Read Dog Days: Australia After the Boom (Redback) for Free Online Page B

large-scale immigration programme.
    Each of these steps was made possible through public education and advocacy by informed members of the community – private people across the partisan political divide coming together to promote a change in policy that was judged to be in the public interest. An informed independent centre of the polity created a climate of opinion in which it was possible for leaders to make changes. However, four prime ministers over two decades had to absorb bitter criticism from parts of the community, to accept political costs and to take political risks.
    The centrepiece of economic reform, and the area subject to strongest opposition from business and trade union interests, was the winding back of protection. Awareness of the costs of protection and the benefits of reform began with independent analysis, at first by a small number of people in the universities. The analysis was extended and publicised from the late 1960s by the Tariff Board (the predecessor of today’s Productivity Commission).
    From its formation in the 1920s, the Tariff Board had mostly been comfortable working within the established consensus on protection. It changed in the late 1960s, under the leadership of individuals who asserted their independence from government and business pressures and were prepared to take bold professional stands in the public interest.
    The work of academic economists and the Tariff Board was introduced to the wider Australian community by a small number of journalists, who put effort into understanding and explaining complex arguments, and who were allowed to do so by their editors, boards of directors and proprietors.
    By the mid-1970s there was an understanding of the costs of protection to the Australian standard of living within a substantial group of independent and public interest-oriented citizens – ‘elite opinion’, as it came to be characterised by some political leaders and commentators in the early twenty-first century. There was widespread although by no means universal understanding that Australian economic performance had been relatively poor. There was widespread but by no means universal understanding of the value of far-reaching changes. There was widespread but by no means universal understanding that the necessary changes included reducing barriers to the international exchange of finance, goods and services.
    Independent reports commissioned by governments widened public understanding of the need for and benefits of reform. The Fraser government’s Campbell Committee Report helped to build understanding of the value of financial reform. Although the Fraser government itself did not implement many of the report’s recommendations, together with the Hawke government’s own Martin Report it was an important part of the background to the swift and comprehensive reforms in the mid-1980s. My own Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy , presented to Prime Minister Bob Hawke in October 1989, caught the public imagination by linking opportunities in Asia to reform at home. The Hilmer Report in 1993 helped build support for the widening of the scope of competition policy into the states following major advances in the commonwealth from 1987.
    Cutting back protection allowed the Australian government to participate actively in multilateral trade negotiations for the first time. In turn, this supported the inclusion of agriculture among measures to reduce global protection. Australia’s sponsorship of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation from 1989 and its promotion of the idea of ‘open regionalism’ (regional trade liberalisation without discrimination against outsiders) was an important influence on many Western Pacific countries up to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98.
    When it came to winding back protection, there never was anything like majority support. Protection remained popular even when its removal was playing a major role in increasing Australian living