As Australia’s most prominent business leader of the 1970s and ’80s, Sir Roderick Carnegie was a nationalist who believed in the power of big corporations competing in open markets to drive human progress.

He made a mark overseas at Oxford and Harvard, before joining McKinsey in New York and bringing it to Australia in 1963. Sir Rod, who died on Sunday aged 91, must have seemed like the ultimate safe pair of establishment hands when London-based Rio Tinto Zinc appointed him to run its Australian subsidiary CRA, which traced its roots back to zinc extracted from tailings at Broken Hill in the early 1900s.