Bert Kelly, The Bulletin, October 2, 1984, p. 94.

When I wrote last week’s column suggesting that John Stone, like other prophets of the past and present, probably would have to spend a lot of time crying in the wilderness, I had not read his Perth lecture. I have now and I feel embarrassed that my comments were too shallow.

When I heard that Stone had given tongue as and when he did, I was surprised that he could not wait to unburden himself until he had retired from his post as head of Treasury. However, now I know that he had been asked to give the Shann Memorial Lecture, I can understand that the parallel between what Professor Shann said in the late 20s and what Stone had weighing on his mind in 1984 would make the temptation to jump the gun by two weeks impossible to resist.

I have worn a ministerial muzzle and know the frustration of not being able to say what cried out to be said, so I can understand how Stone’s bureaucratic muzzle must have irked him. I encouraged him to lay it aside when he gave the Stan Kelly Lecture in 1981 and I am grateful for that.

But this time he was completely free at last and the opportunity to compare Shann’s experience with our present prospect was an opportunity just too good to be missed.

To me, Professor Shann has been a shadowy figure with a reputation I did not appreciate properly until now. My father was appointed to the Tariff Board in Melbourne in 1929, straight from the farm and without any academic economic training. Being pitchforked into this responsible position, with the Depression and unemployment growing worse every week, was not pleasant. My father looked for guidance from professors Giblin and Copland who were both Melbourne-based and from Shann who was, unfortunately, far away in Perth.

Because communications were not as developed as they are now, the first two loomed larger in my understanding than did Shann.

However, since reading Stone’s lecture, I understand what clarity of thought and independence of mind Shann showed. For instance, few people realise how tariff protection was then regarded as a sacred cow.

Sir Keith Hancock, in his great book Australia, wrote in 1930:

Protection in Australia has been more than a policy, it has been a faith and a dogma. Its critics, during the second decade of the 20th century, dwindled into a despised and rejected sect suspected of nursing an anti-national heresy. For protection is interwoven with almost every strand of Australia’s economic nationalism.

Yet Shann could see — and said — what harm our protection policies were doing to us in 1928, something that most people now realise.

It is frightening trudging with Stone in Shann’s footsteps, watching us make the same mistakes as Shann warned his generation to avoid in 1929. The profligate state and commonwealth expenditures are the same now as then, also the strangling web of red tape, the reliance on tariff protection rather than market forces to guide us as to what to produce and, worst of all, the regulation of labour markets.

Shann warned his people about them all and Stone did well to remind us that we are plodding down the same tragic path.

Shann was strongly critical of the arbitration system of his day and this is still with us in an even worse form, with this latest labour protection award the last straw. The fight to alter our present arbitration system radically will be the big battle now that the intellectual one about lowering trade barriers is just about won.

Stone, too, is scathing in his condemnation of the power and incompetence of arbitrators who try to regulate the price for labour while ignoring the supply and demand for it. But his particular hatred — and that is not too strong a word — is for the high minimum wages we fix for young people. But let him speak for himself:

The truth is that our system of wage determination today constitutes a crime against society. It is, starkly, a system of wage determination which trade union leaders and people preening themselves as “Justices” of various arbitration benches combine to put young people in particular — but many others also — out of work.

I can understand now why Stone spoke out as and when he did. If I had a great timebomb like that ticking away in my heart and head, I would grab any opportunity I could to get it out of my system.

However, I do not think a man who can think and speak like Stone will have to spend much time crying in the wilderness. There is too great a hunger among ordinary people to have the facts faced fearlessly for that to happen.