by a Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly],
The Australian Financial Review, March 18, 1977, p. 3.

What I envy other members most is their fine footwork.

Perhaps it is because I was older than most when I came into politics or perhaps because I am rather flat-footed, but the plain fact is that I plod around while my younger or more accomplished colleagues fairly dance across the political stage.

Mavis has often urged me to pay more attention to my footwork. She said:

It is no good you standing with bucolic calm on a point of high principle, you only bore people when you do that.

Your constituents are always hoping for a more polished performance. You really must practice.

So that’s what we did. Mavis made me wear shorts and sandshoes and I practised in front of the mirror with Mavis swishing at my legs with a little horsewhip.

But instead of getting faster my footwork got slower as I got more tired.

But if my backbench colleagues are good, you should see the ministers perform. They have more experience and they have their staff to help them, and they can really go.

But when you assemble the ministers into a government with lots of feet belonging to individual ministers, you see a sight that fairly dazzles the imagination, with the ministerial feet going in all directions while the amorphous mass of the Government seems to stand almost stationary.

Let me give some examples.

Eccles has compiled a list of ministerial statements which indicates that the Government is travelling along the lower tariff path.

For instance, this statement by the Prime Minister satisfied even Eccles:

Australia cannot afford to pursue courses of action that isolate us from external competition.

As in our domestic affairs, we must face up to the reality of a competitive outside world. If we fail to do so, we will run the risk of ultimately becoming a country of second-raters.

Then there was a statement by the Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations and Eccles quoted it again with approval:

Higher tariffs, of course, do not overcome the underlying problems of Australia’s poor competitive showing.

In the very real sense, indeed, they exacerbate the general problem because higher tariffs tend to raise the prices of the affected imports and of the local product afforded additional protection.

Whatever the higher tariff may do for the individual industry concerned, therefore, it results in pushing up the general price level; and when wages are further adjusted for price rises all industries find their costs rising.

Said Eccles approvingly: “You can see where the Government’s feet are taking it — they have seen the light at last.”

Then the Minister for Foreign Affairs made a statement along the same lines. I quote him with approval:

… Development assistance aid programs alone aren’t good enough. You’ve got to generate the capacity within countries to be able to improve their own standard of living and this involves not merely handouts and project aid but also more liberalised trade.

So the footwork of the ministers seems to be taking us along the right road, but suddenly the Government’s feet start going backwards or sideways or something and most of its actions seem to be directly opposed to what it says.

Every time there is a chance to increase the tariff, the Government grasps it with both hands and all the splendid speeches about the lowering of trade barriers are quickly forgotten.

This tendency for the Government’s feet to take it in different directions has been worrying Eccles for some time but he touched rock bottom in the slough of despondency when he read the statement by the Prime Minister on February 21:

Because of rising labour costs, employers were tending to use machines rather than people in the production process.

If tariff protection for Australian industry were reduced, this trend would worsen.

The Government has worked to ensure that the push for lower tariff levels would not continue.

Eccles was speechless when he heard this and this doesn’t often happen, then he muttered that there must be some mistake. Eccles said plaintively:

Perhaps the Prime Minister had two speech writers and they can’t get on with each other — there must be some such explanation.

We can’t have a government with its feet going in so many directions at once.

I wish I could be certain about this!