different flavour...but...same message
http://www.garp.org/news-and-publications/overview/story.aspx?newsId=13002
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century banks have been 'Australian owned'. So the other strong dimension of left populism--nationalism--has tended to focus not so much on banks per se, but on 'foreign capital' and its embodiment in what became called 'transnational corporations' that invest capital in Australia and extract profits (see Kuhn 2005).
This process was expressed in the idea that Australia was a 'client state' of international capital (Crough and Wheelwright 1982), and the slogan that Australia was being 'up-rooted' by the impact of transnationals (AMWSU 1977).
By the end of the 1970s this nationalistic campaign slid away from the issue of the foreignness of capital, and to a more specific argument that the Australian economy was being 'ripped off' (AMWSU 1978): that foreign capital was buying up Australia's mineral resources.
Not only was there a loss of national control (environmental damage was at this stage on the margins of left populism), but the corollary was that Australia's manufacturing industries were being devastated as a result.
Manufacturing faced a mining-driven appreciating dollar (causing cheaper imports), but also (ironically) a loss of investor interest.
Economic populism on the left has, thereafter, been driven largely by the consequences of manufacturing decline in the context of globalization, and the need to re-build industrial capacity via state policies on skills, infrastructure, and industry planning (especially ACTU/TDC 1987).
