An op-ed by Labor’s assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh in The Sydney Morning Herald last week sexily compared the biggest investors in Australia to Lexcorp of Superman, and Terminator’s Cyberdyne. Leigh wrote “five investors — HSBC, JPMorgan, National Nominees, Citicorp and BNP Paribas” are “the biggest owners” of Australia’s largest listed companies. Which in Hollywood’s never-ending search for a new superhero movie, could end up on screen.
But Leigh’s methodology was quickly shut down, with Rear Window’s Joe Aston writing a take-down and Peter Martin, The Age‘s economics editor, filing a critique a couple of days later.
The Herald issued a broad correction in yesterday’s paper, and has updated the online version of the article with the correction and linking to Martin’s analysis, which opens, “Andrew Leigh is wrong”.
But if you only read the hard copy paper, you might struggle to remember who it was who didn’t quite have his facts straight; the correction names the headline but not the author of the article. We thought we better make it clear.
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