This is quite a tragic day. I only knew Benaud from his commentary days for which he was exemplary. It was Peter Walsh I knew – he would not have known that he had known me, however. This on Peter Walsh from the AFR, picked up at Andrew Bolt, is exactly how I remember him. They really don’t make ’em like that any more.

[He] came to despise the hand-out, protectionist and regulatory populism of the then Country Party and the sway it held over the fate of the Australian economy in the post-war decades.

But Walsh was not selective in his hatred of rent-seekers and protectionists: He despised trade union leaders as much as he despised farm and business leaders for their special interest pleading. And he was just as withering in his critiques of the environmental movement’s anti-growth agenda.

His contempt for the Green movement remained with him after he left politics and motivated him to be a founding member of the climate change sceptic lobby. He was a founding member of the Lavoisier Group which disputes the scientific basis on which climate change forecasts are based.

Walsh described global warming as “highly speculative science” and argued that those most active in proposing legally binding greenhouse emissions limits as “self-serving propagandists and bureaucrats”.

He abhorred the rising influence of the environmental movement on the Labor Party and wrote that “since the 1980s Australian Labor Party policy has been incrementally hijacked by well-heeled, self-indulgent, morally vain and would-be authoritarian activists whom the media often describes as the intelligentsia”.

Walsh became increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as modern Labor’s infiltration by “the chattering classes”.

And let me add a quote from the article which has a certain resonance today:

Walsh hated wasteful spending, especially on politically fashionable causes. And he hated the rent seekers who cruised (and still do today, in greater numbers than ever) the corridors of Parliament House trying to convince ministers that their cause is the one that really deserves support.

Because of this, Walsh played a critical role in the transformation of Labor’s economic policy reputation during the Hawke and Keating era.

Mathias Cormann, please take note.