tries to alter the system by which the Government has gone down the drain, somebody who tries to change things for the benefit of the country — such a person is not a subversive.

RD: The word for that is “radical”.

LH: You’re getting down to words now, and as you know I’m not an educated person.

RD: Well, we can’t call you a conservative, because a conservative wants to maintain the status quo, and you certainly don’t.

LH: If you want to play with words why not call me a progressive? I want to progress from a nation where the growth rate is about two per cent compared with five per cent in America and eleven per cent in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. I want to progress Australia into that sort of growth. Given that, you can call me what you like.

So we’ll call him a radical of the Right. It is true that he is not an “educated person”. He gained his Leaving Certificate at the rather posh Perth private college Hale School with marks exceeded only by the dux, but did not tertiary studies thereafter, not even in geology. Despite severe short-sightedness he was a dour opening bat for Hale’s First XI and a determined ball-chaser in its First XVIII of Australian Rules football players, and he later learned to fly aeroplanes, of which more later. But none of this gives Lang Hancock the right to subvert any Australian government, nor even to radicalize it. What does?

The answer, of course, is money, and Hancock admits it in an off-the-cuff statement which provides the first breakthrough in this book’s attempt to understand the many enigmas and dichotomies of the man. Questioned on his right to mess about in politics, he says: “What’s the use of looking for great wealth if it’s going to be taken from me? I’m wealthy as it is, but what’s the use of looking for even greater wealth if I know that in five or six years’ time my family isn’t going to have it; someone is going to move in and take it from them? So I believe personal wealth and national growth are allied; each can only take place within the protection of a very wealthy, well-developed, properly functioning Australian civilization.”

The implications of that simple statement are enormous, for they tell us straight away what sort of man Lang Hancock is. He is a man who will soon die — not because he is sick but because he is very close to the seventy-year life span which he has always believed is fair enough for anybody. Lang Hancock has no death wish, and he will not die until nature takes him, probably at his desk. But he does worry about the sort of Australia his daughter Gina and his grandchildren will inherit, and he wants it to be an Australia in which their fortunes will prosper. Such aspirations have been shared, of course, by the humbler and less affluent men, who for the sake of their children’s future, died in Would War II.

So much for sentiment. Lang Hancock is too gruff and too bluff to be a sentimentalist; he is just straight honest selfish. Cheeky, too; in that address to the Liberal Party establishment in Melbourne in late 1976, he advised them to view Australia through the eyes of sympathetic observers in foreign countries — “I of course include Western Australia in this category.” His speech that night was basically an attack on Malcolm Fraser, and the reason for the attack was Fraser’s alleged failure to rescue Australia from what he called its present calamitous socialist path. “What has gone wrong?” Hancock asked. “Why has the Fraser Government not been able to distinguish itself from the Whitlam regime? We know the Prime Minister wants to. What is stopping him? It is no use waiting until the Liberal Party is bundled out of office. The time to find out is now.”

Hancock then spelt out what he called the main forces arrayed against Prime Minister Fraser. They were the ever-increasing dominance of the Canberra bureaucracy; the emergence of a trade union dictatorship controlling the political as well as the industrial life of the nation; the powerful, high-protectionist manufacturing lobby which, he insouciantly added, was probably the main source of the Liberal Party’s election funds; the socialist Press, dominated by socialist-trained journalists educated by the State from excessive taxation levied disproportionately on the 12.5 per cent of the people who produce the basic wealth of the nation; and the inept quality of the ministers supporting the Prime Minister, owing to the fundamental error of the Liberal Party’s pre-selection system.

The man is radical indeed. He then attacked education which, as we have seen above, he admits to lack. Hancock said: “Enormous amounts of money have been wasted on so-called education, but the very basic knowledge upon which the whole of our civilization rests has not yet been taught in any seat of learning. Nowhere have we been educated to understand that everything comes from the earth — you must either mine it, or grow it in the first instance. No one has educated the trade unions to the fact that their fundamental function should be to foster trade, not destroy it. No one has educated the government to understand that it is their job, not the trade unions’ job, to govern the country. No one has taught the academics (the archpriests of miseducation) what to teach to make a society healthy, wealthy and wise.”

“The Fraser Government has made genuine, praiseworthy but painful efforts to reduce government spending, only to finish up with a record deficit. Why not abandon the present inevitable road to disaster and attempt to reduce big government drastically. No one could say that this challenge is not big enough, seeing that the ultimate utopian goal would be to reduce government power of interference until it was left only with those things with which it was capable of administering — for instance, the Police Force, the Titles Office, and a nuclear-armed Air Force.”

This would mean very little government left, but Hancock makes no apologies for the vast army of unemployed bureaucrats and under-employed politicians his plans would create. It’s not that he despises the abilities of the civil servants; on the contrary, he thinks the best of them must be very smart men indeed to have built themselves such Parkinsonian empires, and that their talents could well be used by a genuine free enterprise State. He is equally positive about politicians:

“One of the main problems facing Malcolm Fraser is the fantastic growth of government over the years. Government has poked its incompetent nose into every facet of the commercial and private lives of Australians. It has become so large, so all-embracing and so inefficient that no cabinet of men elected through the parliamentary process could possibly expect to have the competence to administer it properly. If Mr Fraser was able to select twenty-seven men for the whole fourteen-million Australians I doubt if he could come up with a group wise enough to exercise judgement over the whole range of government affairs as they are constituted today. What hope has he got of selecting a twenty-seven-man cabinet from the very limited number of limited-capacity individuals provided by the Liberal and National Country Parties?”

What annoys Hancock most is that no civil servant, State or Federal, has ever managed a major mine, built a major port, raised hundreds of millions of dollars of risk capital or built an ore railway: “If a minister is incapable, and his permanent staff are incapable — as they must be — of exercising judgement in such cases, surely the answer is to take the matter out of government hands and leave it to the industry that makes its living in that direction.”

It follows that Parliament’s propensity for making laws annoys him also: “We have such a surfeit of laws of all kinds, most of which are damaging to this country’s best interests. They are so multitudinous and so involved that every citizen of Australia, every day of his life, must invariably and unwittingly break several of these laws and regulations. If you would take time to think, I feel sure you would come to the conclusion that you would have some difficulty in nominating any law passed since the end of World War II, no matter how well-intentioned, that would not be better repealed. Every law that Parliament passes gives added power to the Canberra bureaucratic octopus and lessens the power of the electorate to produce.”

The first prerequisite for Lang Hancock’s Australia, then, is a hatchet man as prime minister, a man so confident in his electoral success that he would not mind being hated. Hancock had hoped that Malcolm Fraser would be such a man, but he was disappointed. While whole hosts of Australians agonized over the Fraser Government’s savage cutbacks on education and other public spending, over its seemingly heartless attack on the unemployed as “dole bludgers”, over its assault on the funds of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Hancock could only complain that Fraser and his team were no better than Whitlam and his. Nor did Hancock get his second prerequisite — a hatchet man working for the hatchet man. Here he wanted a public servant who could cut bloody swathes through all the other public servants, and in that role he would have liked to have seen Sir Lenox Hewitt. John Gorton, the only Australian prime minister whom Hancock has come close to admiring, used Sir Lenox in such a role, but the bureaucracy beat them both. When the late “Strangler” R. F. X. Connor, Whitlam’s Minister for Minerals and Energy, grabbed Hewitt as his administrative head, Hancock gained respect for him. “I have no reason to like you, Mr Hancock,” said Connor at their first meeting, and the feeling was mutual. Hancock thought Connor was the ultimate in socialist subversives, but he had a sneaking admiration for the man because his maverick bluntness matched his own, and if he had the sense to appreciate Sir Lenox Hewitt’s virtues he could not be all bad. Of the three, Hancock is the only one who is still a stirrer.

As an economist, which he certainly is not by sometimes aspires to be, millionaire Lang Hancock is a fully fledged disciple of the Milton Friedman school. Friedman, a current American economic guru, believes in minimal government activity and full wage indexation as the workers’ only real right. Hancock has also read the more humanistic John Kenneth Galbraith, whom he charitably describes as “one of the greatest fiction writers of our times”. He and his like-minded partner Peter Wright have recently tried to cope with a pair of second-guessers — two economic journalists writing for the respected Fortune. These two non-Friedmanites argued that the public’s ever-increasing expectation of public services, which means higher taxes, also means inevitable inflation. The more we expect of government, be it Medibank or a subsidized rape referral service, the more taxation we will have.

Thus taxation to cater for community demands is an inflationary factor, an element which the Friedman monetarists have refused to admit. The more we expect out of government, at whatever level, the more we are doomed to inflation, because the costs of those services will be diffused throughout the community which demands them. Taxes chasing extra services can be just as inflationary as money chasing too few goods — and, the Fortune authors agreed, this was not necessarily a bad thing.

In Hancock’s Australia it would be, and this is where we come to his secessionist credo. If the Fortune scenario is right, then the bureaucracy will keep burgeoning forever, mining projects will become too costly to launch, governments will become impotent and a dictatorship of the trade unions will take over. If he cannot stop this, the only way to perpetuate his own fortune, to realize the potential of the Pilbara, and to save Western Australia from being wasted, is to persuade the State to secede from the whole Federal mess. But there would be no point doing this if the new W.A. simply recreated the mess; it would need a new Constitution, loyal to the British Crown but quite savage in its restrictions on the role of government. It would have no Reserve Bank, tying up huge amounts of foreign capital (and thus frightening it away) in variable deposit requirements, and it would not issue export licenses. It would simply say to the developed countries of the world — mainly America, Japan, Western Europe and the developing Middle East sheikdoms: “You need the minerals; we have them; come and get them.” This, of course, is the Great Australian Quarry syndrome, but Hancock has thought the thing through a little better than that, from restraining bureaucrats to foreign policy. The tax concessions to big investors, being conditional on at least 40 per cent re-investment of profits, would encourage not only further exploration but enormous on-site processing plants, from pelletizing to benficiation of low-grade ores to steel mills.

But there is another aspect to Hancock’s concept of Australian Quarry. He believes, or claims to believe, that no government anywhere can lay claim to a country’s minerals on behalf of its citizens. Australia’s minerals were formed around 2 000 million years ago, he says, and they therefore belong not to the Aborigines, who arrived much later, and certainly not to the Europeans who took over the country much later still. The minerals belong to the world community and should be offered freely to the world community. No bunch of political activists, whether of the Right or of the Left, can claim any right to them in the name of a parvenu nation which did absolutely nothing about creating them.

The only man who has the rights to the minerals is the man who find them — the prospector. The Aborigines, who for centuries roamed over all these ores and did nothing about them, have no rights at all — except for those who turn prospector and are prepared to market their finds, sacred sites regardless. Some of Lang Hancock’s best friends in the Pilbara in his boyhood days were Aborigines, there being nobody else, and he would not be at all put out to see any of them seeking and getting the same rewards that he is seeking and getting, providing they put in the same amount of work and effort. In short, minerals may be international, but the man who claims them is entitled to claim ownership and thereby hold security of tenure while he arranges for their exploitation on the world market. Governments, and the LCD majority of people in the cities, have no right to interfere.

This very laissez-faire openness, which many would call vulnerability, nevertheless has become Hancock’s foreign, defence and resources policy. Our minerals would become so valuable to the world’s most powerful nations that they would never allow a predator, either from their ranks or from outside, to try to grab them all. In case of regional emergencies, W.A. would be defended by a fleet of nuclear-armed F-111s which, being so wealthy, it could afford. Meanwhile the rebel W.A. would be in no danger of invasion by its countrymen from the East, because so many of them would be in the West participating in the new prosperity. Sydney and Melbourne would continue to exist, but only doing the things they can do profitably. And Canberra? Who cares about Canberra?

Hancock formed and funded the Westralian Secessionist Movement years ago, and employed a devotee, Mr Don Thomas (a Welshman), to run it. Mr Thomas occupied a single desk within Hancock’s headquarters in the Perth suburb of Claremont, an HQ named The Angelas after the Pilbara mineral finds Hancock claims the W.A. Government stole from him, and outside which there is a big yellow secessionist sign. Mr Thomas prepared pamphlets, organized school lectures and liaised with the puny but pugnacious secessionist branches throughout the State, and one of his keenest helpers was Hancock’s daughter Gina. But secession is not just a Hancock benefit show; Western Australia did actually vote by referendum to secede in 1932, when it was felt that Canberra was robbing them to pay the Depression Dole to the big-city unemployed. Prominent among the then secessionists was a young, politically minded accountant called Charles Court, later to become Premier of W.A., a disciple of the so-called New Federalism, and Hancock’s arch-foe. Sir Charles does not preach secession today, but many West Australians still feel that the Eastern States are “something else”. In February of 1976, the man who was Perth’s leading real estate agent told me: “We don’t curse God for creating the Nullabor Plain. We thank Him for putting it there to insulate us from the evils of the East.” He did not mean the Orient.

Hancock’s own view is to equate W.A. and New Zealand whose capitals of Perth and Wellington are both separated from Canberra by about the same distance of nothingness — sand in one case, sea in the other. He sees no more reason why W.A. should be associated with the Canberra-Sydney-Melbourne axis than should New Zealanders.

But two things have broadened Hancock’s maverick vision. The first is his discovery of a soul mate in Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the peanut farmer who by blatant gerrymander would seem to be the permanent Premier of Queensland (and why not, if the majority is always wrong?); the second is the great uranium debate. Hancock has watched Bjelke with growing admiration as the latter did such things as thwarting Prime Minister Whitlam’s bid to gain control of the Senate (the Gair Affair); brazenly blackmailing the Japanese to take more Queensland beef if they wanted more Queensland coal; defying both the new Prime Minister, Mr Fraser, and his own Federal National Country Party leader, Mr Doug Anthony, over the 1977 Constitutional referenda; calling continual curses on the Canberra bureaucracy; and, to spite the growing Republican movement in Sydney and Melbourne, declaring Queen Elizabeth II to be Queen of Queensland. If secession was a realistic proposal for W.A., it seemed to be equally so for this other maverick State, which also is full of minerals.

Now into the picture came the Northern Territory’s uranium deposits, particularly at Jabiru (Ranger) and nearby Jabiluka (Pancontinental), where export projects had been stymied since 1972 by the Federal Labor Government’s concern with Aboriginal land rights and environmental hazards, and were still frozen when the new Liberal-NCP Government failed to cancel the Fox Inquiry referred to in chapter one. The Northern Territory and its great desert wastes were then administered by Canberra, and were therefore an impenetrable wedge between the two potentially-secessionist States. Now that the N.T. is a State in its own right it too could decide to secede. Thus the vision emerges of a sort of bivalve Australia, in which the dominant half would be W.A., the N.T. and Queensland, possibly linked in a loose federation under a joint, anti-government, secessionist constitution, a federation so wealthy from its mineral exports that the now weaker States would seek to join it. By such an iconoclastic route might Lang Hancock achieve the kind of unified Australia he believes it should have been all along.

This concept is so breathtaking — and the word “subversive” again comes to mind — that even Hancock does not yet preach it in quite those terms. But he did fly his Falcon twin-jet to Brisbane to see Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and early in 1976 he flew him back to the Pilbara as his guest. At Wittenoom Hancock off-loaded Bjelke from the jet, put him aboard his little twin-engined Aero Commander, and flew him around the Hammersley Iron Ore Province, without co-pilot. Bjelke, who has his own plane but employs a woman pilot to fly it, was suitably impressed, both with Hancock’s flying and with the massive ore deposits below. Then they flew to Perth for a tarmac Press conference around the steps of the Falcon, which proved to be an orgy of mutual admiration. “If only there were more men in Australia like Lang Hancock,” said a beaming Bjelke-Petersen. Said Hancock, “I regard the Premier as a man of character who is not frightened to say what he thinks, regardless of the political consequences. It is one encouraging sign that somewhere in the Australian electorate is a man of principle who is held in some esteem.” Neither mentioned Sir Charles Court, who, when asked later by the author if he minded a fellow-premier dropping into his State without the courtesy of contact, replied just a little petulantly, “I don’t mind him coming, but it would be nice if they tell me.”

Lang and Joh meanwhile worked up a symbol for their embryo idea of a pan-State secessionist movement — a transcontinental railway linking the arid wastes of W.A.’s Pilbara with the coal wealth of Northern Queensland. At each end would be a steel mill, and the trains would carry Pilbara ore to feed Queensland’s mill, and Queensland’s coal to feed W.A.’s. The idea is not new — Sir Charles Court once promoted it. What is new is the Lang-Joh concept of financing such a grandiose project, which would be to invite Middle East capital to build the railway, section by section, in return for mineral rights for 100 to 200 kilometre on either side of it. One of the minerals the Arabs could hope to find in those cast deserts would be, of course, uranium.

Early in 1977 Hancock brough Bjelke to the Pilbara again, and shortly afterwards the two left for the Persian Gulf, Hancock in his private jet from Perth and Bjelke by commercial airliner from Brisbane. They linked up in Beirut, and then went together to see if they could interest the sheiks in putting their oil millions into the concept and prospects of what we have called “Hancock’s Australia”.