Thus far the case against the Bureau is not, to modern eyes, very formidable. The Bureau might recommend against the White Australia Policy. It may favour the admission of New Zealand butter or Fijian bananas. A speech of a higher level was provided by the newly elected MP for Fremantle, John Curtin. He did not once mention Protection. ‘I believe that a case can be made out for a Bureau of Economic Research’. He did not think, however, that ‘an adequate reason’ had been ‘furnished by the Prime Minister’. ‘I do not object to the establishment of a bureau of economic and social research, but I cannot support the bill in its present form, limiting, as it does, to scientific and technical inquiries, and excluding the examination of social problems as such’.

The ‘economic and social’ research Curtin had in mind included: women in industry; housing and efficiency; vocational guidance (there was infinitely greater waste from the neglect of such guidance than from any wrong decision on tariffs); industrial health; and the distribution of wealth.

This is not the concession to economics that it may seem. Curtin made it clear that, in his hypothetical bureau, economists would not be called for, and he had no interest in bestowing any public patronage on them. ‘It is not true that Australia is destitute of those that serve the science’. The Economic Society was ‘very influential’ (a suggestion not then quite as laughable as it would be today), and it published the Economic Record.

What did they have to offer, in any case? Curtin advances a critique of economics reminiscent of the historicist critiques that had gained wide currency in the late nineteenth century. ‘The doctrines that have been promulgated in the name of economics during the last 100 years have been weird and extraordinary. Such doctrines have been the basis of the writings of Ricardo, Jevons and Malthus’. There is, in truth, ‘no such thing as the economic man. The individual living entirely by himself, and for himself, is not to be found on earth’. More generally, there is no such thing as an ‘Economic law’. ‘The contention that there are laws which dictate the trend of economic development, and these laws must be obeyed is belied by the course of economic history’. To Curtin’s mind ‘the remarkable disrepute into which economists fell as a result of their predictions before the war’ had ‘a good deal of justification’. ‘Economists by and large’ said Curtin, ‘are conservative minded, and are fearful of change’. ‘The truth is that every new proposition that has been advanced, particularly in the last 50 years, for the amelioration of social conditions, has been opposed by economists’. What these were Curtin leaves unenumerated.

Curtin then advanced the remarkable assertion that ‘Every reform that the world has had, and which has been of benefit in the long run, has had to run the gauntlet of established knowledge, whether political, theological, scientific, or other’ (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates 19 March 1929, p. 1462) To Curtin, learning was not an active agent in human progress. It was an obstacle. This was a strange doctrine for a quasi-intellectual such as Curtin. But in a quasi-marxist fashion Curtin seems to have held that established learning was not interested in progress. No progress would come from there.

There is no need to search for the source of Curtin’s anti-economics; it was a pervasive idea-cliché of the intellectual climate of the late Victorian world from which he had acquired his world view.^[18] But he also had had one much more recent encounter with economists that would not have strengthened his confidence. In 1928 he had been appointed by Bruce to be one of five Royal Commissioners assessing the merits of introducing a national scheme of ‘child endowment’. They took evidence from two of the economists: Brigden and Copland.^[19]

Brigden put to the Commissioners that a scheme of child endowment was ‘desirable’, but that the ‘details need to be very carefully framed’. In a carefully weighed appreciation of a hypothetical scheme he contended that any system that had the endowment cease upon the child reaching the school leaving age (14 years) would be ‘disastrous’ to education. It would mean that children would be ‘thrust upon the labour market to earn their own maintenance’. The moral was that an endowment scheme cannot be usefully done on the cheap. At the same time the scheme should not be so ample so as to make ‘production of children as remunerative as the production of income’.

In his evidence, Brigden, who was childless, was alive to the fact that any scheme of child endowment amounted, at bottom, to a transfer of income from those who do not have children to those who did. In contemplating this transfer, Brigden wanted the Commission to give thought to the costs of this to:

Copland’s evidence assailed the prospect of child endowment with strokes that were heavier and less adroit. He sought to insinuate doubts about any scheme in the circumstances of the time. He warned that ‘an ambitious social policy involving more expenditure on consumption goods must not be embarked upon without very definite evidence of real social and economic gains from the policy’. With no obvious connection to child endowment, he then launched into a summary of his researches into the Quantity Theory and purchasing power parity.

A very close exchange followed between Copland and Curtin. Curtin made the most of the difficulties of attempting to establish a relationship between the money supply and the exchange rate by means of 15 years of annual data. Was not the Australian exchange rate most appreciated when her money supply was most expanded? Had not prices in the United States and Australia risen by the same proportionate amount between 1913–21?

Curtin then pursued Copland on his affirmation of the Millian doctrine that capital inflows improve the terms of trade, and the cessation of such inflows will worsen them.

The majority report of the Royal Commission on Child Endowment or Family Allowances recommended against introducing a national child endowment scheme. Such a scheme was to wait until July 1941 for its introduction, by Menzies, and partly on the advice of Roland Wilson, but in the context of entirely different macroeconomic pressures.

Whoever was the victor in the encounter of Copland and Curtin, the Economic Research Act was assented to on 22 March 1929. A search then began for the Director. A salary of £1500 was offered, rather better than any professorial salary. Brigden seems to have won Bruce’s confidence; he had in Bruce’s opinion ‘the best and most practical mind’. But Brigden was not favoured. In 1971 Brigden’s close colleague Hytten gave this account of the matter.

Yet Bruce had something with which to console Brigden. He recommended Brigden to the Overseas Shipping Representatives Association. Part trade association, part cartel, the Association spoke the language of rationalisation and the elimination of waste (Bach 1976, p. 301). ‘So far as competition was wasteful, it [rationalisation] meant the elimination of that competition’ said Brigden.

Giblin believed that: ‘Brigden is probably the better fitted to the [Director’s] job … The trouble is however that B is inclined to prefer the shipping job – thinks there is a more hopeful result of getting a practical result … He is being strongly urged by his friends to hold out for five years, or at least three years engagement … He may in the end take it without the guarantee – he is strongly attracted and would like to gamble on it (NLA LFG 21 April 1929)’. In the end he did take the gamble. Brigden presented his appointment to the press as another symbol of the arrival of the economist. It was simply a ‘sign of the times’.^[24]

But, in the meantime, who was to fill the empty chair of the Director of the Bureau of Economic Research? Others were considered, including Horace Belshaw (1898-1962), the founder of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. But according to Hytten, J. B. Condliffe (1891-1981), another Canterbury College protégé of James Hight, was ultimately offered the position.

In the end nobody was to be Director. On 10 September 1929, just 11 months into his third term, six Nationalist members crossed the floor of the House of Representatives to defeat the Bruce Government’s attempt to transfer industrial relations powers to the states. The government was entitled to battle on, but Bruce decided to call general elections. ‘I think he is riding for a fall’ Giblin told his wife. (RBA LFG 1 September 1929). On 12 October Bruce lost his own seat in a Labor landslide victory. The Scullin Labor Government took office. The Bureau was a dead letter.^[25] The new government was to be uncontaminated by economic research.

Wall Street’s ‘Black Thursday’ was 12 days away.