This work analyses the case study of wheat export market deregulation in Australia, which was implemented in 2008, ending 60 years of statutory marketing by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB). At the time, policy makers claimed that this policy change would empower individual growers, providing them with choice and freedom in wheat marketing. However, regional wheat markets have become concentrated and are increasingly controlled by a small number of transnational agribusiness firms.

I argue this shift should be viewed as part of the broader restructuring of Australian society and economy. In analysing how the deregulation of the wheat export market has been made possible, I examine the construction of knowledge, values, and identities, to conform to the rationality of liberalised markets. These constructions create a reality which makes the shift from the public to the private appear as a logical, common-sense solution to the challenges facing society. I use the case study of farming and, specifically, wheat export market deregulation to show how this shift has been made possible in this context. To make this reality operable, I show how governmental technologies such as audit, the entrepreneurial individual, cost-benefit analysis, performance objectives, econometric modelling, and the consumer were used to act upon society, to make the shift towards liberalisation of the wheat export market happen. The construction of firms as passive efficiency maximisers is central to this shift. As a consequence, policy makers have either ignored or failed to recognise the capacity of firms to shape their external environments to