Bert Kelly, “Boring it up the bastards from the bush,” The Bulletin, November 11, 1980, p. 155. Reprinted in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 244-46, as “Dr Stretton,” dated 22 October 1980.

Recently I read a review of the book Labor Essays in which particular attention was paid to an essay by Hugh Stretton which the reviewer said “is a remarkably incisive and passionate piece of political advocacy. He analyses the divide-and-rule tactics which have recently led to a noticeable decline in middle-class compassion and social concern, and puts the so-called tax revolt into its proper perspective as a form of class warfare.”

Then the reviewer goes on to quote directly from Mr Stretton’s essay. “If the reactionaries can recruit a sizeable minority of workers and their wives to the alliance against the welfare population … then the bastards will have won.”

That quotation makes me miserable because it shows how even a man of Mr Stretton’s intelligence and rectitude thinks. Many people, particularly socialist intellectuals, see the behaviour of people who disagree with them as part of a deep laid plot of evil, well organised capitalist groups who, with relentless cunning, have worked out some reprehensible way to grind the faces of the poor. “Then the bastards will have won,” they say.

These people should remember the story of the schoolteacher in America who was giving her class a lecture on the American Indians. At the end she asked if there was anyone in the class who had Indian blood in his veins. Little Tommy put up his hand. “How very interesting,” she gushed, “Which tribe?” “It wasn’t no tribe, Ma’am” Tommy replied, “It was just a wandering Indian!”

Most of the tax revolt is not the work of an Indian tribe, it is not class warfare at all, it is not a plot by a lot of bastards who have planned some cunning campaign, but it is the reactions of simple sods like me. To illustrate this, I will describe how the taxation iron entered my soul way back in 1947. Things were really tough on the farm then, with little spare cash and Mavis with three kids at foot and with many quite proper demands for more money to be spent in the home. So I made the rash decision to grow 120 acres of mustard under contract. It was rash because I didn’t know anything about the crop and neither did anyone else in the district. I suppose I should have grown wheat which I understood but the wheat stabilisation scheme discouraged me from growing what the world wanted. This is the way of stabilisation schemes.

I sowed the 120 acres in May, braving the scornful remarks of my friends and neighbours, “Pride goeth before a fall” and so on. The wretched crop did not germinate, so I sowed the paddock again at the end of June, working the tractor at night with a kerosene lantern hanging on the starting handle. There were no frills in those days, no air conditioned cabs, not even headlights.

The crop behaved splendidly from then on and by the end of December it was about 7 feet high and ready to reap. But when we took the old ground-drive header into the crop, we found that mustard has to be reaped when the weather is cool, otherwise the seed shatters. So, having sown the wretched crop at night, we now found that we had to reap it at night also, still with the lantern hanging on the handle.

However, we kept at it, going round and round and taking off bags of mustard with gratifying regularity. It was when I was clearing out a bunged up thresher in the middle of the night, with my head down and my tail up, which gives one a jaundiced view of the world, that I started to do some mental arithmetic. Then suddenly I realised that Mr Chifley (he was then Treasurer) would metaphorically be waiting at the heap to take away half the proceeds.

That was when the tax revolt started with me, in the middle of the night while reaping a crop I had sown at night, while the district sneered at me for taking foolish risks.

This old fashioned determination to keep what you have worked so hard to win, and have run uncomfortable risks in the process, this is the mainspring of the tax revolt. It is all very well for well heeled civil servants or academics living comfortably in ivory universities, to sneer at the bastards who are taking the risks that make the economy go round. I admit that we are not doing this to benefit our fellow men; we are trying to benefit ourselves. But in the process we benefit pure and noble people like Mr Stretton also. And then he reckons we are bastards!

Inside every tax moonlighter there is a small business man trying to get out.