Brigden’s argument was to become the key idea in an enquiry into the tariff commissioned by Bruce, that was to prove an enduring landmark in Australian economic history, and, perhaps, in the development of ‘modern’ trade theory: The Australian Tariff: an Economic Enquiry, often known as ‘the Brigden Report’. (See Cain 1973, Manger 1981a, Samuelson 1981, Irwin 1996).
The genesis of the Enquiry lay in a sudden increase in protectionist sentiment and action in Australia in the aftermath of the First World War. The average tariff rate rose from about 10 per cent in 1918 to about 20 per cent by 1927 (Dollery and Whitten 1998). Bruce, a moderate protectionist, seemed to have increasing reservations about the wisdom of the protectionist trend. ‘The cry of “Let us make everything in Australia” is quite enough to prevent [men] seeing the effect of a policy of that character carried to extremes’ (Bruce quoted in McDougall and Bruce 1986, p. 443).
Bruce wanted a ‘scientific protection’. The notion of applying scientific methods to problems of national welfare was popular. Shortly before, Bruce had brought to fruition something that resembled a ‘national laboratory’, a notion earlier championed by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, awed by German technological prowess in the First World War. This was a council of scientists and industrialists in the form of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). A council of economic scientists might promise to be equally useful. In this spirit, in September 1927 he asked Giblin, C. H. Wickens (the Commonwealth Statistician), and the ‘businessman-ideologue’ E. C. Dyason to undertake a statistical investigation of the effects and success of tariff policy. In mid-December 1927 this group of three invited Brigden and Copland to join them. This was to result in The Australian tariff: an economic inquiry.
The authorship of the Enquiry was protracted, difficult and unhappy.
Copland had put himself under awful strain at the University. His letters record him as ‘busy’, ‘very busy’, ‘frantically busy this week’. It was not just teaching: Copland’s professional bibliography runs to around 120 items, a magnitude few economists from the inter-war period (or today) could match. Copland at this time was often an irritated, exasperated man.[6] And it took a toll. Harvard University’s C. J. Bullock counselled him: ‘your recent troubles were largely due to nervous strain’ (UMA 23 November 1926).
There was also significant physical, stylistic and doctrinal distance between the five authors. These divisions (following Marjory Harper and N.G. Cain) might be summarised by way of a contrast between a ‘Melbourne Group’ (with Copland the leading member) and the ‘Hobart Group’ (with Brigden the leader). The Hobart group was distinctly protectionist, while Copland’s Melbourne Group was more equivocal. Copland was empirical, Brigden more theoretical. Copland wrote as if drafting speeches for a public meeting; Brigden tried to write as if penning letters to a friend. The difference in opinion between Hobart and Melbourne was never successfully resolved. Circumstances were against it. The Enquiry was ‘written piecemeal, with few meetings of the whole committee’ (Harper 1989, p. 8).
An initial three-day meeting in Hobart in January 1928 distributed tasks to the five co-authors. But on 13 March 1928 Bruce demanded the report within a month. To meet Bruce’s pre-emptory demand for its conclusion, a draft of the enquiry (a ‘Melbourne Report’) was prepared by Copland, and submitted to Bruce without ‘Hobart’s’ knowledge. Brigden appears to have suffered this high-handed treatment very meekly.
According to one close student of the Enquiry, Bruce ‘proposed to publish the document, with addenda from Hobart, seemingly without reading the Hobart material. As Giblin and Brigden objected to publication without considerable revision, they were permitted to redraft the Report to incorporate their work’ (Harper 1989). An examination of some of Bruce’s correspondence paints a different picture. In a letter of 27 August 1928 Bruce explains that the Melbourne Report ‘would not convey much to the ordinary intelligent individual’ (Bruce quoted in McDougall and Bruce 1986, pp. 654–60). He dispatched his secretary to Hobart, where all five authors were conferring, with the instruction ‘they must do better’, and a request of Brigden (not permission’) to redraft it (Hytten 1971, p. 52). Bruce declared Brigden’s consequent redraft ‘an incomparably better job of work than the original one’.
Copland did not share Bruce’s judgement. ‘So began a low key power struggle’ between Brigden and Copland (Harper 1989). ‘By the end of 1928 all members of the Committee were rather discouraged’. Giblin told Eilean: ‘I’m still rather breathless. The tariff will not get finished. A section I am supposed to be doing rather vital to the whole thing, won’t come clear… It has been rather a nightmare at times’ (NLA LFG 20 January 1929). The difficulties did not subside. On 11 March 1929, Giblin (then in Melbourne) explained: ‘Doubts arose and we wired Brigden to come over for another discussion’. Copland complained to Brigden, ‘The new draft on incidence leaves me as puzzled as ever’ (UMA 8 April 1929). On 22 May 1929 Giblin wrote: ‘Brigden will be over on Saturday, and we must settle things then or never’ (NLA LFG 22 May 1929).
Copland’s impatience outweighed his doubts. Copland wrote to Brigden: ‘The sooner it appears the better. Each time we meet to discuss it doubts and difficulties arise on minor issues and we could, apparently, go on altering the words indefinitely’ (UMA 28 June 1929). In the low-key power struggle, ‘Hobart’ had outworn ‘Melbourne’.[7] Years later Hytten summed up: ‘Brigden and Giblin wrote that report … no one else had much of a hand in it … Brigden wrote, Giblin criticised … to pacify Copland his essay on free trade was added as an appendix’ (Hytten 1951, 1971 p. 53).
Giblin with great care took the corrected proofs to the printing works himself. The Australian tariff: an economic inquiry appeared first on 19 July 1929. ‘Melbourne was very interested and crowded the bookshops. The first edition of 3,000 has nearly gone and I have written to Bruce about further editions. It is externally quite impressive – looks like a 10/- or 15/- book and sells for 3/6 … The [protectionist] Age leads its article National Policy Vindication and the [free trade] Argus counters with Medicine for Fanatics’ (RBA 9 July 1929).
The Enquiry’s conclusion is distinctly presented on its first page: in Australia’s present circumstances free trade would lower the ‘standard of living’, that is, the real wage. The Enquiry, therefore, distanced itself from the strong tendency of theorists to assert that tariffs would not harm labour as long as it was mobile between import competing and export sectors.[8]
The trenchancy of the Enquiry’s theses is not matched by the lucidity of its argument. It was a ‘compromise document’ in which differences of opinion were concealed. This commitment to compromise discouraged any attempt to secure agreement to some clearly stated argument. This commitment to compromise muffled the Enquiry’s presentation of the Australian ‘case for protection’.[9]