Bert Kelly, “Dreams up in smoke,” The Bulletin, September 11, 1984, p. 146.

I think Fred must be going through some queer change of life or something. I told how he went to Queensland recently to buy a sugar farm and how he returned with his tail between his legs, without a farm and disillusioned about the myth that Sir Joh’s government is the last bastion against socialism. Fred’s latest craze is to buy a tobacco farm. He has found out that the average tobacco farmer gets an annual subsidy from the government of about $25,000 and he wants to get his trotters into that trough.

How he blundered across this information, I do not know. It is true that I wrote about tobacco in my book Economics Made Easy, but I didn’t think that Fred would ever bother to read it; at least, that is the impression he has always given me.

I thought I would throw cold water on the idea by telling him that a lot of the tobacco was grown in Queensland and he is sad about Queensland at the moment. But he knew that there was a lot of tobacco grown near Myrtleford, in Victoria. This is where we went.

We took Eccles with us this time. Fred agreed to this because he knew that there were a lot of hidden lurks in tobacco that are hard to dig out. Usually I dislike travelling with Fred and Eccles together; they niggle at each other a lot and this makes life rather a strain. And if they are not doing this, they are combining to keep me in my place. “You are having too much to say, Bert,” one of them says. “You seem to think you are back in parliament. You keep quiet and you might learn something.”

So the three of us headed for Myrtleford: Eccles with his briefcase full of reports, Fred full of the hope of getting his sticky fingers on this $25,000 subsidy money and I with my head full of foreboding. It is a lovely area, one that you would think could grow almost anything. Still, if the government were paying you $4,000 a hectare to grow tobacco, I suppose there would be little temptation to grow something else.

When we got there, Fred went into a land agent’s office to see about buying a tobacco farm, but he soon came out again with a long face to tell us that, as with sugar, you have to have a quota before you can start. They do not insist your being of superior morality, as they do in Queensland; in Victoria all they want is your money.

It seems that the market price for a tobacco quota is about $4 for the right to supply a kilogram of leaf and, as the average production a farm is about 14,000kg, this makes the average quota worth $56,000. This is before you buy the land.

Fred felt even worse when Eccles told him that one of the reasons why the US refused to remove its damaging duties against our wool — about which we complain so often and so rightly — is because of the barriers we place against the importation of their tobacco. I know that Eccles is right about this because I have heard an official of the US embassy say so on a TV program.

I know that some people think that Eccles and I are hard men, devoid of the milk of human kindness. Eccles indeed is like this, but I have a nicer side to my nature, deeply hidden though it may be. To demonstrate this, I am launching a campaign to persuade the government to pay each tobacco farmer $2000 a hectare not to grow tobacco.

According to Eccles’ figuring, this would make the Treasurer happy because now he has to pay out in various devious ways about $4000 for each hectare of tobacco and, as there are about 6600 hectares of tobacco, it must be costing him more than $13 million a year. I know it is hard to make treasurers happy and that is why they nearly all have long faces, but surely saving half of this $13 million would make them smile.

Certainly my idea would make the growers happy. Just fancy being paid $2000 for not growing a hectare of tobacco. You could sit in the shade and scratch yourself or use the land to grow something else. So the tobacco growers would love the government — and governments love being loved.

The woolgrowers would love the government, too, if this action induced the US to remove its duties against our wool. We are always moaning about the wicked way other countries, particularly those in the EEC, place barriers in the way of our exports and we wonder why no one takes much notice of us. Here is a chance to demonstrate our sincerity.

If my scheme were adopted, there would be about 1000 tobacco growers, 90,000 woolgrowers and all the tax-payers on the same side for once, all determined to love the government. So it should not be hard to get my idea adopted.

They really ought to make me an ambassador or something. I understand that the post in Outer Mongolia is still vacant.