Former Reserve Bank and Commonwealth Bank governor H. C. “”Nugget” Coombs has condemned Australian Government policy since 1986 for allowing Australian assets to be sold overseas to people who had no responsibility or care for Australia. He said the wisest thing Paul Keating had said was that unless Australia changed it would become a banana republic. But that was in 1986 and he had not put in place the policies that would stop it.
“”We are persuaded to go further into debt, to sell what we still own so we can go on and we don’t have to sacrifice anything,” he said. “”All we are doing is progressively selling the ownership of Australian assets to people overseas. We balance our payments by the sale of our assets and that’s the basic trouble and it is partly because we do not think it is necessary for us to save personally on the scale that is necessary to avoid having to sell things.”
The main reason was that Australians saved mainly for housing and retirement, which were not productive investments. Dr Coombs said he was more concerned about foreign debt than his other great policy concern _ the plight of Australian Aborigines. He was optimistic that ultimately Aborigines would take control and care of their own problems. However, the selling off of Australia did not seem to have a long-term solution. Dr Coombs was speaking in a joint interview with former Liberal Minister Billy Wentworth who is standing as an Independent candidate in the seat which bears the name of his great grandfather, explorer and publisher W. C. Wentworth. The by-election in the seat formerly held by former Liberal leader Dr John Hewson is to be held next Saturday. Mr Wentworth has proposed a uniform import duty to redress the balance of payments problem. He has been widely condemned by economists who have argued that the balance of payments problem will be self-correcting in the long-term.
Mr Wentworth said classic free-trade theories were based on a world where capital was fairly fixed. Now, however, capital could be moved about. As a result Australia was redressing its balance-of-payments problem by moving capital _ by selling Australian assets overseas. On Aboriginal policy, Dr Coombs called for an honest negotiation and settlement. White Australia would realise that Aboriginal demands were quite modest. Mr Wentworth said the problem with the idea of negotiation was that it was difficult to know who to negotiate with.