A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Whose hand is in the honeypot?,” The Australian Financial Review, June 19, 1970, p. 3. Reprinted in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 129-31, as “Spending your Money.”

I once used to make resounding speeches complaining about the multiplicity of Government departments and how grossly underworked and overpaid were the Civil servants in those departments. These sentiments were usually received with gratification by my rural audiences, which contained very few Civil servants who seldom ventured far from the city.

I justified this stand by pointing out that I was dedicated to saving the citizens’ money. This sentiment was received, as I say, with gratification, but certainly not with rapture. After I came to Canberra, it did not take me long to find out that the Member of Parliament who advocated saving money did not loom very large alongside the man who advocated spending it.

Isn’t it a queer business? The Government has no money of its own, and all it spends it gets from the citizens. And much of the year, these citizens spend most of their time gathering together in small groups, complaining about the proliferation of Civil servants, how little work they do and how much they are paid, and how high is income tax and how it is dampening their incentive to work and so on.

But about twice a year these same citizens go along to a public meeting of some kind, perhaps a political meeting, and then they spend almost all their time complaining about the lack of vision and the absolute stinginess of the Government because it won’t give more of their money away to someone else.

The clever people who write the political columns in the newspapers are just the same. When the Budget is being framed, these very worthy gentlemen, with impeccable economic logic, castigate the Government lest it spend a cent more than is absolutely necessary.

The rest of the year they spend kicking the guts out of the Government because it isn’t spending more on a naval base at Cockburn Sound, more on pensions, more on storage of water, more on hospitals, more on education, more and more on just about everything.

Of course, Fred is not like that. He absolutely hates the government spending money on anything at all, except on simple things like subsidizing superphosphate and wheat, and on roads, school buses, country high schools, water reticulation in the country and so on — things that are really worthwhile and necessary.

Now Mavis may not know much about economics, but she has a very shrewd idea of how I should behave if I am to climb the political ladder. So she is at my side, continually urging me to make a good fellow of myself, giving away your money.

Eccles stands grimly at the other side, sniffing occasionally, but always urging economy on me. When I express surprise at the difficulty of my situation, he says it is self-inflicted.

“None of this would happen, my man,” he grizzles, “if you wretched Members of Parliament every time you opened an irrigation dam, or an old folks’ home or you increased pensions or any time you did anything like that, you did not pretend it was your money, and not the citizens’, you were throwing around so generously.”

I suppose there is a lot in this. Sometimes I open an old folks’ home. On such occasions I am often able to present a cheque from the government to the chairman of the group that has really done the work. The speech I make on that occasion is interlaced with references to the generosity of the Government (and by implication, me) when all the time I know that if it was my money they were getting, and not the citizens’, they would be getting a much smaller helping.

I suppose you would realise, if you stopped and thought, that the Government hasn’t really been generous with its own money. But you don’t stop and think. You are in such a hurry to get your hands into the honeypot, that you haven’t got time to think.

So Governments spend more and more, and so tax more and more, and you grizzle more and more, urging economy on us [politicians] on Sunday, and generosity on us for the rest of the week. It’s no wonder we get confused!