Page 3577 - Week 12 - Thursday, 20 September 1990
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experiment: the constraints of economics, the difficulty of allocating scarce resources, the essential basis of the political divide in Australia would no longer exist. You would not have debates between Labor and Liberal as to whether there should be a greater proportion of gross domestic product allocated to the public sector as against the private sector.
We certainly would not be having to debate about school closures. Mr Humphries says he would like to keep the schools open but the budget cannot stand that. We say that priorities could be altered to allow the budget to maintain the schools. If Mr Stevenson was right, if Mr Clampett was right, both of us would be satisfied. We all say we should keep the schools open. Mr Humphries says we cannot afford to. If Mr Clampett was right we could have a school in every neighbourhood, a school in every suburb, indeed, a school for every child.
Mr Kaine: That would be going a bit too far.
MR CONNOLLY: Even we would say that is a bit extreme. Economics would not be about scarcity; it would be simply about demand. Whatever you wanted you could have. As I said in the debate earlier this week, this theory really is the ultimate magic pudding, Mr Deputy Speaker. There is no limit to the credit that can be created in this fantasyland. Credit is not an issue of balancing debt against assets. The Chief Minister has seen a balance sheet or two in his time, I am sure, and, like other members of this Assembly, with the exception of Mr Stevenson, understands that you cannot create credit without an asset backing.
There is just one point that I do wish to reiterate tonight. I made it earlier in the debate, and it is rather less humorous than some of the aspects of this theory which I think are humorous. I refer to the publicity material surrounding the learned tome Hand Over Our Loot which describes its author as Professor of Constitutional Law. Mr Deputy Speaker, as I said earlier, that is quite fraudulent. The author of this tome has no qualifications in law; he is not a professor of constitutional law. That is a title that is held by a very few senior academics in the Australian law schools. To describe oneself as a professor when one has not earned that title by study and research and service in a university, I think, is a quite scandalous thing to do. If it is intended to lend added authority to these ideas, it has dismally failed.
I did comment the other night that these ideas are not new. It is just taking the crazy idea of running the printing press one step further to create unlimited electronic credit. I refer to the theories of one Major Douglas who was around in the 1930s, originating, I think, from Britain, but achieving some popularity in Canada. At one stage the Social Credit Party, the followers of Major Douglas, actually gained control of the Saskatchewan
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