I did manage to get through Q&A last night but what caught me right from the start was where Wayne Swan, former Treasurer, said to Kate Carnell, the newly installed CEO of the Australian Chamber of Commerce, that ACCI had NEVER sought balanced budgets. Never is a long time and having been the ACCI Chief Economist up until a decade ago, I can say with perfect assurance that at least in my time, ACCI, previously known as the CAI, had never sought anything other than balanced budgets.

Way back, as far back as the days of Bob Hawke as Prime Minister, I wrote an article for our newsletter titled, “An Australian Economic Miracle?” Not many things on the net from the late 1980s, but I did find this:

“An Australian economic miracle, a truly Lazarus-like recovery is now a clear possibility,” says the Confederation of Australian Industry (CAI) in a newsletter this month.

Following the 1987 share market collapse, everyone across the world got religion and more especially Paul Keating here in Australia who balanced the budget in 1988. This was then – and always was while I was there – CAI/ACCI policy. Balancing the budget by lowering expenditure was a near-on certain cure-all for me and so it proved. What then wrecked it all was the almost immediate concern that the economy was overheating that then required the administration of a ridiculously high interest rate regime which brought on the “recession we had to have”. I had to spend the next five years shouting at the government for ruining it all with its monetary policies but it was by then too late.

But in that brave moment in 1988, Australia was set for the most remarkable recovery you ever saw. The flack I took for saying what I said, along with the organisation, was prodigious. But the then Labor Government, having balanced the budget, was indeed overseeing an economic resurrection that at the time no one had noticed was in place. So I wrote the article, signed off by my CEO, and once the recovery became common knowledge, had to endure the idiocies involved in cooling down what had only just picked up.

Balanced budgets work, and deficits do only harm. The evidence that the policies of the classical economists were overwhelmingly better than the policies of every mainstream text of the time, and of today as well, was demonstrated to me, just as it would be demonstrated again when Peter Costello balanced the budgets in the period after 1996. I am therefore pleased to see that Kate Carnell has reiterated the long-term policy of the Chamber.

And if you would like to have a better understanding of the underlying theory, you could not do any better than have a look at my Free Market Economics. Strange to relate, it is to my knowledge the only book of its kind.