A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], The Australian Financial Review, May 12, 1972, p. 3. Reprinted in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 158-60, as “Trouble with Bishops.”

I am used to being castigated by Mavis, Fred, Eccles and almost everyone else, but now the bishops are having a piece of me and this is harder to take.

I don’t resent ecclesiastics being concerned about the twin problems of inflation and unemployment and other similar grave problems. I am not one of those who thinks parsons should stick to the pulpit. Indeed, I would be disappointed if they did. What I find irritating is the bland assumption that economic problems are easily fixed and that they do not often originate from moral causes.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that poverty is as serious as the bishops say. When you look at the ways of abolishing it you realise that the solutions depend on a change in the moral outlook of people as much as on politicians.

For instance, how much money would be needed to redress the poverty position in Australia? Last year the Commonwealth spent about $1,790 million on social welfare. I gather that the church would think we should spend more. How much more? Twice as much?

In 1971-72 we spent about $1,307 million on intoxicating liquor and $547 million on tobacco and cigarettes, a total of $1,854 million. Would this be enough to stop poverty in its tracks?

If you deduct the excise and customs revenue from these items, you still find that we spent $1,069 on liquor and tobacco. This money would surely go a long way to solving our poverty problem. And ceasing to use these two luxuries would immediately reduce the poverty problem itself, because they both directly increase poverty. Yet surely such a reduction would be more a moral than a political problem.

But there are other ways we can tackle poverty. We can spend more money on poverty control and less on education, or defence, or external economic aid, or payments to the states. We will have to cut some of these back if we are going to use more resources on poverty prevention. Which? The bishops don’t say. It would help me if I knew.

Perhaps we could raise more money from income taxation, but here again we run into moral problems. If we increase income tax we reduce the incentive of people to work hard and take risks. People oughtn’t to be like that; they should burn with a desire to help their fellow men, but they are really only keen on helping themselves. So if we want to get much more revenue from income tax, the starting point is to make people better.

And we ought not to ignore the impact on the moral standards of our country of high income tax rates. We know that, even now, a great deal of effort goes into income tax avoidance.

Some of this effort is at least morally questionable, even if it scrapes through legally. Our present tax system encourages people to be “just a bit crook.” To increase tax rates will increase this tendency unless we attain better moral standards first.

Again, we should not ignore the plain fact that, at least with some people, poverty is a self-inflicted wound. We are not supposed to know that some people are in a mess because they drink too much, or gamble too much or are just plain lazy.

This sector, however big or small it may be, goes immediately into the ‘Moral Responsibility’ basket. And if the community is seen to be helping the waster with hand-outs, then surely we encourage others to be wasters also. Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if people weren’t human, all loaded down with human weakness.

And inflation comes about because the difference between the increases in money wages and productivity gets pushed into price rises. This is becoming known as ‘Eccles Law’. To stop inflation you must increase productivity by stopping strikes and silly industrial disputes and by everyone working harder, and by stopping employers increasing prices. In short, you must stop people being lazy and selfish. If they weren’t like that, you wouldn’t have a problem. All you do is to stop them being like that. But is this only my responsibility?

In short, the responsibility for poverty should be shared between the bishops and me. I know from bitter experience I can’t make laws that will make men good and so I am inclined to pass my responsibility over to the bishops. But the bishops seem to be doing the same thing in reverse. My trouble is, the bishops drop their responsibility from such a height that it hurts!

There is something splendid about the conception of the Welfare State. It would work well too, if only we were better people.