Australia's Economy in its International Context

This is not a lecture by an economist for the guidance of politicians; rather perhaps the reverse.

When I was an undergraduate there was a topic of study appropriately named “Political Economy”, the lecturers in which were commonly lawyers who appeared to regard as somewhat menial the task of expounding a science and art less accurate than that of the Law. True, they imparted to us with due vigour any principles which could reasonably be called “laws”. Thus it was that I encountered “Gresham's law” and “the law of diminishing returns” and the “law of supply and demand” – the first of which I have sometimes suspected to be a law of politics, the second of which I have never quite under stood, and the third of which my friend Professor Copland has now abolished.

But two things were always clear, and have become no less clear in the passage of time; that laws are made to be broken, and that any law may be changed by Parliament.

With this precious stock of first principles, let me apply myself to the task in hand, that of explaining how a man who was Prime Minister of Australia for the first two years of this war sees and remembers some of the economic problems and experiments of that period, and anticipates the problems to come.