Bert Kelly, “A lean time all round,” The Bulletin, January 10, 1984, p. 83.

You will remember the story of the Irish migrant calling to people on the wharf as his ship approached his new country: “Is there a government here?” “Yes,” came the answer. “Well, I’m agin it,” he said.

An Australian would have replied: “Well, I’m gunna lean on it!”

Eccles says that our tendency to lean on the government comes from our past. The convicts and their guards were plonked down in their new land with its heat and flies, its poor food and its snakes and everything else that was strange and uncomfortable and, so, they began even then grizzling at the government and we have been doing it ever since.

Here in South Australia where we were free of the convict stain and were actually founded as a self-help colony, we were different to the other for many years. Indeed, it was only after the Playford era, when we caught the Donny Dunstan disease, that we became as bad as — or even worse than — people in other States. Now, we spend as much time as everyone else pleading for government help for almost everything. “Round and about and underneath us are the government’s everlasting arms and, if they aren’t, they jolly well ought to be,” should be the motto on our coat of arms.

I was encouraged in this line of thinking by reading a piece in The Bulletin of November 22 by Professor Harry Gelber of the Tasmanian University. He was writing about the difficulty of operating the democratic system when everyone expects so much from governments. He wrote:

Trying to reconcile popular or sectional demands for increasingly detailed regulation of some areas of public life with equally powerful demands for a leaner and more accountable public sector may be one of the central problems of government in modern, advanced societies. Another set of difficulties has to do with the absurdities of a system of public finance created by competitive tinkering over several decades.

If one insists on having a sufficiently idiotic fiscal system, with tax structures full of disincentives, with a network of variously privileged monopoly groups, with penalties for success and subsidies for failure, then, however much individual and privileged groups may prosper, the economy cannot work.

For some decades now, more and more people have been shielded from the consequences of their own actions — for example trade unions, the public service, members of the New Class such as teachers — and government has accepted commitments, most obviously in the area of pensions, which it is politically impossible to cancel and economically impossible to honour.

Leaning on the government is an Australian sickness but to blame it all on the convicts is not fair. The British suffer from it, too, and it is a long while since 1066.

But, if I am uncertain about its past, I know how the disease is spread now because I helped spread it.

Before each election, my colleagues and I used to scrape the bottom of the political barrel desperately for some bait to attract the electorate. Dams, universities, pensions, closer settlement schemes, etc came tumbling out of the political gladbag.

And the political pundits in the Press gallery would tip buckets of scorn over us if we rested on our record and say that we were lacking in vision or compassion or something.

There may be something rum about Queenslanders in general and Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government in particular — they are certainly not above buying votes by the most invidious pork-barrelling and I can well understand their resistance to having a public accounts committee — but they have one great thing in their favour: their parliament seldom meets.

It is true they have too many MPs and that these are paid far too much but at least they do not spend all their time passing laws and making regulations which make it so difficult to make a crust, as we do in Canberra and in the other States.

I have just received a letter from an Australian living in Switzerland. She corrects me, saying that their unemployment rate is now 0.8 percent and not 0.4 percent as it was. At least it is not 10 percent, as here.

She says that their MPs are part-timers who earn their living in the rough, cruel world. Their cabinet consists of seven people representing the leading parties and of equal status. And their presidency rotates through their group and their president goes to work on a tram!

She agrees that Switzerland has hardly any natural resources, except the quality of its people, yet it does so well while we who have so much do so badly. Why is this? Let’s do as we always do and blame the government!