This is an edited transcript of a speech delivered on October 26, 2012 in Melbourne
To John, to Bob, to Ray and to Craig, thank you for inviting me to speak here tonight.
It is a distinct pleasure to be here and be part of the launch of what is a very important book for a critical figure in Australian history, who, in many ways, has not been recognised the way he should.
It is always a pleasure to come back here to the IPA as well, because a little intellectual nourishment and the occasional admonishment should have a role in the life of any good politician, particularly those of us who fight for Bert’s ideas, tempted as we are by the serpents of special interest promising us tributes and votes time and time again.
I never had the privilege of meeting Bert Kelly, but being born in 1973 I am, in many ways, representative of the first generation to have benefitted from his life’s work.
The victory of economic rationalism, to use the somewhat strange pejorative of the time, because I never quite figured out if you are accusing someone of being an economic rationalist, the alternative of being an economic irrationalist meant that my argument was winning from the beginning, has presented my generation with opportunities our parents could not have dreamed of, and that they definitely did not have.
We have not experienced – my generation – mass unemployment or inflation, but constant economic growth since the early 1990s.
This is due to the implementation of many of Bert’s ideas. Indeed it was often our parents that bore the cost of the collapse of the protectionist state which Bert’s ideas brought about. But I believe it is very important – and this book will play a role – that we properly ascribe the cost of the collapse of this state to its proponents.
Memories get hazy as time goes on and the old era is too easily misrepresented as a comfortable and successful period.
Today, these so-called costs of economic liberalisation and a mythical era of protected yet advanced Australian manufacturing seem to be constantly thrown back at us, as special interests once again mount a claim on the public purse and the Australian consumer.
The blame for the retreat of cosseted industries belongs to McEwen and his band, not Kelly.
We need to reinforce this because the best advocates of grievance and special interest continue to be cloaked in the language of the common wealth and the betterment of the whole country.
That economic regime was always going to fail; it was simply a matter of when it was going to and whether it would do so in a manner of our own choosing, or be forced on us in terms more familiar to countries in other parts of the world so famously compared by Paul Keating to banana republics.
But thanks to Bert Kelly, the end of McEwenism and the removal of the final bricks of Deakin’s economic settlement occurred at a time of Australia’s choosing in a way that we could manage.
And while the costs of that change, though real in human terms, belong to the protectionists, we also need to mount the case that our recent good fortune belongs to Bert and his ideas.
A few months ago I was at one of Australia’s larger and more iconic manufacturing sites. I was asked to meet with the local CEO, who wanted to have a chat about some of the views I had been reported as expressing. I will admit that it was a little comforting to know that I had been noticed.
It was outlined to me that we needed to support our manufacturing industries in order to have an economic base after the mining boom; that we had removed too much protection for these industries to be sustainable.
My retort was simple and it was informed as much by the writings of people like Bert Kelly and the people that directly inherited his legacy, like John Hyde and organisations like the IPA, as it was by anything I learnt in an economics faculty at Melbourne University. That if we hadn’t removed the protection, we wouldn’t have a mining boom. That if labour and capital was tied up making Valiants or business shirts and our resource investors were paying higher costs for steel and all the components they needed, we would not actually have the boom and be enjoying the fruits of our natural resource blessing.
Bert often spoke and wrote of the costs of protection being borne by exporters in general and farmers, in particular.
This biography outlines the effort he went to in order to comprehend the indecipherable. He knew that tariff issues were made so complex precisely to keep their costs from the Australian public.
No one beat Bert on the facts. Famously, and as Hal goes to great detail to outline, McEwen had to resort to every tactic other than that that which was intellectual, in order to combat the rising force of Bert’s ideas and his logic.
But what stands out to me about this book, and about Bert, was that it was the moral component of protection that stands out of his speeches and his writings.
Bert understood and outlined that the regime that we had was not only inefficient, it lacked moral legitimacy.
Bert knew and outlined that it did not protect those it claimed to. He understood it was unfair for one to subsidise another and for that person not to know how much it was costing them.
But most importantly, he mounted the case that state patronage corrupts our politics and society.
In fact, a recent former prime minister made the famous quote that he wanted to put government back at the centre of the economy. Indeed, it had already been at the centre of the economy, and due to Bert, we had removed it.
I lost count to how many times Hal in the book referred to the beneficiaries of protectionism being substantial donors to the Country Party and building McEwen House in Canberra, but I think Hal gets point across very effectively.
Bert also knew that these moral arguments were not enough. Whether it was the abominable Special Advisory Authority favouring donors and contributors, or the costs borne by consumers and exporters, Bert knew he had to win the argument on practical grounds, as well as philosophical ones.
Bert explained his arguments in terms that were easily understandable, he famously used farming analogies. Maybe they’re not as appropriate today because we don’t have the same number of people with a family background or personal background on the land, but we can take the lesson he taught us and use it in goods that people understand more today.
I remember when my parents bought their first colour television in 1982; it was a big moment for a nine-year-old. My dad was a diesel mechanic, it cost him a couple of week’s wages. It was about a 19 inch screen – using the old imperial, I know you’ll like that Ray – and weighed a tonne.
Imagine if we were still protecting AWA or various other foreign television makers.
We’d have a very large Australian television industry presumably, by Australian standards, with tariffs preventing us buying those nasty, cheap, big, technologically effective televisions that come in from China, at now less than half our weekly wage.
We’d have our kids running up, like I saw in a movie the other day – which does make you realise how old you’re getting, especially when you’re only 39 – and a kid runs up in the movie and says ‘dad, what’s this big, black box hanging off the back of the television?’ That would be what we’d still be watching if Bert hadn’t had his way.
When Bert was the voice of economic good sense and of logic, he was alone, and Hal outlines this in great detail in the book.
John Hyde wrote and spoke at one of the valedictory functions for Bert, that he had the beneficiary of never being alone.
What I’ll say as a young Member of Parliament is, we have it even easier, because we don’t just have the force of the idea, we have history to point to. We have the last 20 years, we have facts, and the success of Bert and his ideas. We are not just arguing for a theory.
I wonder sometimes, if Bert was a member of the ALP, there’d probably be a university campus named after him, there’d be tributes, there’d probably even be an ABC lecture series – but that wouldn’t be Bert’s style.
Bert had that humility that men confident in their ideas have, confident in their arguments, confident in their research. That is something that is missing a little bit from politics today and something we can all learn from reading Hal’s book.
I also wonder whether or not he would have liked something like that, purely because it would have given it another opportunity to grandstand and cut a ribbon, which he was so famously opposed to.
To all those associated with this book, it is a tremendous contribution to Australian political knowledge. It is terrible that someone can go through university, high school and claim they’ve studied Australian politics and economics, and barely have heard Bert Kelly’s name.
Hopefully this book will be yet another step in making sure all Australians are grateful for what he did and understand the ideas he put forward are ideas we need to fight for.