George Negus interviews Lang Hancock, “Lang Hancock goes public,” The Weekend Australian Magazine, May 20-21, 1978, p. 12.

George Negus: Why have you burst back into print and pretty strong voice lately? Is Lang Hancock preaching right now?

Lang Hancock: I think things are going from bad to worse, Australia seems to be looking internally just because the rest of the world is in depression. A lot of us seem to have given up hope. I feel the least I can do is see if I can get heard overseas. I’ve said things in Perth and nobody’s reported them, I’ve said the same things in London and they’ve been reported back from London in the local press.

Negus: Why does this happen?

Hancock: I don’t know except that the press is not a free agent by any manner or means. They talk about the freedom of the press, but I don’t think it’s true.

Negus: What do you mean?

Hancock: If it turned around and spoke the truth and some of the communist-controlled unions, they either ask for it to be retracted or they’d close the paper up.

Negus: But these are all old themes of yours.

Hancock: Whether they are old or whether they’re young, that won’t alter the truth of them.

Negus: What do you think newspapers should be saying then about communist-controlled unions?

Hancock: They should take the line that there’s an elected government and that its laws have got to be obeyed. The communist-controlled unions — and there aren’t many of them — have got to conform to the law just the same as you and I and everyone else has.

Negus: What laws are they breaking at the moment? That sort of accusation has got to be more specific?

Hancock: I don’t know. But if it doesn’t matter what it happens to be, they decide the foreign policy of the country, they tell you what nations you can trade with, they tell you what ships they’ll load, which countries you can play sport with and so on and so on. These things, I believe, are not the province of unions.

Negus: In your terms, have unions got any place at all?

Hancock: I’m not in any way quarrelling with the right of a union to better its wages and its conditions, that is its province. Its province isn’t to run the country.

Negus: But many of the things you come out with sound like an attempt to usurp governments — trying to take over yourself, telling governments what they should be doing. You’re not elected either, any more than the trade unionists are.

Hancock: No, no, no — anybody who says that, they can’t read or think because the whole theme of what I’ve been saying is that we don’t want more government, we want less. I’m not telling them what to do, but what they should undo. They’re doing too much in your life, in my life, everybody else’s life with the result that nobody can do anything.

Negus: You reckon we’ve got too much government and at the same time you say we’ve got to protect the system, our so-called way of life against all sorts of forces you name. There’s a contradiction there.

Hancock: I don’t think so. I maintain that as government gets bigger, our way of life becomes more restricted and our standard of living is going to decline instead of going the other way. Perhaps I should explain what government is.

Negus: I’m sure most people have a different idea of it than you. So you probably should explain yourself.

Hancock: Well, to me government is not the elected representative of the people; I don’t believe in any shape or form that Australia is a democracy. It’s run by the four great pressure groups. The most powerful of these by far is the great central bureaucracy, building up and growing faster and faster in Canberra. That’s the number one power. Secondly, the communist-controlled unions — they’d be number two. Number three would be the very powerful manufacturing lobbies — they’re able to write their own tariff rates, their own quotas and generally live in the public purse behind a very high protective wall. Number four I would call the media, but they’re beholden to the other three absolutely and then underneath that lot, declining in influence, you find the elected representatives of the people.

Negus: If the media is beholden to these other groups and forces, how do you explain that I’m able to conduct this sort of interview? That flies in the face of your comments about the media.

Hancock: No it doesn’t. No matter what questions you ask me, if I was a big advertiser on your paper and you turned around and criticised the fella’s product or something, that advertisement could be withdrawn very very smartly. So you’ve got to listen to them; you’re dependent upon news or so-called news largely from leaks from the central bureaucracy. How’d you get rid of Gorton and so on? He offended them by suggesting he’d cut down their budget — and exit Gorton in very short time.

Negus: Maybe we could do a reverse. You take a large ad in The Australian and then criticise The Australian in this interview and see what happens.

Hancock: I know damn well what would happen. How on earth can a paper exist without ads. You can’t destroy your best customers.

Negus: You’re beginning to sound like an evangelist as the years go by. You’re saying the same sorts of things. Maybe you’re using different words and your philosophy seems clearer now. But you are sounding like a missionary trying to get converts.

Hancock: I don’t see that. I just puzzled my brains and tried all sorts of means. There’s no mystery about what’s wrong with the place, how to rectify the thing is the problem. I’ve been tracking my brains as to how on earth you can have some effect. I’ve tried this way, I’ve tried that way. As you say I keep repeating the same old message.

Negus: What’s your new approach then?

Hancock: What I’ve been doing lately is to try and get the press outside Australia to say something. That’s why I gladly accepted to be a guest speaker at the International Press Institute in Canberra just recently.

Negus: You caused quite a stir there. They’d never heard anything like you before.

Hancock: There’s no good causing a stir unless the message comes back here.

Negus: Isn’t that being evangelical? You’re almost religious in your fervour and therefore a bit impractical.

Hancock: Well tell me the practical way to do it and I’ll learn. How on earth do you turn around and get Australia on the right path. We’ve got all the wealth we could use, the richest place in this earth if we could get away from these government impediments.

Negus: But are you being practical?

Hancock: I’m not being evangelical or whatever it is — your words are too long for me. I never went to school. Tell me how I can do it practically and I’ll be grateful to you and I think most Australians would be grateful to you.

Negus: What I’m getting at is that people will say — there goes old Lang Hancock again off on the same old tired line. You antagonise people because you go in boots and all.

Hancock: I think that’s right, but if you don’t antagonise people where do you get …? Take this Uranium Producers Forum. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on well-reasoned stuff that didn’t antagonise anybody. What happened? It filled up everybody’s waste paper baskets. Nobody took the slightest bit of notice of them.

Negus: The anti-uranium movement hasn’t got an argument?

Hancock: No. It can be sustained by the plain cold hard facts that nuclear power has been going virtually for 2000 years without killing one single member of the public. That’s a fact and you can’t argue with it.

Negus: The arguments about adequate safeguards and waste disposal will probably go on forever.

Hancock: They don’t have to.

Negus: You could have misjudged what the opposition to uranium is about. Basically it’s political. Some people don’t like the idea of nuclear industry because of the potential it creates for a third world nuclear war, or even the use of nuclear material by terrorists — the sort of people you would be opposed to.

Hancock: You can’t advance any logical argument against it. Therefore, because the reasons advanced against it aren’t logical, you’ve got to try to find out what stimulates those lies they put out. There must be some ulterior motive. You’re used to dealing with facts. There’s not one argument against uranium that can be substantiated in fact.

Negus: One of the facts is the some people believe — rightly or wrongly — that a nuclear industry provides the potential for non-peaceful use of uranium.

Hancock: Who gives them that belief?

Negus: But isn’t that a fact? It is possible that there are non-peaceful uses uranium can be put to?

Hancock: Oh yes, yes, but the fact that people believe that is unfounded, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen. What I’m saying is in whose interest is it to make people believe things that aren’t true?

Negus: Okay then what’s your explanation for the lies you say people are being told about uranium?

Hancock: Let’s get down to basics. If you can find out where the money comes from for this environmental movement. Everybody looks to the world’s largest economy, the United States, because it affects the world — so let’s start off there. You’ve got this environmental movement set up there. Right, the thing that they picked on was energy. They were able to get laws passed through the big bureaucracy the same as we have, and what they did was delay the building of the Alaska pipeline for five years. They were able to stop the expansion of the oil industry in the U.S. The drilling of the Atlantic seaboard for instance, they were able to delay the building of nuclear power plants for a three-year period, they had to build them on artificial islands off the coast — all this sort of rubbish went on — they had to build enormous protective coverings and so forth — things even the Russians don’t do — they brought in all sorts of anti-pollution laws to make cars gobble up more fuel; they restricted coal mining by environmental controls. With the result that the U.S. became a big importer of oil instead of an exporter. And that has upset the whole balance of the world’s oil situation.

Negus: That’s your thesis.

Hancock: No, no, no. That’s the facts. And let’s see where that’s taken us. You’ve got an oil shortage throughout the world. The oil producing countries turned round and took advantage of that and multiplied the price of oil fourfold. That meant that all the big manufacturing countries had to pull in their horns because they had to use up so much of their foreign exchange to buy oil and they couldn’t buy products from other countries, so the world’s trade then had shrunk and that’s where your depression comes from. The depression the world is suffering now is directly traceable back to these environmental movements in the United States.

Negus: Who are they?

Hancock: The do-gooders, the genuine people are up the front and behind them are various types of subversive elements that are making use of them.

Negus: Is it a plot or is it stupidity — as you see it?

Hancock: It’s a combination of both. But it’s a group of very dedicated people who believe if they can bring down the system and substitute one of their own, they would be the people with the power.

Negus: But you’ve got to be more specific. Is it an international plot?

Hancock: No, no. The thing actually grew.

Negus: It’s not a genuine school of thought then?

Hancock: No. This vehicle for subversion was almost a gift from heaven. A lot of genuine do-gooder people set up this environmental kick and these fellows came along from behind and said, “By gee, this’ll wreck things, we’ll get into it.” They used it.

Negus: Are you suggesting that these people have been duped?

Hancock: Absolutely. They’ve preyed upon their own good intentions. They’re people who are probably better intentioned than I am at heart — I’ll admit that — but by gosh, they are being duped.

Negus: What do you mean by that? That’s an interesting comment. Aren’t your intentions good?

Hancock: I don’t profess to be a do-gooder.

Negus: What are you? You say you’re not a do-gooder and they’ve got better intentions than you, what are your intentions?

Hancock: I don’t describe myself.

Negus: I’d find it difficult to describe you. I thought you might be able to throw a bit of light on yourself for a change.

Hancock: Well by the time you’ve gone from here and seen a lot more iron ore and so forth you’ll have a description of me.

Negus: Let me have a go now — how can I put it? Are you really nothing more than a prospector who had a lucky strike? How would that do for a description?

Hancock: I’m a prospector. As far as a lucky strike is concerned, I got nothing whatsoever for finding the iron. Where I got paid was for turning round and inducing hard-headed blokes — big multinationals as they are so-called to come in and pay me a royalty. That’s where the money came from, trying all the Australian companies, 30 overseas companies and finally getting one company and persuading that company to take a punt sight unseen.

Negus: But you were lucky at the outset. Would you have the same strong feelings about mining being the be-all-and-end-all if you hadn’t stumbled across such rich iron ore finds?

Hancock: A long while ago it didn’t take me long to realise everything comes out of the earth. Mining is the basis of all civilisation and I’d been mining for some years before I found the first iron strike. I’d been mining asbestos and lead.

Negus: You quite often give the impression that you’d turn the whole country into one huge mine. Where would you stop?

Hancock: If you stop mining, you stop civilisation. Where do you want to stop? Do you want to stop civilisation?

Negus: Not necessarily, I was just wondering whether you had a cut-off point?

Hancock: The only cut-off point is the one which human beings of this world want. In another five years, there’ll be another 400 million people, they’ve got to live on mining. There’s 4000 million people here, soon there’ll be 12,000 million and so on and so forth. The cut-off point is when their needs are fulfilled.

Negus: But is it all that civilised to go round ripping everything out of the ground?

Hancock: You’re not ripping everything out of the ground. They’ve been mining for something like 4000 years and there’s not one mineral that’s disappeared off the face of this earth. Take out mining and you’re back to the level of the black fella. He doesn’t mine, he didn’t till. He just lived on what nature provided. But his numbers were limited to 400,000 people. So all right, say we give mining away, we do what the do-gooder environmentalists want. We have the perfect life. Who’s going to knock on the head the other 13 million people in Australia? Are you going to do it? Is the press going to do it?

Negus: We could feed them newspapers, I guess.

Hancock: Yes, feed them newspapers all right.

Negus: Seriously though …

Hancock: That’s the absurdity of the thing. If you carry it to its logical conclusion, you can’t turn round. You can’t do anything. People in the city think water comes from a tap but where does the tap come from?

Negus: Because you are so adamant, so single-minded, most people would regard you as a fanatic and therefore not to be listened to.

Hancock: People have not listened to me all their lives and look what has happened. So all right what did you say I was — a fanatic?

Negus: Some people would call you that, obsessional even?

Hancock: An obsession? These are the things that you have got to think of and try to put them into some sort of perspective, I think the most reasonable perspective that you can get if you want to be reasonable is that mining now is virtually keeping us alive. We mine less than 1/3 of 1 per cent of the total land surface of Australia and that supports the nation. Are we turning the place into a giant quarry? It doesn’t matter if we did.

Negus: You’ve certainly said that’s what we should do.

Hancock: What effect would it have? You wouldn’t see where it is. There’s far more country taken up with roads in Australia and heaven knows we haven’t got too many roads in Australia where there’s a big land mass, than there is taken up with mining.

Negus: What you are really trying to do is to influence the thinking of Australia’s trading partners and they can lean on the Australian Government.

Hancock: That’s right, in their own interests.

Negus: That’s a pretty grandiose plan, isn’t it?

Hancock: Well, I’ve tried every other one, haven’t I?

Negus: Well, it’s also in your private interests too, isn’t it, that it should happen?

Hancock: Well, okay.

Negus: You’re not exactly short of a quid, are you?

Hancock: No, it doesn’t really matter if I have one less plane.

Negus: Make a sacrifice?

Hancock: Something of that nature. It does matter to a hell of a lot of people, especially the young people who haven’t got jobs to go to, who won’t have jobs to go to? It’s going to affect them more than it’s going to affect me adversely. I keep telling everybody that if we could get the Government out of the road and stop them interfering, we could double the standard of living in Australia in 10 years. And I don’t see why this shouldn’t happen. We have the resources there to do it.

Negus: The average Australian apparently feels better if we have government the way we’ve got it at the moment. Doesn’t that put you on the outer?

Hancock: No. Because if you’re not old enough to know, and the average Australian isn’t old enough to know what went on in the Depression, now when the Depression came, people started to think but they haven’t really been since.

Negus: Are you predicting another one?

Hancock: It’s inevitable unless we can get the American Government to change its attitude to these environmental things, unless America becomes a larger exporter of oil again — so that the price of oil comes down to what it was and the price of energy where you can persuade countries throughout the world to build nuclear power plants instead of being dependent on oil. Unless those circumstances come around, unless countries don’t have to, you can’t stop countries spending virtually their whole foreign exchange on oil, to sustain them and this happens to the third world more than anyone else because they can’t afford to do it, there must inevitably be a shrinking of world trade. You’ve got to get an expansion of world trade, people can’t trade with you if they’ve got no money. They can’t buy your goods if they’ve got to spend all their blasted money buying oil.

Negus: You quite openly admit to being vehemently anti-communist. But would you trade with them?

Hancock: Oh yes, I’d trade with anybody.

Negus: You don’t see any double standards in that?

Hancock: No, none whatsoever.

Negus: That’s no problem?

Hancock: As long as they can pay for it.

Negus: To be honest, talking to you is a bit confusing because almost in the same mouthful you talk about yourself not being a do-gooder but you are issuing all these recipes to have the human race from itself. How do you explain that sort of reaction?

Hancock: I don’t look at myself, I see problems and I try to cure them. I’m not worried about that. I don’t sort of look inwardly. I don’t worry about what I am or anything.

Negus: You don’t worry about what you are?

Hancock: No, I just don’t think there’s anything constructive in worrying about what you are. I don’t need an image. I’m not standing for Parliament or anything.

Negus: You do have an image, even if you haven’t gone seeking one — the image of being a pretty tough, ruthless sort of customer.

Hancock: Well, I didn’t make that image, I didn’t look for it. I didn’t deliberately set out to acquire that image. I don’t know what my image is, if that is my image, I didn’t deliberately go out of my way to get whatever image I have. I see that something is wrong, a lot of people see that something is wrong. And some people don’t care to do anything about it, they say, well, we’ll just roll with the country.

Negus: How tolerant are you of people who don’t share your views about things like mining, uranium and defence?

Hancock: I’m not very tolerant of anybody I believe will undermine the country, I’m not very tolerant of that at all. I’m tolerant in a lot of other respects, I would think, but when it comes down to a very vital issue of national importance I don’t think I am very tolerant.

Negus: What are your scruples, your own values? How do you decide what is right and what is wrong for Lang Hancock?

Hancock: I don’t think it matters what is right or wrong for Lang Hancock. I don’t think it matters to anyone. What does matter, which I keep coming back to, are the facts. How do people get a living? How do we look after the countries that surround us? How can we make our families safe and secure? These are the things that are worth worrying about, not whether you’ve got a million or whether you’ve got a conscience or whether you’ve got something that others haven’t.

Negus: You’ve described Malcolm Fraser as presiding over a state of stagnation. What do you think he should be doing?

Hancock: I think he should be doing what he believes in. What he believes in is fundamentally what I believe in, but he’s powerless to do it.

Negus: Why isn’t he doing it, because of the people you say are really running the country?

Hancock: Yes.

Negus: You talk about solving Australia’s inflation problems almost overnight by cutting all government departments by an equal amount at the same time. That’s hardly practical.

Hancock: I think it is the only way that it could be practical because the elected representative of the people have not got the quality of the permanent heads of the department.

Negus: Do we go around suddenly slashing the funds available to all sorts of government departments — defence, social welfare?

Hancock: There is not one department that couldn’t have its cost slashed by 10 or 15 per cent for the benefit of that department as well as everybody else. They’re totally inefficient, any government enterprise is totally inefficient. You turn around and say to every departmental head, your budget is down by 10 per cent whatever it happens to be, right across the board. Don’t listen to any arguments, you’re responsible for making your own department 10 per cent poorer.

Negus: You don’t believe in a mixed economy?

Hancock: No, not under any circumstances.

Negus: What sort of economy do you believe in?

Hancock: I believe in a totally free enterprise economy. The one which we’ll make the greatest strides in. I think we are such a wealthy nation that if we had that, the world would beat a path to our door. Capital from all over the place would snowball. There’d be nothing like the growth that you could see in Australia if we had completely free enterprise.

Negus: You don’t think that would become a jungle? Free vampirism if everyone was in for their chop?

Hancock: No, I don’t think so. You’d get intense competition and from intense competition you get efficiency, and from efficiency you get a higher standard of living.

Negus: What about the people who aren’t good competitors? What do they do in that sort of system?

Hancock: They go under because no system can afford to keep drones. The more drones that you keep the more bogged down the system gets, so that ultimately not only just a few people go broke — the whole world goes broke.

Negus: So, to put it tritely you really believe in the survival of the fittest and the Devil take the hindmost?

Hancock: That is right. That’s the way of nature.

Negus: That’s a summary of your philosophy?

Hancock: I don’t know if it’s a summary of my philosophy, but that is the way that nature has set the globe up. I can’t change it, you can’t change it. A lot of people think they can promote communism and socialism and this sort of ism and another sort of ism, but they can never change that fact.

Negus: When you say those sorts of things, people have often described you as a fascist.

Hancock: Well, I don’t know, I can’t help comparing what Australia could be with what it is and I can’t see any reason, no matter what you call me, why Australia can’t be one of the richest nations in the world. Now if you like to call me a fascist because I want to do that or you want to call me a fascist because I say the communist system won’t work, then you are entitled to call me a fascist.

Negus: Strangely enough, you could almost be described as a right-wing anarchist, even though you probably place yourself against anarchists.

Hancock: Very much so.

Negus: But you’re against government and so would most anarchists be. But you are approaching from the right.

Hancock: Anarchy is no government. I’m not arguing that at all. I’m suggesting that …

Negus: You’re not against government totally?

Hancock: You’ve got to have a certain amount of government, which you could probably limit to about four areas. But beyond that you don’t need it.

Negus: What are those four areas?

Hancock: The first, of course, is that you have to have a titles office, so that you can register your title to your house, your block of land, to your mine or something else. You’ve got to have a treasury department to take care of the public funds. You’ve got to have a police force to protect the individual from all sorts of thuggery. And you’ve got to have some form of defence force. After that you don’t really need anything.

Negus: The nature of things being what it is, if you started with those four they would mushroom, we’d end up back where we started.

Hancock: Ah, now this is where I come in fairly strongly. I’ve said for years that there’s only one way to turn round and lessen the power of Canberra — that is for Western Australia to seek under a constitution to limit it’s power of government. It’s no earthly use seceding and building up another Canberra in Perth. You’d have six Canberras instead of one. The moment one started seceding the rest would follow and you’d break up the Federation that we’ve got. This enormous central power, this enormous bureaucracy is Canberra would disappear off the face of the earth.

Negus: But your secession movement was about as successful as your flirtation with the Workers Party.

Hancock: First of all, I had nothing to do with the Workers Party.

Negus: Well, rightly or wrongly, you were associated with it.

Hancock: Well it was wrongly. On the secessionist movement, I would say that when things become as depressed as they were in the last depression, 70 per cent of the people in W.A. voted for secession. When things get as bad as that again, then I think they will secede, but they’ll need a leader like Bjelke-Petersen or someone of that character to take them out of their misery.

Negus: I get a picture of the country with Joh Bjelke-Petersen as prime minister and Lang Hancock as treasurer.

Hancock: Oh no, no, you don’t catch me anywhere near government office of that kind. But you do need a man of character.

Negus: Could Joh Petersen run the show better than the people who are?

Hancock: Well nobody could run it worse. Honestly, you couldn’t bring in anybody to run it worse, could you? That’s what they call the hypothetical situation, but it’s quite amusing. But I do think that Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the hard life that he has had, the hard upbringing that he had, has moulded his character to the point that he’s about the only political figure in Australia that will stand up.

Negus: You identify quite strongly with him, don’t you?

Hancock: I don’t identify with him, but I do admire him among all the other politicians who won’t stand up for anything — particularly those middle-of-the-road blokes who say you mustn’t rock the boat. Joh stands up there and says this is right, and he does it. Other people admire him for it.

Negus: In Queensland.

Hancock: Queenslanders are the only people that know him, that come in contact with him. You put him in Canberra, you put him in Melbourne, they’d soon change their tune about him.

Negus: Do you think the world is just a little more complicated than the way Joh sees it?

Hancock: Well, you don’t know how Joh takes it.

Negus: Well it looks as if he has a rather simple view of the world. Things are a little more complex and the problems a little more difficult and the solutions more complicated than he thinks.

Hancock: Well I believe everything is simple, if a thing isn’t simple, you give it away. It’s a thing I’ve said a thousand times. Simplicity is the keynote of success. If you can’t reduce things to simple terms, give them away.