MUSIC Kerry is recovering from a cold, tis the season after all, hence a bit of a croak in his voice, as he draws on his expertise of reporting on politics and global affairs for decades to diagnose the challenges facing our politics and civil society right now.

I'll come back shortly to big tech and how governments are now trying to play catch up, but I want to dive deeper into that other major element of disruption over half a century and the ideological framework of two economists named Hayek and Friedman, sponsored initially by a handful of very rich and powerful American men and adopted by two of the most dominant and influential politicians of their era, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

It was called neoliberalism but was really just a dressed up version of the old laissez-faire capitalism.

Give us the people of money and power behind the Reagans and Thatchers a free hand to make ourselves richer with as little regulation as possible and sitting on trade unions, no bleeding heart politicians to get in the way and magically everyone will benefit.

Their idea of democracy largely meant democracy for them.

Their idea of freedom meant freedom for them.

When they railed against elites, they meant the elites who didn't agree with them, not the elitism they practiced themselves.

And the former ABC TV News and Current Affairs journalist is speaking at the Byron Writers Festival, which we're told was standing room only for this event.

Yeah.

So it does burn a, a hole in your brain, that one.

Uh, now how he kept his sanity, I don't know, because he was about 22 or 23.

And the education of the brothers themselves wasn't flash.

Not too many of them had a university education before they were sent out to teach, and so it wasn't long before they learnt to rely on the leather strap as their means of support.

And, uh, again, years later, you know, I was a young journo in Sydney working on the Sydney Sun, which is now defunct, and, uh, and went to a colleague's place for dinner one night, and, uh, it turned out he'd also gone to a Christian Brothers school in Sydney, and we...

He, he said, "Did you realize that the straps that they used had steel reinforcement?" I said, "Don't be ridiculous." And he went to his bookshelf, and he pulled a couple of books aside, and he pulled out a strap.

Mm.