Victor Caruso, The Australian, September 26, 1978, p. 3.

Lang Hancock, the mining millionaire, yesterday urged all corporate Davids to take arms against the Canberra Goliaths.

He told an Australian Retailers Convention in Melbourne: “You can fight Canberra and you don’t have to be a giant to do it.”

The self-made giant of the Pilbara, in a fiery speech attacking Australian, Russian and American governments and bureaucracy — especially bureaucracy — laced his loathing for both institutions with case histories.

He said: “Unfortunately, government as an institution always tends to increase in size, power and incompetence, and so government attempts to provide more and more of the answers, with less and less success.”

The bureaucracy was now the fourth branch of government, behind the executive, legislative and judicial arms.

In America, he said, medical research was down on what it was 15 years ago because of the time and effort companies put into satisfying government regulations.

One company produced a 120,000-page submission weighing one tonne and full of worthless scientific data, just to get a licence to sell arthritis medicine.

In Australia, governments were spending $14 million an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week.

Mr Hancock said: “It all comes down to this basic premise: if you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom and, in fact, all freedom.”