The deregulation of the Australian export wheat industry in 2008 ended 60 years of statutory marketing by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB). Proponents of deregulation contended that competition was necessary to allow individual growers to maximise their returns. This reflected an approach towards agricultural policy in Australia which contrasted with the 1950s and 1960s, where co-operation, re-distribution of income and collectivisation of risk were emphasised. However, this shift in discourse was not a sudden process. This paper analyses industry papers and newspaper articles published between 1983 and 1989 to understand how efficiency, competition and individualism became such pervasive ideas, despite wheat growers not wholeheartedly embracing this shift. A poststructuralist genealogy of government is adopted to reconstruct how the problems within the wheat industry, such as the 'inefficiencies' of the statutory authorities, were perceived, and to understand how competition and efficiency were developed as 'truths', which offered solutions to these problems.
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