The AFR View
Max Corden: Vale Australia’s prophet of prosperity
The Financial Review’s take on the principles at stake in major domestic and global stories.
Max Corden, who has died at the age of 96, arrived in Fremantle from Germany via England on the eve of World War II as an 11-year-old boy, a year after actually seeing Hitler.
By 1962, The Australian Financial Review’s editorial writers praised Corden as an “outstanding” young scholar for his series of scathing articles that established the intellectual, but then politically heretical, case for dismantling Australia’s protectionist tariff wall.
Economist Max Corden at Giorgio’s Restaurant in Malvern. Jesse Marlow
Six decades later, modern Australian prosperity stands as a monument to his work.
Along with Trevor Swan, no other Australian economist has made a deeper international mark. The first of his Financial Review articles said the Tariff Board’s criteria for setting protection was based on the “existence principle”: if a factory was there, it should be shielded from imports regardless of cost.
“The cost effects can be adverse on other industries, especially those rural industries, which are not protected,” he wrote. “Indiscriminate protection must eventually damage the standard of living.”
While a brilliant theoretician, Corden also understood that protection rewarded inertia and the “politically most vocal”.
This great realisation later became the core story of Australia’s economic reform era – a time which is long overdue for revival.
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