"Public intellectuals" are often pompous, usually wrong, and sometimes dangerous.
Donald Horne, as the inventor of the term "the Lucky Country" was one of Australia's foremost public intellectuals. His claim, first made in 1964, that "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck" made his reputation.
The reference to second-rate people (in this case politicians and business and trade union leaders) was a consolation to all of those who thought they could do a better job running the country. Horne complained that intellectuals didn't have sufficient influence over policy decisions. "People who might be described as intellectuals are assuming enormous importance almost everywhere in the world except Australia".
Horne never contemplated that we were a lucky country precisely because intellectuals didn't have the same authority in Australia as elsewhere. Whether Australia in the 1950s and 1960s was as banal and as provincial as Horne made out is debatable. In any case, he never paused to ask whether anyone wanted the alternative to this "ordinariness" -- which presumably was some sort of European-style riot and revolution.
The Lucky Country was scathing about the management of Australian companies.
"There is still talk of 'free enterprise' in Australia, but to many Australian manufacturers this is just a lesson they have learned off by heart ... Often what it means is that the businessman demands from the government a special protection that will help him continue to survive". And there was more. "To many Australian businessmen the way to make money has been to grab some ideas from overseas, rush them into operation, however inefficiently, and then rely on the Tariff Board for protection". The Tariff Board is gone, but the calls for more industry assistance from government assistance haven't diminished.
According to Horne, policies such as industry protection ultimately led to a "stupid society" which was "not capable of reacting to danger or making its own decisions". This might be a little harsh, but it's true. What Horne doesn't admit is that such a condition is the consequence of what happens when intellectuals (or politicians acting under the influence of intellectuals) ignore the market.
Australians have suffered from many policy disasters. The invention of Canberra in 1908, and the release of cane toads in northern Queensland in 1935 are notable examples. Less obvious was the inability of Australia's Olympic team to win a gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The resulting national shame prompted the Fraser government to establish the Australian Institute of Sport, and today federal funding of sport is more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year.
On any assessment the worst mistakes are those that came about when intellectuals and governments convinced themselves they knew better than the market.
For instance the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1905 nationalised the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and ever since communications ministers have been attempting to frustrate free competition in media and telecommunications.
Intellectuals constructed the economic regime that existed in Australia until the 1980s. The philosopher of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, also supported tariff protection for infant industries, and his arguments were eagerly taken up by journalists and writers in the pre-federation colonies.
The landmark Harvester Judgement in 1907 established the requirement of the basic wage, and Henry Bournes Higgins, the judge who made the decision, was the typical public intellectual of the early 20th century. Like most intellectuals he had little knowledge of or interest in commercial enterprise. It was inevitable therefore that when he set the basic wage he didn't investigate whether firms could afford to pay it.
Higgins' industrial relations legacy allowed Horne to produce one of the best lines from The Lucky Country -- "Other countries also get themselves into a mess with the regulation of wages and conditions of labour, but they usually do not set up so many institutions to do it". The situation hasn't got much better. With the passage of the Work Choices legislation there will be a record number of federal agencies enquiring into, monitoring and regulating employment arrangements.
If Horne had contemplated the role of public intellectuals in practice, rather than in theory, he would have soon concluded that most interventions into public policy by intellectuals result in disaster.
Attempts to second-guess the outcomes of a free market by intellectuals usually fail -- and attempts by governments to second-guess the market always, in the long run, fail.
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