Keating’s list of business greats spans miners and property moguls
Keith Campbell, Rod Carnegie and Marius Kloppers were praised by the former prime minister who oversaw a period of great change in the Australian economy.
When asked to name the business people who impressed him the most during his long political career, Paul Keating starts with Keith Campbell, the former head of the Hooker real estate company. Campbell’s landmark financial system review in the late 1970s laid out the intellectual case for Labor’s financial deregulation and the floating of the dollar.
Rod Carnegie, now 91, also draws praise from Keating in an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review to mark his 80th birthday. Carnegie set up McKinsey in Australia and sought to Australianise CRA, now known as Rio Tinto, in the 1980s. “He was a progressive thinking guy and an economic nationalist,” Keating says.
Michael StutchburyEditor-at-largeMichael Stutchbury is editor-at-large. He is in his fourth decade of writing for and editing national newspapers. After nearly six years as editor of The Australian, he returned to the Financial Review as editor-in-chief (2011-2024). Email Michael at mstutchbury@afr.com
