Jenny Archer, The Australian, June 21, 1982, p. 9.

One of Australia’s success stories of the century is a warm-hearted family man who’d like to shred communists, dessicate ecologists and radically lobotomise academics. JENNY ARCHER went to a Lang Hancock Family Free Enterprise Sydney seminar to winkle out the secrets of the Hancock aura.

He has been described by leading politicians as “not only disgustingly rich but quite disgusting”, and is often presented as a cold, ruthless, money-grabbing tycoon who exercises his tongue more than his brain.

But Lang Hancock couldn’t give a damn.

As Australia’s outspoken defender of free enterprise and resource development for 30 years, Mr Hancock has heard it — and done it — all before.

A self-made, wealthy Western Australian, he brought down widespread wrath on his head last year when he suggested painless sterilisation of a group of Australians; 10 months ago he proposed that the Federal Government hand over the ABC to the chief executive of News Corporation, Mr Rupert Murdoch; nine months ago he underwent open heart surgery; last week he announced plans to challenge BHP’s domination of Australian steel production; and now the director of Hancock Prospecting plans to write an Australian constitution to limit the power of the government.

It all seems quite feasible when you meet the Hancock team.

Although the controversial, 73-year-old Mr Hancock is one of the warmest, most family-oriented men you would meet in any iron-ore mine, the dynamo behind him, his 28-year-old daughter and business assistant, Gina Hayward, knows exactly where she plans to manoeuvre her Pa — right to the top. And a radically conservative constitution is the way to do it, according to Ms Hayward who is not one to pull punches.

At this point in time she sees the central Queensland coal-fields as a means of realising her father’s dreams. She’s had just a little help from the close ties between her father and the Queensland Premier, Mr Bjelke-Petersen, who continues to support his big mining ventures.

With typical lobbying flair, Ms Hayward says she has decided to name the proposed $155 million coal port for Queensland’s Cape Clinton as Port Petersen. How could Mr Bjelke-Petersen not be putty in the lady’s hand.

Her father is. He thinks she’s “just brilliant.” Asked why he has not yet retired, he answers simply: “I’m doing it all for Gina.”

Although Mr Hancock openly praises his daughter, she has remained an enigma in the public eye. Her eight-year marriage broke up last year and she refuses to discuss her private life, except to say her former husband is now driving a taxi.

Money, she says, doesn’t mean all that much to her.

But by material standards, Mr Hancock is a fortunate man and Ms Hayward, as his sole heiress, a fortunate woman. Through his discovery of huge iron ore deposits on Mt Tom Price in 1952, the Hancock mining companies earn $1 million a week before tax. The family has huge property holdings in Sydney and has stacked not an inconsiderable amount of their dollars in the Australian film industry.

But Ms Hayward’s hands aren’t out for the money. She’s too busy organising her father to make more.

Take, for example, last week’s Hancock Family Free Enterprise Seminar at the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney. Fifteen dollars to secure a seat and not a drink or sandwich in sight.

Although Mr Hancock took the stage along with his two guests — Mr George Roche, synonymous in the United States with new-wave conservatism, Reaganomics and the politics of minimum government and maximum freedom, and Professor Petr Beckmann, a dynamic advocate of energy resource development — it was obvious Ms Hayward ran the show.

Mr Hancock couldn’t have organised the seminar better himself. His two guests slammed socialism and pleaded for the mining of uranium to the obvious pleasure of the capitalist audience. Even Ms Hayward and her mother, who bear an uncanny resemblance right down to the same orange lipstick, were chafing at the bit.

A tanned Mr Andrew Peacock, also on the platform, seemed less impressed.

Mr Hancock admits two fears to his friends: the lack of cheap energy and the headlong rush to “socialism”. Asked if he were chairman of a world multi-national corporation, how much he would invest where and in what, Mr Hancock replied he would acquire one of the four media chains in Australia in an attempt to educate the public to the fact that a “golden era” awaits them.

“All they would have to do is move from the present climate of stagnation — forced on them through bureaucratic economic dictatorship — to an age of minimum government,” he enthuses.

Also preying heavily on his mind is World War III, and he says to nip it in the bud Australia has to take decisive moves on behalf of humanity right now.

The obvious course of action was to internationalise the Iranian oilfields under a scheme whereby the oil-dependent nations such as France, West Germany and Japan, agreed to receive but not exceed a quota in exchange for their help with the internationalisation. Prompt action would guarantee success because of the disarray of the Iranian armed forces, which would not be more than 20 per cent efficient while under “rabble” control.

Mr Hancock isn’t a man to mince words. He wants to sell Australia and he plays an American-made tape recording to prove it. (Even if it is a comparison between the US and Russia, he gets the idea across.)

Basically, he says the US doesn’t have one “john” for seven families (as, we are apparently to assume, do the citizens of the Soviet Union); owns 90 per cent of the world’s bathtubs; has enough food; and its people are free to leave.

The tape tends to stir Mr Hancock to memories of Winston Churchill who once delcared socialism to be the “philosophy of failure”.

Just behind Churchill, in Mr Hancock’s good books is Professor Beckmann who insists it’s more dangerous to leave uranium in the ground than to mine it.

At the seminar, Professor Backmann blasted the Premier of Victoria, Mr Cain, as a “hypocrite” and an “ignoramus” for allowing nuclear wastes from hospitals but not from power plants in the State, when clinics actually produced more low-level nuclear waste than plants.

Mr Hancock’s other good mate and president of Hillsdale College, Mr George Roche, a tall, well-groomed man and the only one who gave Mr Peacock a run for his sartorial elegance, abused inflation and spoke of the negative impact of big government which “consumes wealth — it does not create it”.

But Mr Roche said there was hope for both the US and Australia. The latter had Mr Hancock and the US a new American Revolution which began in the autumn of 1980. Mr Hancock says the capitalists will win the “battle” before the year 2000. No question about it.

Andrew Peacock was looking lost. “I don’t really know why I’ve been asked here,” he confided.

Indeed, the mutual hospitality was rather unusual given their extreme political differences. Mr Hancock’s far-right, free-enterprise views are quite at odds with Mr Peacock’s small “l” Liberal posture.

But the MP did score some that’s-my-boy-grins from Mr Hancock when he said to leave Australia’s uranium in the ground was “irresponsible.”

Why it was only in February that Gina, Lang and Andrew toured the vast iron ore deposits at Pilbara in the north-west of Western Australia in a Hancock aircraft. There had been dinners too. But yes, he did have warm feelings for Lang and his family.

None, however, could be warmer than those of Sydney media personality, John Singleton, who wonders if Mr Hancock will have to die before Australia recognises him rather than deride him for so promptly breaking Australia’s 11th Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Succeed.”

But one has to admit Mr Hancock does manage to rub a few people the wrong way. Take his favourite recipe:

  • Take a communist trade union leader who is disrupting Australia and feed him through a chaff-cutter feet first.
  • Melt oil from the frozen body of an econut and add one pint.
  • Spice with added brains of publicity-seeking academics who sign anti-nuclear petitions for the sole purpose of having their names published.
  • Serve to all politicians at election time in the hope it helps them when making promises they cannot keep.

In a nutshell, it’s the Hancock recipe for success. As the man himself says, you can like it or lump it.