“Dave’s Diary” column [Bert Kelly], Adelaide Stock & Station Journal, September 29, 1965, p. 87.

The weather is hotting up at the same time as the wedding preparations. What I can’t understand is why I agreed to Harold getting married early in October — right in the middle of the busy season. I suppose the truth is that I wasn’t consulted, as is generally the case nowadays.

And Harold is going to have a whole two weeks’ honeymoon. What they will do during two whole weeks I just don’t know. I know Mary and I managed very well with a long weekend at Victor Harbor.

I suppose just because Harold is marrying into the Clarkson family he thinks he’s got a right to go to Switzerland or somewhere.

And unless we can get the crutching finished (which seems doubtful) then it looks as if I will spend all Harold’s honeymoon hunting old ewes with the dagging shears while he lies around on the beach feeling romantic.

And in between times I will be fighting a running battle with Mary about shifting from our old home in our “city residence,” as Mary is calling it.

It is really just a little house in the town and I will be trying to take my old treasures with me and she will be trying to leave them behind.

I am not going to enjoy the next month very much.

And the bowling season is starting; and just when I want to devote myself to this Clarkson will come bounding over each weekend and give me gratuitous advice about how I ought to be making ensilage to prepare for the next “inevitable drought” as he calls it.

And he will impress on me the desirability of sowing Sudan grass because we are going to get a lot of summer rain because we haven’t had enough rain during the year.

So, altogether, I am not going to have much fun.

But the thing that has really got under my skin is that evidently the Vernon Committee report has come out and it has supported Clarkson’s ideas on tariffs almost entirely.

This means that for the next 10 years I am going to have this drummed into me.

I am going to be told how farseeing and statesmanlike Clarkson was and how he flew in the face of public opinion in Parliament and was proved right after all.

He’s bad enough at any time; but now he’s got this additional incentive to be going round telling everybody what a fine fellow he is, well he is going to be completely impossible.

I understand now that he wants to invite the members of the Vernon Committee to the wedding so that he can make a long, flowery speech at them during the reception, telling them, I suppose, how lucky they were in their deliberations to have the advantage of his advice.

So other people may have things to be happy about during the spring. I have often complained about the spring before, but this spring is going to be worse than any other.

Clarkson says the Vernon Committee report is in two great big volumes, totalling over 900 pages.

Clarkson was very disappointed to find that it wasn’t all about tariffs, which, of course, is the only subject he is interested in.

But a great deal of the report was a discussion of the economy, in general and evidently they found that the thing that will limit Australia’s progress is not the amount of employment that can be found, but our ability to produce the exports which will be necessary to pay for the imports which a developing economy demands.

They then went on to show that the ability to produce these exports, whether from primary or secondary industry, will be limited if the exporting industries (primary or secondary) have to carry the load of the inefficient industries (again primary or secondary).

The committee nowhere recommends the adoption of a free trade policy, and Clarkson is not a free trader either. He has been arguing all along that a certain amount of tariff assistance is all right.

I am sure this decision is right from the Australian point of view, but what makes me fearful is that Clarkson is going to be completely unendurable in the future.

But when it is carried to excess then it does make true, sound development much more difficult.

If only Clarkson were a more reasonable person I would be quite delighted with the news that the Vernon Committee has come out with the recommendation that high tariffs be looked on with very great care.

As I have said, he is bad enough at ordinary times, but now he’s got a shove in the back from the Vernon Committee, then I’m frightened he is going to go through the roof.

And now, to find myself about to be related to him by marriage is almost the last straw. But there doesn’t seem anything that can be done at this late stage!