Trial Balance by H.C. Coombs

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new creative phase in the post-Menzies and the Whitlam years. In 1972 he became an adviser to Whitlam, a role he oddly describes as ‘outside the system’. Beside Whitlam, Coombs stood as a symbol of continuity. Friends had long regarded him as the kindler of ‘the light on the hill’, while his enemies had never ceased to see him as a dissembling bureaucratic espionage agent for Labor. Surprisingly, Coombs actually expected Whitlam to reincarnate the ‘casual, tolerant, egalitarian’ Chifley ethos. He had always hoped to remain in touch with ‘the people for whom ... the system should be designed’, but instead he became locked into an exclusive bureaucratic caste. The process is best illustrated by Coombs’s method of understanding the growing electoral problems of the Whitlam government in 1974. He confidentially polled that group of notables and celebrities which had in 1972 called for Labor’s election in the national rather than the party interest. The results were not helpful. Coombs strives for consistency in himself and his image of Australian society, but his own social priorities have clearly changed, and Australian political culture has changed in complex ways. Coombs’s life expresses many changes, most dramatically seen in his stepping out of the bureaucracy and into Aboriginal political culture, but in other ways he seems to lack historical and sociological curiosity about many changes down below. The title, too, is rather puzzling. The ‘trial balance’ is never drawn. The books ends without a conclusion. The esteem of others seems more important to Coombs than his own self-knowledge. The preface suggests a series of discrete administrative memoirs, the record of ‘a working life’. But this career cannot easily be understood as a series of discrete memoirs, a fact recognised in the book’s structure: four essays on four roles which Coombs calls Bureaucrat, Banker, Amateur, and Advisor. These roles were based in both the structure of bureaucratic power and in Coombs’s unusual personality. This unwieldy set of memoirs constantly dissolves into autobiographical nostalgia and reflections. Coombs often becomes repetitive, especially at key transitional moments. He tends to blur any sense of chronology and the shape of the career. The title is thus best interpreted metaphorically, as an attempt to achieve inner equilibrium under adverse conditions, to achieve that aesthetic grace which Coombs the amateur finds in Aborigines, the environment and the arts. Coombs’s style is also difficult; his intentions and tones are often unclear. Some lines are reminiscent of Sir Les Patterson: Coombs describes a commissioned mural on the Melbourne Reserve Bank building as ‘probably per square foot the cheapest Nolan in the world’. Elsewhere he recounts an excruciating dinner to advance the cause of opera finance, at which Prime Minister Gorton, Mrs Gorton, Lord and Lady Harewood, Russell Drysdale and others were present. With slight retouching, this episode could have appeared at the end of Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass. The emotional and historical centrepiece of this book is the account of the 1940s, Coombs’s group of Australian New Dealers; their recruitment, circulation, and illustrious postwar dispersal through the bureaucracy and the academy. Coombs carefully delineates their successes and failures, their intellectual sources (including ecological social thought), their conception of extensive social and economic planning, their solidarity in technocracy. Old post-war reconstructionist friendships bound Coombs into the bureaucratic elite of the Menzies era and beyond, the most interesting case being Coombs and Sir Frederick Wheeler. Their touchy friendship came to grief over Coombs’s economic advice to Whitlam in 1974. Although we have a rich account of the brilliant career of the leading postwar reconstructionist and his survival until the return of Labor in 1972, we learn little of his early development. Coombs presents himself as a rootless modern man, as a man with no past, only a future. He mentions no forebears. His parents appear in a photograph, but they are not named, described, or attributed influence. I believe that Coombs was the eldest child, the only son among a number of daughters, and that his father was a rural railway station master. He needed scholarships to gain a good education. I am tempted to imagine the youthful Coombs not as the sporty type he depicts, but as a precocious expert on railway timetables. Was the Western Australian railway network his first improbable introduction to the cybernetic imagination? We do not ·know, because there is neither boyhood nor much adolescence in this book. A passing reference to ‘my political adolescence’ reveals that Abraham Lincoln was an early hero, and Coombs later saw Lincoln’s likeness in: Ben Chifley’s face. Coombs climbed the ladder to the future: Perth Modem, school teaching, Teacher’s College, and University. When capitalism seemed to be dying in the late 1920s, Coombs as we now know him came to life; the medium was the fantasy-system of modem economic theory. He describes the moment when, out of dissatisfaction with one Teacher’s College lecturer, he excitedly delved into economic texts: ‘... I realised that the economic system was ‘a system’ and that laws governing its operation were capable of being analysed and expressed. After his L.S.E. doctorate on central banking, the big event in Coombs’s intellectual life was the publication of Keynes’s General Theory ... in 1936. ‘Keynesianism’ becomes an almost talismanic hero in this book, an elegant yet utilitarian ‘paradigm’ with which to understand and change the world; the language of economists and technocrats; the model for other social-scientific theorising. Coombs calls his 1940s period ‘a Keynesian Crusade’ – unusual medieval language for such a modernist. To Coombs (and many others), Keynesian thought was a means ‘to by-pass the most divisive issues within our society’. A recurring theme in this book’s anecdotes is a personal distaste for social conflict. Throughout these tales, Coombs is the nimble yet stoic, rationalistic solver of disputes. But there is a touch of megalomania, too, in his attempt to impose Keynesian categories on the minds of Commonwealth and Reserve Bank colleagues and staff. Not surprisingly, Coombs now laments the decline of the Keynesian approach, the rise of ‘monetarism’ and doctrinal division amongst the natural governors of society. He says that ‘the modifications to the Keynesian model which have been necessary ... have not invalidated it’, but he clarifies neither these modifications nor why Keynesian ideas might have lost their domestic and international relevance. He naïvely trusts ‘the processes of academic debate’ to rescue us from Paradigm Lost. For one so deeply involved in the strategic planning of the Curtin-Chifley Governments, Coombs is oddly reticent about the transition to the Menzies period. In a passage on the early staffing of the ANU (of which he was a founder), Coombs describes the waning of the 1940s ethos: ‘Many of the new arrivals shared the reaction widespread at the time against the discipline, the constraints, the perpetual appeals to subordinate individual preferences to those socially determined which, apart from the dangers and more material deprivations, had marked the war and the immediate post-war years’. The pressures for decontrol must have disturbed him. After all, he had designed the wartime rationing system, and some wartime controls were essential to Labor’s postwar planning. (Coombs acutely criticises Menzies and Fadden for lacking a decontrol strategy.) But he gives no sense of whether he expected Labor to lose the 1949 election: His claim that Menzies’ victory suddenly jeopardised his tenure as Governor of the Bank is no doubt correct, but he surely considered this contingency beforehand. As it happened, Coombs quickly gained the trust of Menzies and Fadden. At the Bank he encouraged expansion into small home loans, thus exploiting the very cultural pressures which he later claims gave him offence. His retrospective remarks on the ‘selfishness’ and ‘materialism’ of the Menzies era are now clichés. Coombs endured those years in his bank enclave partly by developing his outside connections with artists and academics. As an executive, he apparently showed a commendable concern with the dangers of ‘institutional senility’ and ‘ossification’ in banking. This did not prevent him from remaining at the helm for nineteen and a half years! Coombs describes his personal fears of boredom and of co-option, his fear of isolation from individuals and ‘the people for whom ... the system should be designed’. Yet the many pages he writes on economic and monetary policy in those years inevitably deal with ‘other people’s money’ (to use his own phrase), not other people’s lives. The reader traverses the inflationary crisis of the Korean War years and the Credit Squeeze of the early 1960s without gaining any sense of their human consequences. The account takes place in the economist’s cybernetic or hydraulic linguistic void. Coombs depicts himself not as a member of the ruling class, but as an individual ‘on whom “the arrangements of society” confer control of great resources’. Similarly, the author of the 1944 White Paper on Full Employment offers no reflections on today’s structural unemployment, or technological change, or the decline in the political coinage of ‘full employment’. The really profound change of heart in Coombs is his absorption in Aboriginal politics and culture since 1967. His book Kulinma: Listening to Aboriginal Australians (1978) gives some hint of the almost redemptive significance of this change in Coombs, but the present book does not explain how he abandoned the old ‘assimilation’ framework. He now espouses self-determination in Aboriginal affairs, an administrative devolutionism which had precedents in Post-War Reconstruction thought but which was not then applied to Aboriginal Australians. Coombs’s fascinating shift in this· area seems to reflect a deep dissatisfaction with the depersonalisation and remoteness of his long ‘assimilation’ to bureaucracy. Coombs’s reassessment of assimilationism does not extend (in this book) to immigration and population policy, where ‘multiculturalism’ is now in vogue. He omits Arthur Calwell’s immigration scheme from the discussion of post-war reconstruction, and more contemporary references to anti-discrimination refer only to women and Aborigines. There are many ways in which Coombs remains an Australian nationalist of the Curtin-Chifley-Evatt vintage from his belief in an Australian style of central banking, to his endorsement of a kind of Australian imperialism in Asia and the Pacific, but does his thinking also remain fixed in an ethnic assimilationist mould? Obviously, much remains to be understood about Coombs and how far he reflected, anticipated or opposed many changes in Australia’s postwar political culture. This rather undigested book suggests many hypotheses for future historians and biographers. It also contains many pleasures: judicious anecdotes of bureaucratic technique and styles, and many conscientious reconstructions of the inner history of well-known political events. For outsiders to the Commonwealth Club, however, exposure to the thought-processes of a former senior member can be disturbing experience. The lasting impression is of a man deeply divided; a man who struggled to unite humanity with power; to maintain a kind of populist integrity and a dry technocratic elitism; to achieve social-democratic ends by manipulative means; to suppress a native romanticism with an heroic rationalism; but a man, withal, whose language does not enable him to explore with his readers the Faustian dilemmas inherent in such an extraordinary career.

Warren Osmond

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