CHAPTER 3
My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage,
and my courage and skill to him that can get it.Valiant-for-Truth, The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
In May 1981 Peter Bowers wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Bert Kelly ... for most of his 19 years in Parliament was single voice with a single issue. Year after year he hammered away first at the Menzies Government, then Holt's then Gorton's then McMahon's then Whitlam's and finally Fraser's on the issue of tariff reduction.
When John McEwen bucketed him no one stirred on the Liberal benches to defend him.
If Kellyism was a lost cause, the slow-talking droll farmer from South Australia, who somehow managed to be totally uncorrupted by politics, has had the satisfaction of seeing that cause taken up and turned into a powerful movement after he quit the Parliament in 1977. Bert Kelly believes he failed ...
John Hyde does not see Bert Kelly as a failure. "He schooled all of us," he says. "Few men get a chance to change the course of history. Bert Kelly may prove to be one of those men."
Bert Kelly, who was conspicuously proud of the chickens he had hatched, knew perfectly well that he had not failed but self-deprecation was his way, sometimes to the irritation of his friends. At one point Bowers' article was singularly perceptive: Kelly's incorruptibility was an outstanding trait upon which his considerable influence ultimately rested.
After losing his seat in the Federal Parliament John Hyde came across a speech he had made early in 1975, when he was still very much a novice MP. Whitlam was then Prime Minister. Vic Garland, the Opposition Whip had procured him the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Opposition.
John remembers being told that all he had to do was to bucket the Government. Which he did, declaring that interest rates were too high. He said that at a time when inflation was high and rising and, if real rates were not already negative, they were soon to become so. At lunch, Bert Kelly dumped himself beside John in the dining room.
"Hyde, did you believe all that bullshit you mouthed this morning."
"Well No, but Vic. ...."
"Well why say it?"
John appreciated only later how much work Bert was prepared to put into him, and John came to regard him as one would a parent one wishes not to disappoint. John has no excuse for the speech, but it was at Kelly's feet that he learned enough for later Whips to ask John not to speak.
Bert Kelly was born in 1912, the great grandson of William Saddler and Jane Kelly who in 1838 immigrated from the Isle of Man to South Australia. Even by the time that the Kellys arrived, the colony was to demonstrate two dry precepts. One was that a society cannot function satisfactorily without a Government that can maintain rules. The other was that, if rules are extended beyond the processes that should regulate commerce by proscribing force and fraud, to prescribe prices, quantities, qualities and other outcomes of production and exchange, as the colony had done by fixing a so called "sufficient price" for land, then chaos, inefficiency and waste are likely. In 1838 the people of Adelaide were experiencing wild inflation, unemployment and serious poverty. Bert, who knew his State's history, would have noted that "sufficient prices" for 1830s South Australian land produced many of the same consequences as "sufficient prices" for 1960s protected manufactures. (34)
The Kelly family was of Methodist stock --hard working, principled, fair-minded, where necessary stubbornly defiant, and with that way with words that marks effective lay preachers. There seems to have been a strong sense of civic responsibility running in their veins. His father, William Stanley (WS) Kelly, born in 1881, served on the SA Pastoral Board, was wounded in France, served on the Tariff Board and was a prominent World War II adviser to the Curtin Government. His grandfather Robert sat in the colonial parliament from 1891 to 1893. His great grandfather William had been a district councilor of Talunga in 1853.
WS Kelly, whose appointment to the Tariff Board in 1929 coincided with the Great Depression, came into contact with the great economic minds of his day. These included EOG Shann (Professor of Economics and History at the University of Western Australia and author of Economic History of Australia), Douglas Copeland (Professor of Economics at Melbourne University), Sir Frederic Eggleston (Victorian MP, diplomat and author of State Socialism in Victoria), and James Brigden (Professor of Economics at the University of Tasmania and chairman of the Brigden Committee which reported on the consequences of the tariff in 1929).
They belonged to a club of the intellectual elite among economic policy advocates, the Round Table, to which they invited WS. Its members were of vastly different backgrounds and differing political perspectives but they seem to have shared a highly developed sense of public duty. These people can but have had a great influence on WS Kelly and through him some further influence upon Bert. The Kellys did not, however, need instruction in public duty: that was family tradition. The extent to which such traditions are handed down culturally or genetically we do not know. It may not be relevant, but my father believed that the propensity to "pull one's weight" is highly heritable among Clydesdales: it may also be so in other species.
Members of the Round Table were creatures of their times as we are of ours. When assessed against today's opinion they, therefore, possessed more than a fair measure of that hang-over from the Enlightenment, an overweening confidence in the capacity of human intelligence that Hayek was later to refer to as "the fatal conceit". They believed that by taking thought they could, if not add one cubit unto their statues, at least manipulate mankind in detail for its benefit -- they were social engineers and planners. They were not, however, economic irrationalists -- on the contrary. From before his appointment to the Tariff Board WS Kelly for one of his time, seems to have been unusually sceptical of visions of development guided by wise men and the hand of authority. It surely reflects credit on the Prime Minister of the time, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, and the development-minded men who advised him that they nevertheless chose Kelly. As the Great Depression deepened the role of the Tariff Board expanded. Every industry sought protection from plummeting prices and few realised or, if they did realise, would accept in public that one industry's protection is another industry's cost.
After the "Fusion" of the Protectionists and Free Traders in 1909 there had been few Federal Parliamentarians who shared WS Kelly's concerns about excessive tariffs. There were, however, some: Sir Hal Colebatch, semi-independent Senator from Western Australia from 1929 to 1933; Henry Gregory a member from 1913 until 1940 who joined the Country Party in 1920; Charles Hawker, within the UAP in the 1930s; and Charles Russell in the Country Party but briefly from 1949 to 1951. Each had been a consistent economic rationalist more interested in prosperity and equity than in their careers.
Bert Kelly particularly admired Charles Hawker, the MP for Wakefield in South Australia from 1931 until his death in an aeroplane crash in 1938. Wakefield was later Bert's own constituency. Hawker, who had a distinguished World-War-I record, had been badly wounded, teaching himself to walk with the aid of callipers only by a feat of great endurance.
Shaun Kenaelly tells of how, only three days after his maiden speech, Hawker intervened during Question Time; attempting to quiz the Minister for Trade on a new Tariff Schedule, introduced without apparent reference to the Tariff Board. He was ruled out of order. (It took John Hyde more than four years before he mustered the confidence to take Ministers on at question time.) Hawker was appointed to the Lyons Ministry in 1932. He fought within it against high tariffs, more or less a lone voice for such time as he was there, but was not included in the delegation to the Ottawa Conference that established a preferential trading system within the British Empire, despite his department having done much of the preliminary work. He resigned only months after his appointment, when he felt obliged to support a motion reducing MP's salaries having earlier told his constituency he would do so and because he believed that the necessary sacrifices of the time ought to start at the top. He remained on the backbench until his death.
Over twenty years before Bert became an MP, Hawker had encouraged him in the direction of public office. The episode can only have occurred shortly before Hawker's death when Bert was in his early 20s. Bert was later to report:
One day [Hawker] said, "Look Bert," he said, "I want you to prepare yourself to take over from me when I can't go on, when I resign from Wakefield". I said "Look, I'd rather be dead than in politics!" He said "Look, I'm not asking you what you want Bert. I'm just telling you where your duty lies". (35)
Bert did, however, raise the possibility of politics with Lorna, whom he had recently married. She gave him a firm thumbs down. Over sixty years later she observed to me that the young tempt fate!
Bert was an innovative farmer, well ahead of his time. He had a peasant's affection for and pride in his property, Merrindie, at Tarlee, 80 km North of Adelaide. If John Hyde's son had not wanted to farm he could have sold his farm with barely a glance back, but not Bert. Yet he was not constrained by his boundary fences. He was one of the first two Australian Nuffield Scholars and from the time that he left school he had felt obliged to serve and to teach -- Sunday school, soil conservation committees, show judging, the State Advisory Board of Agriculture and a column, Dave's Diary, in The Stock Journal. I know plenty of superb farmers with strong peasant instincts but no others who so strongly felt the obligation to share their knowledge. I know once-good farmers who serve on boards but very few who provide that genuine leadership which can be offered only by tackling the unpopular causes. It is surely a considerable irony that, if socialism were to have a snowball's chance in Hades, it would depend upon people like Bert Kelly to make it work! Bert attributed the Nuffield scholarship and the long round of talks after it with his becoming known and therefore able to win endorsement for Wakefield later. (36)
Bert won the seat of Wakefield, on the retirement of Sir Philip McBride in 1958. He was fortunate in his marriage. For the first time Bert now came in the way of a temptation that few people making a name for themselves manage to resist, the temptation to take themselves too seriously. Some pomposity gives useful gravitas to those on top regulating and ordering according to the wisdom and authority of their time. It lends only absurdity to those who are trying to buck the system. In the company of the delightful Lorna, pomposity invokes its own hazards. She was Bert's committed helpmate and she was also his most effective critic with whom he discussed tactics and tested those politically effective quips for which he became renowned.
He threw down the gauntlet, very gently, at the feet of the protectionists in his maiden speech but it is doubtful whether any took it seriously and none bothered then to pick it up. Protection was then very much the received wisdom and its archpriest was John McEwen. McEwen had left the parliament by the time that John Hyde came to it but Bert once told John that dealing with McEwen was difficult because, unlike many who came cap in hand for protection from competition, McEwen actually believed in it. McEwen did believe in protection but he believed in it so strongly that he allowed his end to justify means he not to have countenanced.
Peter Howson noted a party-room tussle that occurred in 1966:
a long debate initiated by Bert Kelly on customs tariff procedures in the House of Representatives. I had hoped that it might have led to constructive improvements, but instead it became a brawl between Kelly and John McEwen which, of course, was won by McEwen.
Shaun Kenaelly observes that Bert did not bother to record the episode in his diary. He was too accustomed to losing battles that must be fought again and yet again to bother.
However, before that, Bert, like any other MP, had to learn his new trade. In his first term he was appointed to the Forster Committee to inquire into a grandiose scheme to grow peanuts in the Northern Territory and to fatten cattle upon them. The committee brought down a report that said in effect that the peanuts would grow and the cattle would do very well upon them but that the more peanuts that the cattle ate the more money the farmers would lose. After the committee had reported Bert and his brother Bill went to the Northern Territory in the parliamentary break to see if they could find a less costly way to develop peanut farms. They chained scrub themselves driving a borrowed pair of D8 tractors. Not many MPs would do that! Bert's instinctive doubts about Government utopianism can only have been reinforced by this experience. He was later to be a sharp critic of that economic fiasco, the Ord irrigation scheme. He knew little about irrigation but, when all about were suffering that loss of reticence that is so often associated with the expenditure of other people's money, "Knocker Kelly" would ask questions of people who understood an issue, in that case irrigation. There is much nonsense talked about the role of "vision" in politics and critics accused him periodically of being "a little Australian".
He claimed to have had it explained to him while visiting Queensland that the Northern Territory would never be able to sell peanuts for human consumption so long as Charlie Adermann, the Minister for Agriculture, represented Kingaroy. Bert discovered that the Queensland producers were subsidised by alone being permitted to import duty-free peanut oil to mix with their product. I do not believe that Bert can have been quite as surprised as he pretended. The monopoly position of sugar-growers and refiners -- and peanuts were the same -- had led Shann, in his Economic History, to compare Queensland to the plantation-economy of the American South, before the Civil War. (37) Shann had been a friend and adviser to WS Kelly and Bert was well acquainted with his writings from before he went to Canberra. It was no doubt healthy that he should be reminded, however, that the political corruption that produced the tariff for Melbourne had its counterparts elsewhere.
In 1961 Bert travelled to the United Kingdom to address the annual Conference of the British Farmers Economic Society. Shaun Kenaelly describes the speech as representing a watershed for Bert. It was an important speech that probably for the first time presented him with the difficulties of speaking on behalf of his nation. It was not an opportunity to conduct a domestic argument but an opportunity to put the domestic argument in a philosophical and an international context, if he could do so while not undermining his Government before an overseas audience. He achieved all these things and no doubt disciplined his own thinking in the process. On similar occasions I know that John Hyde was forced to assess his arguments. At one point he departed from his text to tell this story. He was to use it on other occasions, one of which was to throw a spluttering translator service at the Council of Europe into disarray. As Kenaelly repeats it:
The story was about that legendary Australian couple Dave and Mabel, who came to Sydney from the bush and stayed at a hotel where the plumbing was much different to what they were used to at home. At 10 o'clock Mabel complained of feeling thirsty so Dave went out and got her a glass of water. At 11 o'clock she was still thirsty so he got her another glass of water. At 12 o'clock the same thing happened and when Dave this time came back with an empty glass, Mabel asked "What's wrong, Dave?" and he replied "There is someone sitting on the well!" And after about three minutes, when the laughter had died down, I added "And you sods are sitting on our well!
The "well" was Australia's opportunity to export, the "water" foreign exchange with which to buy British imports and the "someone sitting" was the British Government. Bert's humour was never wasted.
From early in his parliamentary life Bert "worked the media". Most politicians do but, unlike most politicians, Bert's efforts to gain media recognition were motivated not by the desire to be re-elected but to gain public backing for his ideas. Like the think tanks discussed in Chapter 5 he understood, probably instinctively, that his was but a small voice in need of much amplification or, in the language of the think tanks, all that he could do was to feed the right ideas into conduits that already operated. No doubt it was because his intentions were not self-serving that journalists gave him respect which they did not accord to most MPs. What is more, in his blacker moments he must surely have looked upon electoral defeat as merciful release with honour. Later, with less cause, John Hyde did.
Politicians without self-doubt, if half credible, are potentially dangerous. On the other hand, not to run the risk of being periodically wrong is to ensure that one does nothing useful. Self-doubt is thus a heavy incubus and all but the most self-confident crusaders crave indications that they are not latter-day Don Quixotes. It is not just a matter of being right, moreover. One can sometimes be reasonably sure of that merely by following expert opinion. To explain it all to others and to avoid credibility-sapping gaffes the crusader needs to understand his cause. Kenaelly reports a diary entry in which Bert laments "I am afraid I came into Parliament with an ordinary farmer's education and I find it quite exhausting trying to keep up with all the economic theories which I am expected to know about". He, therefore, spent long hours, with the help of Samuelson, the most commonly employed undergraduate's textbook of the time, to educate himself in at least mainstream economics. Although over time he was to benefit from the assistance of very many senior economists (perhaps even a majority of them) he also became significantly his own expert. Economists respected him sufficiently to argue with him. I once heard three take him to task at a dinner engagement for what they had believed was an erroneous conclusion that he had reached in one of his newspaper articles.
Following Menzies' one-seat win in 1961, the Party returned to Canberra in poor psychological shape and recrimination was rife. The Country Party was relatively stronger within the Coalition and McEwen was pressing for higher protection. McEwen sought a return to import licensing but the Treasury view opposing this and Australia's membership of the GATT, which proscribed import licensing, prevailed. Instead the Government adopted tariff quotas and a system of "temporary assistance" to be granted on the advice of a Special Advisory Authority (SAA). The rationale was to fast-track decisions but the principal motivation was no doubt to avoid public disclosure by by-passing the public inquiry processes of the Tariff Board. (Tariff quotas place a prohibitively high tariff upon an import and allow limited entry to favoured quota holders. These quotas allowed the possessors to sell at hugely marked-up prices, albeit on a limited quantity of imported goods. The quotas traded for sometimes remarkably high prices and untaxed capital gains.)
The campaign conducted by Bert Kelly in 1961 to protect and preserve the integrity of the public inquiry process was not as detailed as, for instance, that organised by the Dries against the motor car protection in 1981. It was, however, similar in most important respects and serves as the archetypal example of others that it would be too tedious to describe in detail. He faced much the same dilemmas and had much the same sort of opportunities as did the parliamentary Dries from 1978 to 1983 but, unlike those MPs who were to rely heavily on mutual encouragement and shared work-load, Bert was virtually on his own within the parliament. I remain in awe of what he achieved.
Returning to Canberra for the new parliament he sought advice from Ged Chislett, economist to the Australian Woolgrowers and Graziers Council with an excellent knowledge of Country Party thinking, and Dick Boyer of the Tariff Board. This advice not only gave him a better idea of what to expect from the Government but also gave him confidence that he really did understand the issue itself. Throughout his long campaign his knowledge of how to get, recognise and use good advice was among his greatest strengths.
Bert had intended to go on the attack at the party meeting on the morning of his meeting with Boyer and later again that day in the parliament. He was, however, confronted by political considerations and instead ended up defending the Government facing a cock-a-hoop Labor Party on a confidence motion. This type of situation is not uncommon and to have attacked the Government while the confidence motion was hanging over its head would have cost him the support of the people he most needed to convince. Nevertheless, his failure to proceed probably was not understood by those outside the parliament who might have wondered if he had lost his courage.
However much in disagreement, backbenchers do not normally ambush their own front bench. Kelly, therefore, sought an appointment with McEwen who nevertheless went overseas without responding to the request. (38) The care with which Kelly played the game by the established rules of his party was to be a source of considerable strength noted by future Dries. John Hyde believes that any competent Minister of his day would have made time for that meeting but, if anecdote be sufficient guide, Ministerial arrogance was a bigger problem then than in Fraser's time. McEwen's attitude would have been different had Bert possessed a vote in the Country Party room.
Bert took an opportunity to stir up the South Australian Graziers, telling them to get behind Chislett. Such networking was a feature of each dry campaign as it was no doubt of wet campaigns. Kenaelly catalogues another feature of this campaign that was also a feature of every campaign that John Hyde was associated with. That was the difficulty in establishing quickly what Cabinet was up to and whether there were divisions within it that might be exploited. Bits of information would dribble out but Coalition Ministers were very reluctant to breach Cabinet secrecy.
When, in the party room, a week later, Kelly raised the impending changes to the means by which tariffs would be set, McEwen was overseas. On the day that was an advantage. Menzies conceded that Bert's points had substance and agreed to make a statement on the following week. (If Bert was wise to take such a vague undertaking seriously, then he was at least in that one sense better placed than were Dries of twenty years on.) He devoted the week to lobbying -- it is a long process and he did not have the advantage of sharing the workload.
By the next week he had gleaned enough information to know that he would not like the impending legislation. He worked out his party room tactics with Tasmanian Senator Reg Wright, an erratic but gutsy ally. Bert was called first and made what he believed was a fair fist of frightening the Minister immediately responsible, Denham Henty, but Menzies intervened last and placated the party room with the promise of a general inquiry. When the backbenchers came to read the actual legislation they concluded that Henty had misled them. That too was normal in John Hyde's day but they had the advantage of committee scrutiny of the actual bills before the party meeting and Dries could arrange to have a member attend most relevant committees. Bert told Alex Downer, who would have told Menzies, that in light of the proposals he might have to speak and vote against the Government. Years later they still sought out susceptible Ministers to scare.
An exceptional event now occurred. Bert, no doubt honouring an understanding, declined to confide it even in his diary. He had sought and gained a meeting with Menzies at which Menzies seems to have told Bert of his difficulty in dealing with McEwen. They further talked on the plane to Melbourne. My reading between the lines is that Menzies offered him encouragement but no help. So long as he did not imperil the Government, Bert was made free to criticise but he was on his own. Whatever took place, I can vouch for Bert Kelly's high regard for Menzies beyond the latter's death.
When the Tariff Bill was introduced Bert spoke against its provisions but did not cross the floor. The Government's majority was one. There was no room to grandstand. Had he done so, it would have posed a dilemma for Labor which was as protectionist as the Coalition. My guess is that in the heat of the moment it would have defeated the Government and at least discrediting it. However, upon reintroduction of the measure, under pressure from its union constituency, it would have voted in a block with the Government and that would not have helped the Tariff Board or the cause of low protection. Bert had previously had Sir Leslie Melville, the chairman of the Tariff Board, read his intended speech -- for safety's sake. If the speech had merely pointed to the inefficiency of protection and consequent depression of living standards it would have received less notice. Kelly contended that the Government's way of granting the privilege to raise prices to some at the expense of others was capricious, not monitored and wrong! His indictment was fundamentally a moral one.
It received substantial press coverage. I would be surprised if someone from the Tariff Board had not alerted members of the press gallery that the speech was about to be made but that will never be known. The Age described it as one of the strongest made by a Government member since the Menzies Government took office. Both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald addressed it in editorials, the surest indication that they realised its importance. The Age, despite its protectionist tradition, commented:
It may be that Mr. Kelly detects graver dangers than are, in fact, likely or possible. But that does not lessen the worth of his warning or of his attempt to defend the long-established and well-tried principle of independent inquiry into tariff preferences. Certain groups of manufacturers have mounted a sustained campaign for the reintroduction of import restrictions in one form or another and the pressure is continuing now that partial success has been won.
The Sydney Morning Herald took a stronger line.
Mr. Kelly rightly condemns the Minister's power to select special advisers to investigate claims at private hearings. Whatever spokesmen for the Government may claim, the Tariff Board's authority is being seriously weakened. Neither Ministers nor public officials can be trusted to pay sufficient attention to the efficiency of claimants and the economic nature of their activities. An independent and experienced Tariff Board is an indispensable safeguard against the inevitable log-rolling that occurs. Mr. Kelly's chief contribution, however, has been to strip some of the pretence from an abject political retreat.
The Associated Chambers of Manufactures of Australia responded to the speech with a published letter to the Editor of The Age. It would have served its cause better if, at that stage, it had not given Bert the additional standing. The staff and boards of industry associations, however, are as prone as politicians to grandstanding before their constituencies.
McEwen was still away and Menzies made a mild defence of Government policy acknowledging that the legislation would allow for quantitative restrictions. He described Bert as "my thoughtful and able friend" but did not answer Bert's criticisms, for which failure The Sydney Morning Herald took him to task. Malcolm Fraser and Harry Turner, both Government backbench MPs, identified themselves with Bert's line. Fraser feared that quantitative restrictions might "spread like a cancer" through the body of Australian industry.
It is worth noting in passing that the Department of Trade, despite its battle with the Tariff Board, had given Bert all the technical assistance that he sought -- there is a certain professionalism among our senior civil servants that begets respect.
After the passage of the Tariff Bill, Kelly persisted in the face of mounting denigration. Kenaelly records:
Arthur Calwell, then Leader of the Opposition, called him over one day, after Bert had been given a fairly rough reception by the House, including the rage of Government supporters. Calwell told him: "I don't agree with what you are saying, Bert, but I will defend your right to say it. Don't let them frighten you."
I can but assume that Bert felt both flattered and encouraged by that advice. I would have been. It is a measure of the vitriol that was poured upon Bert that Calwell should have felt constrained to offer it. The circumstance contrasts sharply with the experience of later dry MPs. They faced orchestrated abuse from particularly the textile, motor and airline lobbies but their parliamentary colleagues and parliamentary opponents neither abused nor slandered them.
Shaun Kenaelly quotes from an interview of Bert Kelly by the Parliamentary Library, in 1986:
I don't know really, it's a shameful period. The Liberal Ministers used to come to me privately and urge me to keep on going. They were activated more by party politics than economic principles, I fear. They reckoned the Country Party was getting too much influence at the expense of the Liberal Party, and that's what was really worrying them. Les Bury was one of those that understood why it was important that our cost structure, fostered by a carelessly administered tariff system, was getting out of hand, and everybody can now see the damage that was done. But the Liberals were frightened of McEwen, that's the truth of it. He was a bonny fighter and he could clobber you like hell. McMahon knew the damage that was being done but McEwen wasn't easy to handle. He had a religious zeal about him and he wasn't choosy the way he went about clobbering people.
It was indeed a shameful period.
While this furore was still running, Bert found himself involved in a dispute within both party room and Parliament over protection for the dairy industry. It was, if anything, more bitter and Bert worried that he might come to be regarded within the Coalition as a mere troublemaker. The patience of the party room is limited. You can tell when you are losing its attention as members turn to their newspapers while you are speaking and Governments do not listen when your colleagues ignore you. Credibility within it must, therefore, be husbanded.
Bert tried to appeal across the House. At the time only Reg Pollard seemed interested but we know from later political events that he must have at some point impressed Gough Whitlam.
Bert Kelly was a realist defending the integrity of the tariff-setting process and a believer in lower protection. He cautioned John Hyde against claiming absolute purity in the matter of trade. Whether this position was tactical -- a free-trader was more readily ridiculed and on any journey concentration must centre upon the next not the last step -- or whether it, being the position he had inherited from his father, was a position that he barely questioned, I don't know. His logic, however, if taken to its conclusion, was free trade.
Bert developed his contacts, indeed he cultivated them assiduously. As Temporary Assistance Authority (TAA) decisions usurped the powers of the Tariff Board, both importers and manufacturers were caught in what were no doubt the unintended consequences of its rulings. One firm's protection is necessarily another's cost and not all who engage in commerce are so honourable that their "information" may be relied upon. Bert found cases of importers crippled by tariff-duties imposed by the TAA on the grounds that a local manufacturer was making an identical product when it was actually substantially different from the import. Other manufacturers, whose operations relied upon imported materials or components, found that their operations were unexpectedly prevented, sometimes in favour of another manufacturer down the street. Businesses that lacked political patronage turned to the one federal MP whom they had heard was taking a sympathetic interest in their plight.
During an evening and the following morning in October 1962 Bert Kelly made sixteen prepared speeches challenging the preferments afforded several industries by the TAA. Neither John Hyde nor any of the parliamentary Dries of his time were to attempt anything comparable. And this was before the days when backbench MPs had staff to assist them. Although he no doubt had the help of Chislett, the AWGC's economist, the amount of preparation required must have sorely tried him.
He was, however, by now gathering support. Jim Forbes and Fred Chaney Snr (father of the Fred Chaney who was later Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and then Social Security) made a point of intervening whenever he seemed to be flagging. Reg Pollard from the Labor benches -- probably the only other MP who had read most of the reports under debate -- was in frequent agreement. Malcolm Fraser chipped in to question the temporary assistance "required" by Australian Paper Manufacturers when it was making good profits. Even more significantly, he obtained the support of Hugh Leslie, the Country Party Member who held what was to one day to be John Hyde's seat of Moore. Given rising tempers within the Country Party, this intervention required some courage.
McEwen responded to Bert but only in general terms, avoiding the specific accusations. He did not manage to quite disguise his rising choler, a fact that a few journalists picked up. Press coverage was wide and supportive. The National Farmers Union, on behalf of its fourteen affiliates, weighed in with its support and it was the support that Kelly was enjoying among farmers' organisations that most worried the Country Party. It was, however, the businesses that approached him with tales of how duties on inputs, such as yarns and cloth, affected their ability to manufacture without themselves receiving added protection to allow them to raise consumers' prices that best demonstrated the ridiculous nature of the protective process that by-passed the Tariff Board.
For an evening and a morning parliament functioned as convention would have us believe it functions. Some Country Party MPs appreciated that Bert was going some way towards making them look unprincipled. With some sections of the press the Country Party and its successors were never, at least until Tim Fischer's leadership, quite to recover.
Bert Kelly was now to overstep the mark that Menzies could permit -- the point where the feud might result in the Country Party withdrawing from the Coalition and allowing Labor into office. The Chairman of the Tariff Board, Sir Leslie Melville, was feuding with McEwen over the independence of the Board and the resources available to it to conduct its inquiries. Melville eventually came to regard his position as untenable and proffered his resignation. McEwen attempted to portray the resignation as a simple re-posting of civil servant. Bert (and Labor) attempted to bring its real causes into the open.
Labor opened the issue and Bert tried to raise it in the party room but was cut short by Menzies. Some days later he asked McEwen this question:
Has the Minister studied the last paragraph of the Tariff Board's annual report in which the Board states that for staffing and "other important reasons" it feels that the establishment of the Tariff Board should be separate from the Department of Trade? Does he know what are the "other important reasons" referred to? Is the Minister considering the Board's suggestion that the establishments of the two bodies be separated? Is he aware that if this were done it would give the public greater confidence that the Board was not being subjected to pressure by the Department of Trade?
Bert knew what the only honest reply could be. It was loaded question of the "have you stopped beating your wife" variety. The Hansard contains a milder version but the press gallery records that McEwen, whose temper got the better of him, concluded his reply:
I think it ill becomes the honourable member to suggest that there is a want of confidence on the part of the public in the Tariff Board. I think this has been stimulated by the honourable member for Wakefield more than any other single person.
Bert sat there and took it (John Hyde was to learn that it is all that in such circumstances a backbencher can do.) The accusation, however, elicited cries of "Shame" from Government benches. Bert records in his diary that even his opponents and members of the press told him that they resented McEwen's outburst. Press reportage of the question was wide, as was its analysis of Sir Leslie's resignation, and it was very critical of McEwen. Labor took up the attack and argument ensued over the tabling of the relevant correspondence, during which McEwen unwisely said that, although he would not table it, Sir Leslie was at liberty to make a statement of his own. Bert learned from Alan Carmody, the head of the Department of Trade, that Melville had prepared such a statement. When the statement did not eventuate, Kelly rang Carmody who was now very cagey.
Kelly's wish to square accounts with McEwen probably affected his judgement but not entirely. He prepared a statement for the party room. John Hyde cannot recall anyone bringing a written brief to a party meeting but perhaps some did. Although nominally private meetings, party rooms leak like sieves. He showed it to a close associate of Menzies who no doubt warned Menzies. When the time came to address the joint party meeting Bert received quite a bit of support but Menzies arose and descended upon him from a great height and gave McEwen the opportunity to do the same. That ended that debate! Such is politics. In the House Menzies maintained a lofty indifference.
Bert was able more cautiously to raise the Melville issue again in the party room. He also delivered a lengthy and learned speech in the House dealing with the history and consequences of quantitative restrictions and of the place of a Tariff Board that was independent of Government direction. He had succeeded in defining principles that were to influence Whitlam when twelve years later Labor was to legislate for the Industries Assistance Commission.
The efforts of many people turned the protection debate, but among them Bert, a man of extraordinary tenacity, stands out. 1962 marked the beginnings of a watershed. Radical legislative change would have to wait for Bob Hawke and Paul Keating but freer trade was never from that time to be without informed advocates.
This passage, made to conclude a long speech, appealed to institutional morality. It marks Bert Kelly as what was later known as dry:
I feel that we are drifting away from the straight and narrow path of fiscal rectitude. I do not pretend that treading that path is ever easy, and I have a great deal of sympathy with the Minister in this, but if we wander off the path of fiscal rectitude in the search of easy popularity, then we will certainly jeopardise our present successful system, which has played an important part in the development of Australia.
The issues concerned efficiency but more fundamentally they concerned propriety and the employment of Government powers held in trust.
After his success in 1962 Bert was given fewer opportunities to use the parliament to tilt at big names. Although his influence within it had probably reached its height by 1963, his influence outside continued to grow. He had developed lasting respect in the press gallery and among editors. R.W.C. Anderson, the director-general of the Associated Chambers of Manufactures of Australia (ACMA), unwisely from the standpoint of protected manufacturers, decided to take Bert on in sustained polemical exchange. Bert would make a well-reported speech of the moment. Reply came then not from the Government but dutifully from Anderson of the ACMA. This provided Kelly with the publicity that he needed to maintain interest in the case for freer trade. He told me that during these years Anderson, albeit unwittingly, gave him more much-needed assistance than anybody else. It is an axiom to some Dries that, when one is confident of one's case, criticism should be courted. I remain amazed that Anderson seems never to have understood that he was being goaded into responding. McEwen, who was never unprepared to sacrifice pawns, may have encouraged him, but why?
In one way Bert's position had improved. At the 1963 election the Coalition increased its majority from one to twenty two and the Country Party's relative influence in the Coalition was weakened. Menzies was, therefore, in a position to give him more leeway. It is interesting to speculate upon whether the Bert's exposure of McEwen's weaknesses was not another reason for the changed balance of influence within the Coalition. If so, then it was no part of his design.
Beginning with a speech at Orange, McEwen began a protracted campaign to develop a national profile to challenge Liberal dominance or perhaps to make a Country Party-Labor Coalition possible. In the coming years the Country Party was to change its name twice. The Orange speech itself was xenophobic and populist, not unlike those of Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s. The Country Party did a deal with Labor for Western Australian seats in which Labor was to get Forrest on Country Party preferences and the Country Party was to hold Canning and win Moore on Labor Party preferences. It was a period of much animosity between the coalition partners.
From 1963 to 1965 Bert Kelly, nevertheless, slowly lost ground with his parliamentary colleagues. McEwen had succeeded in painting him a free trader, a crank and one who was unlikely to win. In those days, the free trade goal and sharp reduction of protection later successfully prosecuted by Hawke and Keating were unthinkable, despite the big worldwide reductions in protection following the Kennedy Round of the GATT showing how isolated Australia was. The charge made credibly that he could never win cost him support. People do not follow causes without hope. His portrayal as a crank cost him credibility and in politics credibility is everything. It is for these years, while he pressed on, now losing ground, that I admire him most.
Prior to the 1964 election Bert Kelly received the following press account of a speech that McEwen had made to the employees of Bruck Mills:
Mr. McEwen today pledged himself to "look after" Bruck Mills. He made the promise at a lunch-hour address to 300 employees at the mill. He said, "As long as I am Minister for Trade, this factory will be safe. I'm not saying it won't be safe under anybody else. Let the other bloke talk for himself. But as long as I am Minister for Trade, I will look after this industry as I have today."
So much for the objectivity and fairness of protection procedures. After the election Bert used it in a tariff debate to illustrate the contrast between what was actually happening and Menzies' promise that protection should serve the national interest. McEwen rose in fury but Charlie Adermann, the Minister for Primary Industry, grabbed him by the coat tails and pulled him back, "Steady, Jack, Steady." The episode was seen from the gallery and reported.
Bert had on many occasions attacked the statutory marketing schemes and was turning more of his attention to domestic protection, that is, to those anti-competitive measures not involving internationally traded goods, although he did not take up health care, legal services, education or aviation. The following question without notice to Charlie Adermann concerning a new egg-marketing bill illustrates his style. He asked whether the minister
is aware that most of the eggs produced in South Australia are produced by flocks containing fewer than 50 birds. Is the levy which, I understand, is to be the basis of the projected egg-marketing scheme, to be paid on all flocks containing over 20 birds? Will this mean that each flock will have to be counted by an inspector? Will the Minister tell me how this will be done in my case, as most of my fowls live either in the header or in trees?
The House erupted in laughter and the Bill was given a considerable rewriting.
Another excerpt from Hansard illustrates another aspect of him:
Australia was not developed in the past by singing "Oh, how beautiful to sit in the shade". It was developed by those who went out and did things. A bit more of such a spirit and attitude in this House and a bit less careless, easy criticism about free trade would be, I think, of general benefit to our country.
That was moralising pure and simple in the manner of his Methodist forebears. All of his issues were at bottom moral issues. Perhaps as much may be said of all political issues, but Bert was exceptional in that instinctively he asked first about anything, is it right, and he could moralise without sounding holier-than-thou. I never heard Bert mention the Levellers or John Lilburne, and I wonder if he realised how much of what he stood for had seen a brief flowering as early as 1648. He was, however, well enough versed in more recent liberal tradition. Among his difficulties was the fact that the Liberal Party was not.
As might be expected Bert gave evidence to the Vernon Committee. His evidence of course dealt with the necessity of maintaining a non-political tariff setting process and with the dangers of quantitative restrictions. He took up his opponents' national development agenda but argued that it had no future in Australian isolationism.
How long can we survive, isolated as we are, on the edge of Asia, with our standard of living continually rising, while the gap between our standard of living and that of our neighbours continues to widen?
He was wrong about the gap in our living standards and that of our neighbours. It was soon to become evident that our neighbours were catching up very quickly indeed. The adverse consequences of our irrational economics were about to become more evident than even he had anticipated. He however anticipated by twenty years another Hawke-Keating thrust -- the necessity of trading with Asia. When the Vernon Report was eventually tabled in 1965, it contained much that he, many of his allies outside the parliament, Treasury and indeed any dry, found unpalatable. It nevertheless supported open inquiry before protection was granted. Bert's stand had consistently been that modest protection was acceptable but only when enacted through a process that was open and by which the public was protected from self-interested lobbyists.
Menzies at last asserted his supremacy over McEwen, rejecting the report. The debate had moved on, leaving Bert in its wake. If Bert had adopted the more free trade line towards which his logic pointed, in the climate of the time he would probably have achieved little. Bert Kelly will be remembered not just for his contribution to trade policy -- that is, for what he changed -- but also for why he changed it. He protected, nurtured and preserved a philosophy. He was remarkably consistent. He regarded restrictions on immigration in much the same light as he saw trade-barriers.
Bert was writing a newspaper column before he entered parliament. He possessed a rare and considerable talent that he probably inherited more from his mother than his much more widely-published father. His laconic wit for many years earned him a huge following and the fury of protected manufacturers. He began Dave's Diary, his first newspaper column, in the 1940s. That column, a whimsical account of the conversations of a young farmer, Dave, with his neighbour Clarkson, like all of his writings, was intended to instruct. Originally the instruction was in farming practice rather than national affairs but that was to change. While conducting his epic campaign against the Temporary Assistance Authority he used Dave's conversations with Clarkson, who was by then a politician, to explain the current ramifications of industry protection to readers of The Stock Journal.
He began writing his weekly Modest Member, later Modest Farmer columns for Australian Financial Review. He was to write over 800. In these his principle cast comprised Mavis the Modest Member's wife, Fred the farmer and Eccles the economist. There was fun in all of it but here too he never wrote just for fun. Every article had its lesson. The best of these articles are gathered under the titles One More Nail (39) and Economics Made Easy.
A partial quotation from one of the better known of the less flippant chapters gives something of their flavour. It follows his 1964 visit to two big factories in Bombay, as a member of a Parliamentary delegation, one reconstituting skim milk, the other manufacturing cotton sheeting.
Certainly Australia had plenty of skimmed milk powder to sell them. I asked them if they had any troubles and they said only one: "We like your skim milk powder, but we have difficulty in getting enough foreign exchange so that we can buy enough of it."
Next, he tells of visiting a cotton sheeting factory and asking them if they had any troubles:
"Only one," they said. "You people in Australia put a tariff of 55% against our sheets so that we can't sell them in your country and this prevents us from earning foreign exchange."
I find it so difficult to see the sense in all this. The Australian dairy farmer can't sell his skim milk powder, the Australian housewife has to buy dear sheets, the Indian kids can't get milk and the efficient Indian sheet factory can't make sheets. And this is brought about by the good and wise Government which Mavis says I can't criticise.
Bert was aware of the role that trade barriers had played in inflicting the First and particularly the Second World Wars upon the world. As Sir Hal Colebatch had asserted well before WW II, Kelly reminded us again that "If goods cannot cross frontiers armies will"
Menzies retired and after the 1966 election Harold Holt appointed Bert to the Ministry. This, for as long as his Ministry lasted, silenced him in public debate.
Bert had understood the meaning of "economic rectitude" long before it was popular to talk of free markets and balanced budgets; in particular he understood, even by the mid-sixties, that unless Australians restructured the supply side of their economy, then no amount of macro-economic wizardry could save us from declining relative living standards. To establish its nature he often quoted ministers' own words. It is remarkable that, in spite of the many thousands of his own words recorded in readily accessible form in newspapers and in Hansard, and in spite of his practice of hoisting others with their own petards, no one very effectivly hoist Bert with his. He was too consistent.
In 1991, Paul Keating observed to Bert that, if he and everyone else had listened to him 20 years before, then Australia would not be in the mess it was. (40) By then the wheel had turned full circle: Bert had become popular. In 1988 the general managers of BHP, Western Mining, CRA and Mount Isa Mines had hosted a dinner to honour him. The Great Hall of the Victorian Art Centre was filled. Many of Kelly's old allies came to do him honour as did several of his old opponents. I thought that some of the latter looked a mite uncomfortable and on that score I confess to having been amused.
This chapter has been the account of an exceptionally tenacious and honourable man and how he employed the opportunities and the responsibilities of a parliamentarian to further the public good. It should offer instruction to any backbench MP, who wishes to change the course of history for the better. Over the long haul Bert had been effective in doing the only political thing that really mattered: determining public policy. He had understood and employed Parliament's educative function. He had understood that while getting the numbers may change the people in power, public policy that outlasts them must be changed by changing public opinion. He therefore spoke directly to the people. When the Centre for Independent Studies and Centre 2000 instituted the Adam Smith award, he was the obvious first recipient.
Bert, for a long time a lonely dry, was an exemplar to all who followed. Plenty of people told him in private that they agreed with him but ideas that remain private don't change much. As Bert saw the end of his own parliamentary career approaching he encouraged younger MPs -- his chickens. John Hyde had the honour of being taught and tyrannised by him and in moments of greatest doubt he was to ask himself, would Bert approve?
His aims always transcended the next election. There was an occasion during the 1975 Bass by-election campaign when Vic Garland, then their whip, was urging all in the party room to go to Tasmania and assist. Launceston, the only major population centre in Bass, was home to textile manufacturing companies and the Opposition campaign concentrated upon opposition to Whitlam's 25% tariff cut. Bert told the Party Room that he was prepared to go but that he felt he should warn the whip that he would be "on Gough's side". Fraser was quick to say that he was excused. Incidents like that one caused politicians who did not understand or would not accept his aims to aver that Bert was without political judgment, yet he had more influence on public policy than most who climb the political greasy pole to the top.
Few could have endured the disappointments, setbacks and spectacles of sheer cowardice in high places that Bert Kelly witnessed, and still pressed on. He hand-wrote the following by Arthur Hugh Clough on the flyleaf of my copy of One More Nail.
Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright.
He did little without a purpose: it was intended to keep my nose to the grindstone. I have met no man in my short life that I have admired more than Bert Kelly. There is nothing in my contact with public life of which I am more proud than that I think Kelly came to believe that I did, despite much backsliding, pass muster. Disinterested tippler though I am, his ghost might appreciate that I would be afraid to get drunk with it lest I collapse laughing or in tears contemplating my own shortcomings.
ENDNOTES
34. This chapter, although tempered by my experience of Bert who was my mentor and friend, draws very heavily on the unpublished work of Shaun Kenaelly who studied Bert's life and his contribution to public policy in great detail. This unfinished account of Kelly's work is in the possession of Mr Ray Evans of WMC Resources. Although it is not adequately organised and like all drafts repetitious I recommend it to any serious student of the events and their times. The reader will be rewarded also by some beautifully-written passages.
35. Shaun Kenaelly, unpublished.
36. ibid
37. Shaun Kenaelly, unpublished
38. Shaun Kenaelly, unpublished
39. Brolga Books, 1978
40. Shaun Kenneally, unpublished
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