A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “So many pleas … and they are all so hard to please,” The Australian Financial Review, December 9, 1977, p. 3.

“Each man thinks his own bug a gazelle,” says the Arab proverb. Politicians have many people coming in asking for, or demanding, special treatment for their particular causes.

My constituents too have their own pet bugs which appear to them as gazelles.

When I was newly elected to Parliament I spent many sleepless nights worrying about my inability to persuade the Government to give its milk down in response to my eloquent and compassionate pleading on behalf of causes that were obviously worthy.

I would complain to Mavis:

The Government must have a heart of brass. How can it possibly resist my pleas on behalf of the sick, the unemployed, the aged, sporting clubs, school, universities and so on? Surely the Government must see that these causes are worthy.

Why doesn’t it give its milk down when I ask it nicely for money? Do you think I ought to try kicking it instead of patting it?

But as I become more experienced in politics I have stopped worrying so much. Mavis says that this is because I have become hard hearted. She has been hard hearted for years (except about whales) but she thinks it is a most unfortunate trait in a Member of Parliament. She said once:

I don’t know what your constituents would think if they found out about your heart. People like their Member of Parliament to be easily moved, to have his handkerchief ready. You must try to cultivate a more compassionate air.

I tried this but not very successfully. When my schoolteachers clobber me because they want more money for education I listen to them respectfully but remember that most of the increase in the education vote had gone to benefit the teachers and not the children.

And when the pensioners come with their poignant pleas I know that there are many who really need bigger pensions, but I am also aware how many of my friends and relatives are battening on social services.

But the group I can’t handle are the scientists. They come wearing their white coats, and heavily hung about with PhDs. They really do me over. They don’t talk to me, or at me, but down to me. It isn’t long before I am overwhelmed with an acute inferiority complex.

I have tried saying that too much science expenditure goes to support experiments that have nothing to do with the real world.

“Why should I try to get you more money for science,” I whinge, “you will only spend it on some obscure experiments that only you can understand and which will be of no practical benefit?”

But then they tell me that scientists didn’t set out to discover penicillin because there was a great gap in the knowledge of healing that needed to be filled, but it was discovered by scientists who were wandering around the margin of knowledge with a magnifying glass. In other words, penicillin was discovered because scientists were looking for they knew not what.

I was gratified to heart that the Government had form the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC), which is a very illustrious and competent group of wise scientists and laymen whose duty it will be to advise the Government about science.

I also am always looking around for some person or committee on whom I can cast my burden of responsibility. I would prefer to cast it on the Lord but if He is not around, a committee of some sort does splendidly.

But Eccles warned me that it is not axiomatic that wiser decisions will necessarily be made by the most prestigious group of wise men, as ASTEC no doubt is.

He quoted again from Professor Hayek who I am beginning to dislike almost as much as Eccles … “the prospects of advance (in science) would be most favourable if, instead of the control of funds being in the hands of a single authority proceeding according to a unitary plan, there were a multiplicity of independent sources so that even the unorthodox thinker would have a chance of finding a sympathetic ear.”

This is a long-winded way of saying that ASTEC, unless it is inordinately wise, wiser than most committees, is just as likely to make mistakes about science administration as a mediocre man, like me. The trouble is that ASTEC’s mistakes will all be big ones, while mine are futile, silly little things.