A Modest Farmer [Bert Kelly], “Bad news for bearers of bad news,” The Bulletin, October 13, 1981, p. 180. Reprinted in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 195-97, as “I.A.C. Treatment.”

There is growing up a regrettable habit of politicians publicly clobbering civil servants who tell them what they do not want to hear. For instance, Malcolm Fraser and Dick Hamer used to get stuck into the Industries Assistance Commission (IAC) if its recommendations did not please. I used to think that this was just an unfortunate Victorian trait. “After all,” I said to myself, “they cannot go with 100,000 yahoos to a football match and spend all afternoon yelling for blood and guts, and not have their characters warped to some extent.”

However, it now appears that this tendency to clobber the bearers of bad news is not only a Victorian weakness. When discussing the IAC report on the car industry with the South Australian Minister for Industrial Affairs, Dean Brown, he made some caustic comments about the quality of IAC reports and particularly about members’ tendency to stay in their ivory tower in Canberra instead of coming to South Australia to have a careful look at individual factories. Evidently he thought the IAC should examine the factories in detail and so make an assessment of their efficiency and to go even further and suggest to the industry and the State government which factories should be expanded and which contracted.

This is a completely mistaken view of how the IAC should behave. Evidently Mr Brown wants the IAC to act as business consultants. Now I know that consultants are very important people in our complex world as the following story illustrates.

A village in England had an explosion in its cat population, which grew alarmingly. Much concerned, the mayor tried to contact a Pied Piper who lived at a nearby village called Hamlyn but he was away on another job, so the mayor called in a firm of consultants.

Their people were quickly on the job with their clipboards and calculators. With typical competence they quickly assembled all the information, fed it into their computer which pointed an accusing finger at a big, bold ginger tom cat. “Get rid of him and your cat population will fall immediately,” the consultants said.

The villagers quickly caught the offending animal but, being English, they just could not bring themselves to kill such a splendid beast who was indeed a monarch among cats. So they took him to the vet and had him operated on. And immediately the cat population began to fall.

Two years later the population began to climb again and so the mayor called in the consultants again and complained. Their first question of course was, “Did you do as we said and kill the ginger tom cat?” The mayor admitted that they had not killed him but they had had him desexed so it couldn’t be his fault. So the consultant firm set to work again with their clipboards and calculators and again fed all their information into their computer which again pointed an accusing finger at the ginger tom cat. “But it couldn’t have been him,” the villagers protested, “We had him desexed.” The consultants replied, “Yes, but he then set up as a consultant!”

I know that this story has nothing to do with the IAC’s report on cars but this is a dullish subject which could do with a bit of lightening up.

The IAC should never act as consultants and go round telling managers how to run their factories more efficiently. They hear sworn public evidence from people on both sides of an industry fence and make their own judgments. For instance, if the car manufacturers told them, as they did, that they would wither on the vine unless they continued to receive a consumer subsidy of about $1000 million a year, the IAC would be justified in pointing out that this was a grave burden on the community.

And if the same manufacturers claimed that a tariff wall of 50 percent was not enough to protect them against the competition from imported cars, particularly when the high cost of ocean freight was added, then surely the IAC is justified in assuming that there is something basically wrong with the structure of our car industry.

The IAC should, and does, say when it thinks an industry’s structure is at fault, and if there are too many factories to allow them to have an economic throughput, as unfortunately is the case with our tragic car industry. The IAC might even go further and say that, though it is technically possible to grow bananas at the South Pole, this would be a gross mis-use of the nation’s resources which could be better used in other ways.

But if the IAC were to do what so many people beg it to do, and tell governments and industries what they ought to grow instead of bananas, then socialism would have indeed arrived. I think that Brown is much more of a socialist than he realises. I think he would get on splendidly with Chris Hurford, the Labor Party spokesman on these matters.