How to make Santos work for Australia

Tuesday 29 July 2025

Ian Verrender at the ABC is blunt.

Peter Costello pulled the pin on a multi-billion transaction. So did Wayne Swan.

Costello in 2001 rejected Royal Dutch Shell’s proposal to take a controlling stake in Woodside while Swan in 2011 put a stop to the Singapore Stock Exchange’s bid to take over the Australian Securities Exchange.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.