Mark Cully

After departing as minister for finance from the Hawke government in 1988, Peter Walsh began a weekly column for the Australian Financial Review under the byline ‘Cassandra’, named after the Trojan princess who was condemned by Apollo to be a teller of truths but fated not to be believed. Eventually, the bile became too much for Fairfax. Happily, Christopher Pearson offered Walsh a spot at his comely home for curmudgeonly old men, the Adelaide Review, for several more years. Walsh was marvellous. His articles were renowned for skewering the platitudes of the mushy left. He hollered like a Baptist at Country Party types aiming to get their gnarled hands into Treasury coffers.

The cover is spare, the title centre-boxed in a subtle reprise to No Logo, and it is all bound together with a plug by Noam Chomsky. That’s some savvy marketing, designed to appeal to anti-globalisers and bobos alike. Yessir, capitalism works. It co-opts and it commodifies. Even ideas are not immune. It is the policy prescription and its ‘spin’ that are sold. Thinktanks, whose business it is to peddle ideas, are constantly mired in the contradiction between clear-eyed analysis, the basis of their credibility, and advocacy, the basis of their influence. In Growth Fetish, the balance weighs too heavily towards advocacy and the reader is left feeling slightly conned, much like Clive Hamilton reckons we feel each time we depart from the shopping mall.