A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “The ‘growth’ tack — real or hot-house?,” The Australian Financial Review, January 30, 1970, p. 3.
Reprinted in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 153-54, as “Growth (1).”

Eccles has had some harsh things to say about my tendency to make fine, flowing speeches concerning our “vast empty spaces” and “limitless resources” so I have looked around for something else to command my eloquence. I had a go at “growth” and this has been a resounding success. If you tackle the subject with enthusiasm — make a bit of a run at it, as it were — you again become a statesman rather than a politician and this is very pleasant.

The way to handle the subject, I find, is, if you get a nasty interjection from Fred about tariffs on weedicides, to fix him with an eagle eye and ask, “Don’t you believe in ‘growth’ in this great country of ours?” He is supposed to wither under this treatment; and he usually does.

But Eccles has got to hear about this and has been, as usual, unpleasant. First, he took the illustration I had rather foolishly used and pointed out that the growth of some sections of the agricultural chemical industry has certainly hindered the growth of the farming section of the economy because the high price of agricultural chemicals has been a grievous burden for the farmer to bear. I am not sure why this is so, but I think it has something to do with tariffs, which is a subject dear to Eccles’ hard heart.

He said that you can have two kinds of growth in a country — natural growth and hot house growth. He was all for the former and against the latter. “There is no sense in hot house growth if it just makes you fat and flabby,” he said. He then pointed out that you could grow bananas at the South Pole. This, I presume, would be an example of hot house growth. But the bananas so grown would cost a lot more, and the expense would have to be carried by the rest of the community, so limiting its growth.

“And worse than that,” he said, “the cost of paying for the hot house growth is carried, in the end, by the exporters who are, by nature, the section of the economy that are the most efficient. So you have the awful picture of the growth of the more efficient section being slowed down so that the less efficient can grow.

He then went back to a recent sermon about “our limitless resources”. Then he had pointed out that our resources were indeed very limited, and just because they were, it was important for real growth of the economy that we use these limited resources in the best possible way. He had started to talk about “resource allocation” but I am not sure what he meant by that, but I gather he thought that tariffs and things like that tended to channel resources into uneconomic uses.

I think I can see what he’s getting at. To talk about growth, without being clear in your mind whether it is hot house or economic growth, is dangerous, though Eccles sourly admits that it is popular, particularly with people who don’t think, only feel.
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Adam Smith quote for Economics.org.au readers
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 458, IV.2:

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hot walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest absurdity in turning towards any employment thirty times more of the capital and industry of the country than would be necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity of the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though not altogether so glaring, yet exactly of the same kind, in turning towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three-hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which one country has over another be natural or acquired is in this respect of no consequence. As long as the one country has those advantages, and the other wants them, it will always be more advantageous for the latter rather to buy of the former than to make.