Robert Haupt, “‘Clear-the-room’ Kelly outlasted his critics,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, August 22, 1981, p. 32.

Review of Economics Made Easy by Bert Kelly, The Modest Member, Sun Books, 179 pp, $6.95.

Bert Kelly sat in Federal Parliament for 19 turbulent years and watched the six Prime Ministers from Menzies to Fraser.

During most of that time, I think it is fair to say, he had all but a handful of colleagues — friend and foe — convinced that he was a crackpot.

This was partly a matter of him appearing not to take himself seriously — while Billy Sneddens came and went, he remained, indeed, the Modest Member; partly it was his bush ways of speech and humour; and partly it was because from the outset he adopted an extraordinary political strategy.

This strategy was revolutionary in 1958 when Mr Kelly entered Parliament, and it is still rare today. It is to decide what one thinks before deciding what one will say.

Then, as now, most politicians did the opposite. The party system more or less demands it, and Mr Kelly’s Ministerial career — spent in the foothills of Works and Navy — confirms that his is not the path of conventional ambition.

In the Parliament, and in his newspaper columns (a selection of which are preserved in this volume), Mr Kelly entered the distance event.

He believed he had a few worthwhile truths, and since some in the Parliament did not comprehend them, and many more who comprehended them tried to deny them, he decided early on to stick to them, and leave the fashionable areas of foreign policy and social compassion to others.

Bert Kelly acquired as a result of this a quite fearsome reputation as a bore, no more so than on the subject of tariffs. As he remarks ruefully at a couple of points in this book, he had a formidable ability to clear the House when he rose to speak.

The truths that Bert Kelly began espousing in the Parliament in 1958, and in his newspaper column in 1969, were few and simple. I suppose the main ones are these: that a rise in income tax harms the incentive to work; that prices are better than governments in efficiently ordering production; when the price of something goes up, less of it will generally be demanded; that tariffs and quotas are taxes, paid in the end by exporters; and that governments have only two ways of paying for what they spend — by raising money or by printing money.

I should say that opinion is now with Mr Kelly on all these points. It will be a fascinating exercise for historians to explain how this happened.

I look forward to seeing the first scholarly account of the decline of the Country Party — not as a political group capable of commanding votes and seats (loosely-linked commodities for the Country Party anyway), but as a group representing a coherent set of ideas.

The realisation that Bert Kelly’s arguments were essentially correct is not necessarily due to his persuasion, either as a politician or as a columnist.

For one thing, they are not exclusively his ideas. Rather, they are those of one of the main streams of economic thought, from Adam Smith and Ricardo to Friedrich von Hayek.

Even when Bert Kelly made his maiden speech, a rapidly growing number of students around Australia were being introduced to the theories of economics that underpin these ideas.

This led to a growth of economic understanding, which had no more startling impact than in the columns of the financial (and later the general) press.

Max Newton and then Max Walsh brought the columns of The Australian Financial Review to bear on the costs of protectionism, and it was in the Financial Review that The Modest Member became known to a wide audience.

It ought not to detract one whit from Mr Kelly’s achievement and tardy fame to say of him that he was, for the majority of his 19 years in Parliament, in a movement that sprang from a most basic force: the spread of education.

For one of the important ways to measure a political career is by what it cost, as well as by what it gained. There can be very little doubt that Bert Kelly’s unpopular advocacy of economic rationalism cost him political advancement. It probably cost him friends, and it certainly incurred for him ridicule.

He deflected most of this with disarming humour — something that shows through with surprising freshness in the columns collected here.

The book, incidentally, threatens to leave Bert Kelly looking a bit awkward over subsidies: it is published “with assistance of CRA Ltd”.

There is, however, an appealing touch on the back cover. The price is listed there in handwriting as $6.95 (which is, indeed, the recommended price). Rub the ink off, and you find the printed price was $8.95, which shows that Mr Kelly is willing to do more about inflation than simply talk.