Coombs economics is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The 1980s saw economics rise as an end in itself. The remnants of that thinking are still with us. We report economic statistics in an “”end-in-itself” way. We say the national accounts figure this quarter is good or the current account deficit figure this month is bad. It is as if the economics statistics and indicators themselves are good or bad in a moral sense and therefore are capable of measuring the goodness of our society.
Nugget Coombs comes from a generation of economists who saw economics as merely a means to an end. Moreover, the end was stated, and stated in a social context, especially full employment.
Coombs is now 88. He spends half his year in Canberra and the other half in Darwin _ sensibly avoiding Canberra’s winter and Darwin’s Wet.
He spoke yesterday from the Australian National University’s North Australia Research Unit in Darwin where he is visiting fellow.
Next week he publishes “”Aboriginal Autonomy: Issues and Strategies”, a collection of essays about Aboriginal Australia over the past 10 years.
Also next week, he is the subject of the first of SBS’s 14-part Australian Biography series (7.30pm, Thursday).
The extraordinary thing about his career has been his persistence, consistency and relevance.
When you trawl through decades of newspaper clippings on him, nothing jumps out as band-waggoning, faddish, or now embarrassingly anachronistic _ like, for example, Paul Keating’s exhortation for women to stay at home.
In the 1980s when everyone was joining the economic rationalists, Coombs held for a government role and for Keynesian economics against blind faith in the market. He has been a persistent clamourer for more Aboriginal autonomy. In the book he points to practical examples of how greater autonomy has worked. He has spent nearly 25 years working with Aboriginal people, nearly all of it after he had attained the usual retirement age.
He has also been a persistent champion of an independent bureaucracy fearless in giving advice and information to government.
He does not accept the present economic structure and condemns the way it has given greater income to the owners of resources and less income to people who have to rely on their natural talents and labour to get an income. He condemns the way technology cuts demand for people’s labour.
“”Unemployment is not given high enough priority,” he said yesterday. “”The way the economic system is managed and administered is not really capable of sustaining a satisfactorily high level of employment to provide a reliable source of income for people who are dependent upon employment.
“”We need fundamental changes to the structure of the economy.
“”In Australia and other capitalist economies throughout the world there is a shift in the flow of income towards the owners of resources and the owners of enterprises, and reducing funds for the employment of people who only have themselves and their natural capacities and skill to offer on the market. Those are not in demand. We have technology getting more efficient every day in the ways of doing without people. We have a system that assumes that that’s the only way in which economies can be run.
“”That is not true. It is not necessary to accept as an inevitable fact this polarisation, this growth of wealth and affluence and a lot of other nasty things too amongst the owners who are getting fewer and fewer.
“”I don’t believe we need to accept that because I don’t believe it is healthy structure for human society.”
In the SBS documentary he recalls the 1920s when he was sent as a trainee teacher in a Western Australian bush school. The plight of the Aborigines saddened him. He was more saddened and perplexed, however, that the women of the town who seemed decent and gentle to him in other ways were also hostile to Aborigines. He wanted to know, so he asked.
A woman told him the women could not help but feel hostile when they knew many of the children in the Aboriginal group were their husbands’ children.
Having got a PhD scholarship to London in the midst of the Great Depression, he recalled the dole queues and the formation of his view that economics was a means to prevent this.
Those two experiences helped shape his life’s works. Though there is an interesting question here. Do observations and experiences shape the character and views of people or are their character and views the filter which determines which experiences they see as important in the first place?
He is pessimistic about the economy. He thinks Australia cannot reform its economic structure in isolation.
“”Australia can’t do it in a world that is dominated by the dream of the economic rationalists that there is a level playing field because in that kind of world the playing field is slanted in favour of the owners and the enterprises which they own,” he said.
He is more optimistic on Aborigines. The book demonstrates how when Aboriginal people “”have the opportunity to exercise decisions for themselves and have access even to modest resources they are demonstrating that they can organise a way of life that is significantly different from ours and achieve results which are beneficial”.
“”Independent Aboriginal schools demonstrate they can function capably and with innovative ideas about curriculum in ways which link with traditional methods,” he said.
Autonomy is a theme of Coombs. Autonomous organisations are better for society because they can contribute to the balancing of issues.
There were many institutions that performed functions in their own right _ not giving effect to government decisions, but acting independently. The education system was one, “”though day by day that, too, is becoming the instrument of government policies rather than a source of knowledge and a source of wisdom”.
The Australian Conservation Council and Landcare were other examples of units of autonomy with standing and capacity to contribute independently _ to form part of the balancing of this issue against that. He acknowledged the government supported them, but not because it was the government’s idea to do so, but because it was pressed to do so. It was a good sign, especially in the environment field.
“”We have to go through a period of reconsideration and rethinking our institutions,” he said. “”The divisions between industry and government and government and people are over simplified. There is room for innovation in the structure of society and the development of institutions that have autonomy with access to knowledge and resources that can put to the service of the community as a whole. . . .
“”Unique systems in Aboriginal political organisations are being ignored,” he said.
It is in his style to write about real examples with real people, and draw models from them. They consistently point to autonomy as the way forward, but it has only borne small harvests in government policy.
He knows that a lot of efforts are unsuccessful, but that is not a reason for not trying.
The continuing failure over Aboriginal policy is one of the great disappointments of his life.
“”The thing that demeans Australia and Australians more than anything is the failure of Australia to allow a different Aboriginal culture and welcome Aborigines into society,” he said.
That failure can be put on governments of both complexion.
Billy McMahon promised to end assimilation, but his Minister opposed him publicly and McMahon did nothing.
Labor was elected on a platform of Aboriginal land rights in 1983, but abandoned it in the face of opposition from the states. It took the High Court to start the momentum again.
He is optimistic about the environment because the direction of people’s views is changing only in one direction _ towards more caring and responsibility for the environment.
The bureaucracy, however, troubles him.
Coombs was a federal bureaucrat for more than 30 years. In his mid-30s he was appointed Director of Rationing, a new, highly sensitive position. Then followed a largely economic career in the Public Service after which he swapped to academic pursuits. But he would not see that as a swap, for he puts the bureaucracy in the general intelligentsia.
The following is a very quick CV: 1942 Director of Rationing; 1943-49 Director-General Post-War Reconstruction; 1949-60 Governor Commonwealth Bank; 1960-1968 Governor Reserve Bank; 1968-76; Chancellor ANU; 1968-74 member Australian Council for the Arts; 1968-76 chair Australian Council of Aboriginal Affairs. 1943-1976 adviser to Federal Government.
He sees the bureaucracy as part of the intelligentsia because of its duty to society as a whole and because of its independence and neutrality _ at least in an ideal world. It is also part of the intelligentsia because it is part of the group upon whom government is dependent for its capacity to understand what is happening.
On that score both the bureaucracy and the wider intelligentsia have failed Australia, he argues. It has promoted an inhumane picture of the way the economic system works.
In education is has pushed vocational expertise. There are too many experts and not enough generalists, he argues. Targeted vocational education had the drawback of being irrelevant as conditions changed. A general education withstood change and was adaptive.
Earlier this year he said, “”It could be that what we want is a workforce that is infinitely flexible which is trained to do whatever job is put in front of them.”
He thought young people were thinking that way, too. They were not seeking and did not want specialist training for one job that would see them through their whole life.
He attacks present thinking on education and training because it assumes you can predict what will happen five or ten years ahead.
“”I believe education should be a generalist education to teach people how to think, how to analyse, how to understand and they will learn the job on the job,” he said.
He now talks of the unhappy state of the bureaucracy. Previously, he saw it as part of the educational and research institutions of society.
“”We were there not to tell government precisely what their policy should be; certainly not to tell them what they wanted to hear,” he said. “”But we had a research-analysis responsibility to see that government was well-informed and correctly assessing situations.
“”In the post-war period we saw the bureaucracy as an independent unit in government, in which it sometimes exercised influence against he role of the ministers as they might be expressing themselves. I feel that is in decline. Members of bureaucracy spend more time thinking about how they can tell the Ministers what they want to hear rather than in telling them they are making mistakes about their assessment on this or that, or helping correct their mistakes.”
Coombs was notorious for telling Ministers _ and Prime Ministers _ his view. But he survived because consistency and forthrightness were ultimately acknowledged.
Menzies accused him of meddling, but kept him on. And after serving Liberal Governments for 23 years, Whitlam kept him on, too.
Coombs attempted to persuade Menzies to fund the arts and a national theatre, but Menzies thought it would be disloyal to Britain and the Empire to have a distinctively Australian arts-funding body. So in 1954 Coombs was the moving force behind the privately funded Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Only after Menzies retired was a Council for the Arts set up.
There is still no national theatre. Coombs says now that it should not be a priority for government funding. In 1954 Australian theatre was dead. It needed support. Now, it is more appropriate for theatre to seek private-sector funding because government-money is needed more elsewhere.
Perhaps the key to Coombs’s career has been “”influence” rather than “”power”. As an adviser to governments of all kind he was not so much a powerful figure as an influential one. And later his writings and public statements have influenced others to act. He has been driven by wanting to do something about the things that worry him.
He has described himself as “”an activist and interferer”.
That, of course, puts him off-side with the economic rationalists and those of the Adam Smith school of economics who believe that the market will be self-correcting and produce the best outcomes if left on its own.
Coombs rejects this view of the world. Having seen the misery of the depression in pre-Keynes, Coombs rejects this view of the world; he will not turn away.
In his view “”a good bureaucrat makes other people’s dreams come true.”