The Top 100 Most Influential Aussies
The Bulletin has released a list of what it thinks is the top 100 most influential Australians. Rupert Murdoch tops the list, and others such as JF Archibald, Feminist Germaine Greer, infanticide proponent Peter Singer and Donald Bradman.

It is interesting to see who is absent. Fred Schwarz, who influenced people such as Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan and helped stop communism didn't make the cut, but B.A Santamaria did

B.A. “Bob” Santamaria, the son of Italian fruiterers, and the most influential lay Catholic in 20th-century Australia, dedicated his life to fighting communism. The Depression sharpened his social consciousness but he rejected Marxism after he saw what happened to Catholics during the Spanish Civil War. In the 1930s, he developed his own version of working-class Catholic politics, and in 1941, at the request of the Victorian Labor Party, created a covert Catholic movement to wrest control of the trade unions from the communists. By 1950, the Movement, as it became known, had taken its fight beyond the unions. With Santamaria as its chief intellectual force, the Movement (later the National Civic Council) worked against Labor leaders who did not share its anti-communist, socially conservative views. Supported by a network of parish branches, it was effectively a party within the Labor Party. After losing the 1954 federal election, ALP leader H.V. Evatt assembled a factional alliance that kicked out Santamaria and his followers, who formed the Democratic Labor Party which kept the ALP out of office in Canberra until 1972. The DLP collapsed in 1974 and Santamaria soldiered on through the NCC, championing traditional family and religious values and, in the end, deciding that Australian democracy was more threatened by rampant capitalism than communism.

A noble life and works, but I wonder if the complaint against rampant capitalism being a greater threat than communism is the main reason he was included instead of Schwarz, as Schwarz' influence is clearly greater.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, June 27, 2006