The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

As regards the qualifications of the persons to be appointed, it is essential, seeing that the staff of the Treasury is small and the work highly important, that appointees should be possessed of more than average ability, should have considerable experience in accounts, and be skilled in the preparation of financial returns.30

Thus, on Turner’s watch, began the tradition of the Commonwealth Treasury being an accounting body, rather than an economic policy unit. This was understandable and indeed, to a degree, inevitable given the paucity of professional economists at the time, especially in Australia. The nation, however, would pay a price for this focus, which held for most of the next half-century. By 1903 the Treasury had twenty staff, but they were all bookkeepers or people with accountancy skills. The first professional economics advice was sought under the auspices of the Joseph Lyons government in the late 1930s. When Ben Chifley was treasurer, the surge in professionally trained economists during and immediately after World War II encouraged the professionalisation of the Treasury. This process reached its apogee with treasurer Arthur Fadden’s appointment in 1951of the first professional economist as Treasury secretary, namely the brilliant Sir Roland Wilson.

Although the Australian Government was formed on 1 January 1901, the nation waited until 8 October to hear the reading of its first Budget. Indeed, the prime minister showed a remarkable degree of opaqueness when it came to publicly setting the date of delivery of the first Budget, telling the Melbourne Argus on 20 July that:

None of us really knows. I do not know, Mr Kingston [minister for customs] does not know, in fact nobody does. If we fixed a date it might possibly leak out. You can never tell. The only way to guard against such a contingency is not to fix upon any particular date.31

It was reflective of the role of the treasurer as the chief accountant of the government, as opposed to that of a senior decision maker, that Barton singled out the minister for customs as the key stakeholder, rather than the treasurer, when it came to the Budget’s timing. The vast majority of federal revenue was raised through customs, and the minister for customs rivalled the treasurer as the government’s key economic minister.

Turner was never backwards in sharing with his audience how onerous he found the task of establishing the federal government’s accounts. Presenting the first federal Budget, he told the House:

I desire to thank honourable members for their kind, encouraging cheer. I can assure them that I feel today a greater difficulty than, I think, any Treasurer has ever felt—certainly a far greater difficulty than I have ever felt when introducing a Budget into the State Parliament … The difficulties surrounding the task which has had to be carried out by myself, so far as the financial portion of our proposals is concerned, have, indeed, been very great. When you are dealing with one State, you can obtain your information with some ease; but when you come to deal with six states, some of them far away from the seat of Government, it is very hard, indeed, to get proposals before a committee in such a form that they will be clearly understood … I have unfortunately suffered from the absence of my right hand man, my Secretary has been laid up for the last five weeks, therefore a very large proportion of the work that would have been done by him has fallen on my shoulders.32

Turner would go on to deliver another three federal budgets. These first Australian budget speeches were long and detailed affairs, with Turner providing copious information to the House on estimated expenditure and revenue. While declaring in his first speech that the Commonwealth raised £10 million in 1901/02 and spent just £4 million on its own account, he also took time to reveal that the customs minister’s office had added £3, 15 shillings to the expenditures. Turner’s budget speeches were also regularly peppered with questions from members as to detail, which he invariably answered factually. As the historian H Campbell-Jones says of him, ‘he worried through the dry statistics till he understood them. He could explain every line of the estimates.’33

Economic times remained difficult during Turner’s tenure, with the economy not yet fully recovered from the depression of the 1890s when it was hit by the drought of 1902. Per capita, real income fell 6.1 per cent between 1889 and 1895, and it did not return to its peak levels until as late as 1909.34 Between 1890 and 1914, Australia lost its position as the world’s richest country per capita, which had been achieved through the gold and agricultural booms.35 Turner did not concern himself with such matters, however, concentrating instead on ensuring the accounts of the Commonwealth were in good order. Having been Victorian treasurer, Turner was sympathetic to the states’ needs and regularly returned any surplus Commonwealth funds to them instead of hoarding them for the purposes of his own government.

The most important economic decisions of the new Commonwealth Government in its early years were the establishment of a restrictive and racist immigration policy, a uniform national tariff, and a national conciliation and arbitration system to settle industrial disputes.36 This is often referred to as the Deakinite national settlement, after the man who championed it as both an economic and social policy for the new nation. The policies were first developed under Barton and reached their high point in Deakin’s prime ministership. Several ministers were involved, most notably Lyne as home affairs minister when it came to immigration, and Kingston as customs minister when it came to the tariff.

Turner cannot be identified as a champion of any of these policies, so he cannot be held responsible for their impacts. Instead, Turner took great pride in keeping the finances of the new Commonwealth on a firm footing and developing the Treasury as a body that would keep accurate accounts of