The making of a maverick
I catch Carnegie shortly after his return from the annual J.P. Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco, described by Forbes magazine as “a global, multi-day shopping spree and advertising expo for large and small, traditional and boutique, biotech and life science companies, and the investors who love them”.
Mark Carnegie, with $350 million in committed funding to a portfolio of companies in an arc across medical technology, resources and high-end real estate, is one of those investors.
It’s typical of the investor’s modus operandi that his entrance into the medical device market upends a few rules. The narrative of Australian higher education has been dominated by the “brain drain”, but Carnegie has been able to secure a net brain gain by propping up at least three US medical device companies – more are in the pipeline – and reeling them home to Australia.
The genius of the move is that it builds on Australia’s expertise in medical technology; an expertise grounded in eight Nobel Laureates in physiology or medicine as well as Graeme Clark’s bionic ear and Colin Sullivan’s ResMed sleep apnoea device. “People have done really impressive stuff here and what this means is that the Americans don’t sit there and say, ‘Oh my god you’re going to move my company to Kazakhstan’. The second thing is that the R&D tax incentive means that we’re on a level playing field at a federal level with Canada and better off than America. We’ve traditionally had a really good R&D environment and a shitty commercialisation environment.
The really good commercialisation is done in Europe, while America has the worst of everything.”
After Oxford, Carnegie cut his teeth with investment banker James Wolfensohn on Wall Street before going to work for Lloyd Williams at Hudson Conway in London. Despite his membership of an ultra-exclusive tribe, he still advocates strongly for higher taxes at the top end of the income scale, particularly tougher inheritance taxes. His ideal Australia is a more equal Australia and on this subject he brooks no opposition.
“The stats are there,” he says. “More equal societies are better societies. Suck. It. Up.”
In fact the only thing more likely to raise his blood pressure than a Derrida scholar banging on about “logocentrism” is a booster for “unrestrained free market capitalism” offering “trickle-down economics” as a universal salve.
For Mark Carnegie, greater income equality is not merely a social justice measure. It is a means to another end: economic vitality. Egalitarianism is portrayed by its critics as a sure way to douse the fires of capitalism and reduce them to coals, but for Carnegie, equality is a source of economic dynamism, not a dampener. “The key thing is opportunity and social mobility unleashing the creative destruction of capitalism in positive ways to make a better society,” he says.
What Carnegie terms an “opportunity-ocracy” – a society that places a premium on the discovery and cultivation of talent – has the hallmarks of a belief system intellectualised from personal experience, as most belief systems are.
Born into wealth, he has done something socially useful with his and others’ money. Aside from his own investments and those he brokers in the normal course of things, twice a year he calls on entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to a group of investors in the hope of generating a few perfect corporate matches. Known as Carnegie’s Den, it is a platform, as he puts it, “for great Australians to build great Australian businesses”.
The opposite of this approach is inherited wealth used solely for personal gain. “The idea that somebody gets to inherit a large dairy farm from their grandfather and it ends up being a residential development – that’s just aristocratic rent seeking from the Middle Ages.”
Education, once again, is front and centre; he wants an education system that identifies and nurtures talent wherever it exists on the social spectrum. “I’m not saying this because I’m a do-gooding leftie,” he insists. “I’m saying it because the alternative is leaving a whole lot of social potential on the scrap heap.”
Mark Carnegie is battle-hardened enough to realise that he is easily characterised as a walking, talking contradiction. He’s the rich guy and wealth generator with a social vision that critics will deride as demi-socialist. He’s an Australian patriot who has spent half his life out of the country. A scientist by training with a keen strategic mind, his great mid-life passion is classical literature.
But the contradictions are more apparent than real and the social vision remarkably coherent. At a fundamental level he’s a proud Australian who believes in the national achievement but thinks we “would be able to project a better story, have a bigger presence in the room, if we could resolve some important national issues surrounding education, immigration, and our treatment of Indigenous people, and if we could bring some stability and authority to Federal Parliament.”
In any event he may simply be, as Walt Whitman said of himself, large enough to “contain multitudes”. He is, at the very least, a resolute individualist and provocateur who never backs away from a rumble.
BY LUKE SLATTERY