Bert Kelly, “Reflections on a history of farming folly,” The Australian Financial Review, August 11, 1992, p. 15.

I turned 80 recently and my family were quick to tell me that I had a lot to look back on even if little to look forward to. They are right of course, but they did not have to be so quick with their guidance. I am having an interesting time looking back; wisdom seems to come more easily with hindsight.

While looking back I had the good fortune to blunder across Professor Edward Shann’s book, The Economic History of Australia, printed early in 1930. I started farming in 1930 and grew more wheat as the government said. Even our postage stamps on our letters were cancelled by a big black stamp which said: “Grow More Wheat,” and this I did.

Wheat was four shillings a bushel when I sowed it and one shilling and sixpence when I reaped it. It was then that I began growing wise with hindsight. Since then I have been urging my progeny never to listen to government advice about what to grow. “The government couldn’t run a booze-up in a brewery,” I tell them.

This is the wisdom that comes with hindsight.

Shann wrote his book in 1929, before he went through the depression mangle. He knew, even then, that most government attempts to help rural industries usually did them more harm than good. Governments are made up of nice, well-meaning people. I was in a government once and a nicer, better-meaning bloke it would be hard to find and I doubt if other governments before or since were much better or worse.

But governments of all kinds have made a mess of tobacco, eggs, dairying, sugar, irrigation crops, wheat and finally, to our everlasting shame, wool. The only crop I can recall that we really helped was cotton, which we did by withdrawing its support.

An unusual cotton grower, Paul Kahl, gave evidence to the Tariff Board asking that the cotton bounty be discontinued. This startled me because, in those McEwen days, everyone was battling to get their snouts into the government assistance trough.

So I hurried to Wee Waa, in NSW, to talk to this strange fellow who wanted to grow cotton without aid from the government. He explained that he used to be a profitable cotton grower in the US, but then that government had decided that cotton should be grown again in the south where the Negroes liked growing cotton so votes were thought to be lurking there.

Kahl knew that the south was the natural habitat of the pests that ate cotton and getting rid of these would make cotton growing there very expensive. So he came to Wee Waa to get away from government intervention and settled down to grow cotton profitably.

Then he learnt that our government, which could feel an election coming on, intended to build a dam on the Ord to grow cotton. But Kahl knew that the Ord district, being in the tropics, was lousy with cotton-eating insects and killing these with sprays would make cotton growing very expensive so he asked that the cotton bounty be discontinued.

The government heard his plea and cotton growing has been bounding ahead ever since, just because the government did not help it.

But governments have hurt the other rural industries they aimed to help. Even in Shann’s time, in 1929, they were busy making a mess of dairying, sugar growing and irrigation crops.

After surveying the mess we had made of these, Shann looked forward. After discussing those we had “helped” he said, in 1929:

If wheat-growers too should be smitten by the brave notion of evolving a marketing plan by which they too may receive a profitable price — an Australian parity whatever that may mean — the whole burden would fall back on wool. So it would come to pass a strange vision of Australia as one enormous sheep bestriding a bottomless pit with statesman, lawyer, miner, landlord, farmer and factory hand all hanging desperately to the locks of its abundant fleece.

That was years before the government and fools like me tried to help the wool industry with a reserve price scheme. In 1929, Shann was fearful that wheat-growers would line up at the trough of government assistance.

This indeed happened in a restrained way but, by the late 1960s, the government had so effectively hidden the market signals from wheat-growers that it felt it had to impose quotas on wheat growing, allowing some farmers to grow wheat while denying this right to others.

Not only was the scheme wrong but I knew it would not work, not fairly anyhow. I tried to explain why to the bureaucrat who was foster-mothering the scheme, that an effective blackmarket in wheat would soon make the scheme unworkable.

We left “helping” wool till right at the end. I will not parade the basic foolishness of our scheme. It is easy to pour a bucket of scorn on it now; wisdom comes easily with hindsight. But Shann was not relying on hindsight when he wrote the end of his book in 1929. He said then:

These schemes of price manipulation one and all bespeak a hazy appreciation of prices in guiding the economic use of man’s resources. Australians have too often legislated as though a price might be made at whatever figure the producer in search of an easier life chose to call “a fair thing”.

But the prices that direct the goings and comings of sound prosperity are the signs by which men learn from willing buyers their changing needs. High prices encourage production where it affords a margin of profit. Falling prices discourage it — by wiping out the margin or hope of profit.

A government or board of control that seeks to fake the world’s prices does so at the peril of the citizens and producers whom the faked prices mislead. It deranges and weakens its whole economy if it forces them to work with costs which the outer world is under no obligation to meet.

And if, in doing so, it sees fit to feed other nations with an abundance which its price-faking begrudges to its own citizens, it adds to the strength of others and accentuates the contrast in competitive vigour between the bond and free.

It is because of these and other wise words tucked away in many parts of the Shann book that I am trying to get it reprinted. It is almost unobtainable now. If I had read it before I became an MP, perhaps I would not have done as many silly things as I have done or have allowed governments to do.

Just think of all the nonsense we used to trot out! “The wheat farmer is surely entitled to the cost of production” we used to bleat when wheat acreages were going up in leaps and bounds and land values were going through the roof. And we used to ask the government to tell us what to grow!

However, after its bitter “grow more wheat” experience in 1930, it has had too much sense to say anything. Shann even told us, way back in 1929, that we were sloshing irrigation water around far too carelessly because we were afraid to charge a proper price for it.

I will not plod wearily around our farm, surveying the silly mistakes we made, but Shann is just as sound when discussing the way we “helped” our secondary industries. The Economic History of Australia, printed in 1930, should be reprinted now and made compulsory reading for budding politicians, modest or otherwise.