The free-market future

RON Manners remembers getting his first glimpse of what free-market thinking was all about as a youngster in Kalgoorlie, unpacking parts and machinery that arrived from the US.

It wasn't the global nature of the parts and equipment trade that so intrigued the young fellow but rather the packing material used to protect the pieces.

There, among the crates he unloaded, were pages of material printed by the New York-based Foundation for Economic Education, which he absorbed with enthusiasm in the then union-dominated Goldfields.

That experience helped change the course of Mr Manners' life and led him to become one of the Goldfields' most successful mining entrepreneurs.

And, as his corporate life wound down, it also led him to create a free-market think tank of his own, the West Perth-based Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, which specialises in, among other things, providing scholarships to students to increase their exposure to broad economic views.

"The original inspiration was I was very lucky and sent on quite a few of these career forming opportunities from different ages," Mr Manners said. "You are exposed to a whole side of different thinking.

"You start using that in your real life plan."

While the foundation has now been around in some form or another for nearly two decades, it really got into the scholarship business in 2003 when it sent two students away to a History of Economic Thought Society of Australia conference.

The number of students offered the opportunity to travel to such events has grown to 12 this year and is expected to be 20 in 2009. Mr Manners said his foundation had the capacity to fund much more and understood much better how the various universities' scholarship programs worked.

"You see all these opportunities and see a lot of bright students in Australia, and they are not aware of the opportunities," he said.

"We try to match students with the opportunities."

From that process, Mr Manners gets many of these scholarship holders to produce policy from what they have learned.

"There are some articulate people among them," he said. "A lot of people despair of the next generation but I think the future is in good hands."

In addition to scholarships, Mannkal invites speakers to Western Australia to discuss various policy matters and will also sponsor some visiting economists at a conference to be held in Perth next year.

Mr Manners said his efforts to establish the foundation in the 1990s became bogged in paperwork and bureaucracy that had hampered the sector for years.

However, he praises John Howard's 1999 introduction of Prescribed Private Funds, a fast-track process that ended the paperwork and red tape preventing this critical area of philanthropy from flourishing.

After about five years of bureaucratic obstacles, Mannkal was created almost overnight.

Mr Manners said he did receive offers from others to contribute to the foundation but at this stage he's kept the funding internal.

"Having been in the public company arena, the minute you take money from people you have to establish another line of reporting back to shareholders," he said.