A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Leo’s growl descends to a squeak,” The Australian Financial Review, November 8, 1974, p. 3.

Many people are surprised to find that MPs who belong to opposite political parties and who hate one another in public are quite good friends in private. I have one such friend, Leo the Labor Man.

When I mentioned him with approbation to Mavis she became very snitchety. “That’s the trouble with you, dear,” she snapped. “You’re too easy to get on with. You would do far better if you hated everyone on the other side all the time.”

“You must stop giving this impression that there is some good in the Labor Party. It is doing you no good in the electorate. You are getting the reputation of being a namby-pamby. Get stuck into them, including this Leo man.”

But it isn’t easy to hate Leo, as Mavis found out when she met him. I think she was a bit surprised to find he didn’t spit on the floor, and so on. Indeed, when she found he was younger, more handsome, better educated (he has a degree) and much more eloquent, she began to change her mind.

But when she met his smashing little wife and their four charming children, she had to admit reluctantly that the head of such a family couldn’t be altogether bad.

So she has not tried to prevent Leo and me having little chats in private about political problems, although she warns me to be on my guard all the time and to be extra careful not to let it be known that I have a Labor Party friend.

When the Labor Party took office in December, 1972, Leo was full of enthusiasm about the tremendous improvements his Government was about to bring into being. And this continued for more than a year.

During this period I kept my head down while he catalogued all the things we had done wrong and what his Government was going to set right — and before breakfast, too.

And when the Whitlam Government too action to reduce tariffs by 25 per cent he fairly glowed with virtue. “The millennium has arrived,” he said. “We are helping almost everyone and they will all love us. I am sorry that you are not in our party. You are a nice chap at heart, though perhaps rather too modest.” But our talks have had a different tone lately. As the awfulness of the economic mess we are in becomes clearer each day, Leo has become more and more querulous. “I just can’t understand it,” he said one day. “We mean so well, we have such splendid principles, why is everything going so badly, so suddenly and so soon? Perhaps it’s all the fault of the press.”

I can understand his suspicion that his party’s problems are caused by the press. I had the same suspicion in 1972 when our party was performing badly. When I reminded him of that he gave me a sickly smile and agreed that perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame it all on the press. “Well, what is wrong?” he asked petulantly. Why is the economy so sick and the popularity polls also?”

I said I had neither the time nor the inclination to go into that now but advised him to read a book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged. This was quite a long novel with quite a few fruity passages that Mavis won’t let me read if she can help it. But it spells out, perhaps at excessive length, the difference between meaning well and doing well; how the dead hand of the State will in the end stultify the economy.

He was a bit uncertain about reading such a long book, so I marked the purple passages and warned him to keep it out of his wife’s way. He swallowed the bait and he is reading it and when I see him now he has a glazed look in his eye.

But while he has been digesting Atlas Shrugged, Eccles has been pushing forward a thesis he thinks I should mention. He says that too many people imagine that we have two separate problems — inflation and unemployment.

He claims that they are really parts of the one problem, that the reason employment is falling is not that there aren’t enough jobs to be done, but that fewer and fewer people can afford to employ people to do them.

I know this Fred will agree with this. His farm is littered with work crying out to be done, but he can’t afford to pay people to do it. And this is the position over the whole economy, particularly in the export sector or those who compete with imports.

Labor has simply priced itself out of many markets. “You dampen down inflation,” he preaches, “and you find that you have solved the unemployment problem also.”

It sounds so simple when he says it like that!