A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “A cow that sucks itself — that’s us!,” The Australian Financial Review, August 23, 1974, p. 3.

When visiting Fred’s place recently I noticed that one of his milking cows was wearing a worried frown and a queer contraption above its mouth and nose. It was a kind of muzzle with many fearsome iron points sticking out from it. Fred explained that the cow persisted in sucking herself and the points in the collar were to hurt the cow if she got her face close enough to her udder and started to suck herself.

When I expressed some doubt as to whether Fred was telling me the truth he got the cow in the bail and removed the contraption and let her go.

Sure enough, she immediately bent herself around nearly double, got one of her teats in her mouth and started to suck herself with evident satisfaction.

I wonder what she was thinking about. Perhaps she was congratulating herself about the quality and quantity of her milk. Certainly she wouldn’t have been in a position to complain about it.

Or perhaps she was thinking that she was getting something for nothing.

You can imagine her saying to herself, “I just can’t understand why Fred gets so stinking. After all, it’s my milk, I make it myself. Why shouldn’t I drink it if I want to?”

I doubt if Fred would see it like this. He thinks that he feeds the cow each morning and night in the expectation of getting some milk for himself and not for the cow. But the cow would argue that if she drank her own milk she would need to eat less of Fred’s feed.

Perhaps she would justify her behaviour by claiming that it gave her something to do — that it created employment and so was a good thing.

Cows that suck themselves are always thinner than other cows. They seem to take more out of themselves than they put back. They are evidently not good converters of milk when they are fully grown.

Anyhow, Fred didn’t bother to argue about the rights and wrongs of the cow’s case. He just got her in the bail again, put on the contraption, kicked her in the guts and turned her out. He doesn’t seem to think much of her or her arguments.

When I told Eccles about the cow, he smiled in his arid way and said that the cow rather reminded him of our economy. He pointed out that there was more than a tendency for us to live by taking in one another’s washing or by sucking ourselves, so to speak.

When I asked for elucidation he gave me as an example the tendency of so many sections of the economy that expect to be subsidised by the Government, but because the Government has no money of its own, any subsidy for one section has to be taken from another section.

So what it really means is that one section is sucking the other. And if we treat the economy as one unit and not as separate sections, then doing this is equivalent to the economy sucking itself, like Fred’s cow.

Eccles took as an illustration the introduction of aged pensions free of the means test. We may make ourselves popular by giving pensions to everyone, but the money comes from taxing either the pensioners or the married couple with a young family — by sucking ourselves, so to speak.

And taxing ourselves in this way is inefficient. Not only has the cost of collection to be met, but the disincentive effect of taxation also. A cow that sucks itself is always skinny.

I could see what Eccles was getting at, that sucking ourselves wasn’t really much sense, but I argued that one advantage of this rather silly system was that it created employment just as it gave the cow something to do.

But Eccles thought I was talking nonsense. It is true that it gave the cow something to do, but it wasn’t something useful, it was just filling in her time.

Indeed, he thought that if sucking herself was a good thing, it would be far more efficient for cows to suck other cows rather than themselves.

This would be much more comfortable for them because one thing was obvious, the contortions that Fred’s cow had to adopt must have been most uncomfortable, for her neck must have ached something awful.

Eccles thought it would be much better if each cow sucked her sister. This would be easier and quicker and wouldn’t create so much employment but I think the cows would be happier and certainly they wouldn’t have such stiff necks.

Fred’s bull said that he didn’t care much what arrangements were made as long as his employment wasn’t jeopardised.