Lang Hancock, The Australian, September 6, 1985, p. 10,
as a letter to the editor.

SIR — The efforts of Mr John Leard are laudable and deserve the highest praise for highlighting what should be obvious to every man, woman and child who has passed first year maths, namely, that Australia is heading for ultimate Third World status under IMF control.

There are numerous well-meaning bodies propounding the same theme and emphasising the same problems, but as far as I can see neither Mr Leard nor any of the other groups, who undoubtedly have Australia’s interests at heart, have supplied any answers to the problems resulting from Big Government squandering money per medium of ever-expanding government departments and quangos.

The obvious answer is to gradually do away with the departments — State and federal — that spend not only the taxpayers’ money but whatever money the Government can borrow; mainly for the purpose of buying votes.

No Prime Minister, no Cabinet minister, no MP (except those in extremely safe seats) would ever dare to abolish any one of these gargantuan spenders of the taxpayers’ money.

This being so, Mr Leard and other well-intentioned parties are simply preaching the obvious to the converted without supplying a remedy, because it should be evident that no government can in any way correct any of the evils and still remain in power: governments must inevitably levy higher and higher taxes and increase borrowings to raise funds with which to buy votes in order to retain their seats in Parliament.

To understand fully why the elected representatives of the people are powerless to act in the best interests of the electors, it is necessary to understand just what constitutes government in Australia. In actual fact there are five arms of government:

  1. The ever-expanding giant bureaucracies, whose heads don’t change whichever party the people elect to form a government;
  2. The more militant of the trade unions, whose almost permanent heads remain unchanged after every parliamentary election;
  3. The media in all its forms, which does all the thinking for the majority of the populace, and whose press barons never change irrespective of the number and frequency of elections held.
  4. The big lobby groups who have their hands in the till and are responsible for the imposition of tariffs, quotas and the handing out of subsidies of all kinds.
  5. The elected representatives of the people who can’t do anything about the above four without being expelled by the voter, a great and ever-increasing number of whom receive some form of government handout.

It is easy to see how ineffectual the elected representatives of the people are. Therefore arousing the public to the inevitable consequences of elected government must be abortive unless a remedy is supplied to overcome the evils that we all know are dragging Australia down.

I think there could be some hope of making parliamentary government effective by reorganising any political party which is prepared to endorse the practice (and not only the theory) of free enterprise.

To do this it would be necessary to work from the top and make it party policy to select only those candidates who would take an oath to pass no more laws and, in fact, unwind all laws passed in the last 20 or 30 years without lengthy debate, but on the basis of “the last to come, the first to go.”

Such an innovation would catch the newly elected member in “Morton’s fork” whereby if he voted in Parliament to do away with several government bureaucracies, he may get sufficient approval from his electors to be re-elected; but if he failed to vote according to his oath, his demise would be swift and definite.

This may be a drastic remedy, but Australia is facing a drastic situation, as Mr Leard so clearly illustrates, and will not get out of the headlong drift to bankruptcy unless the high spending, high taxing, high regulation process is reversed.

LANG HANCOCK
Perth