H. C. Coombs

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Herbert Cole Coombs (24 February 1906 – 29 October 1997), referred to in his professional life as Dr. H. C. Coombs but commonly known as "Nugget" Coombs, Australian economist and public servant, was born near Perth, Western Australia, one of six children of a railway station-master. He was educated at the Perth Modern School (where Bob Hawke was also educated), the University of Western Australia and the London School of Economics, where he obtained his doctorate in economics in 1933 for his thesis on central banking. As a student at UWA, Coombs was elected as the 1930 Sports Council President and subsequently the 1931 President of the Guild of Undergraduates. While at the London School of Economics he studied under Professor Harold Laski, one of the most influential Marxists of the 20th century. In December 1931 he married Mary Ross.

Coombs's political and economic views were formed by the Great Depression, which hit Australia in 1929 and caused a complete economic collapse in a country totally dependent on commodity exports for its prosperity. As a student in Perth he was a socialist, but in London he became converted to the economic views of John Maynard Keynes, and he spent the rest of his career pursuing Keynesian solutions to Australia's economic problems. He never sought public office or joined a political party, but sought to exercise political influence from within as an administrator and advisor.

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[edit] Public service

In 1934 Coombs returned to Australia and in 1935 became an economist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, then a state-owned bank which served as Australia's central bank. In 1939 he shifted to the Department of the Treasury in Canberra as a senior economist. He became known as a Keynesian rebel against the classical economic theory which dominated the Treasury, under the influence of the Melbourne University school of economists led by L.F. Giblin and Douglas Copland.

The Australian Labor Party under John Curtin came to power in 1941, and Coombs found himself in a political environment much more supportive of his views. Curtin appointed him to the Commonwealth Bank board in October 1941. In 1942 the Treasurer, Ben Chifley, appointed him Director of Rationing, and in 1943 made him Director-General of the Department of Post-war Reconstruction, a new ministry which Chifley held in addition to the Treasury.

Chifley, a former train driver, had no training in economics and came to rely heavily on Coombs's advice. Coombs's closeness to Chifley, and the greatly expanded role of government in the economy during World War II, made him one of the most powerful public servants in Australian history. His influence grew even greater when Chifley became Prime Minister in 1945.

In January 1949 Chifley appointed Coombs Governor of the Commonwealth Bank, the most important post in the regulation of the Australian economy. When the Liberal Party came to power in December of that year, however, Coombs's demise seemed likely, but the new Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, kept him on and soon came to trust his judgement. Menzies was a moderate Keynesian and there were few policy differences between the two men, especially since Australia soon embarked on a long postwar boom and there were few tough economic decisions to be made.

In 1960, when the Reserve Bank of Australia was created to take over the Commonwealth Bank's central banking functions, Coombs was appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank. He retired as a public servant in 1968.

[edit] Later life

Coombs' continued to work following his retirement. He had already signalled his interest in the arts by becoming the first chairman of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1954 (named in honour of Elizabeth II, not because it promoted Elizabethan theatre). In 1967 he persuaded Prime Minister Harold Holt to legislate to create the Australian Council for the Arts (now the Australia Council) as a body for the public funding of the arts, and in 1968 he became its chairman. He worked closely with Prime Minister John Gorton to secure funding for an Australian film industry. He also became Chancellor of the Australian National University, which he had helped found in 1946.

Coombs's most important post-retirement role was as a supporter of the Australian Aboriginal people. In 1968 he bcame chairman of the Australian Council for Aboriginal Affairs, set up in the wake of the 1967 referendum which gave the Commonwealth Parliament power to legislate specifically for the Aboriginal people. He was, however, disappointed that the Gorton and McMahon governments took up few of the Council's recommendations. He became a close advisor to the Labor leader Gough Whitlam in the years before Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972, and largely wrote Labor's policy on Aboriginal affairs, particularly the commitment to Aboriginal land rights. In 1972 he was named Australian of the Year.

From 1972 to 1975 Coombs served as a consultant to Prime Minister Whitlam, but his influence was resented by other ministers and he found the experience of the first Labor government since 1949 disappointing. He disapproved of the events which led up to the Loans Affair of 1975 and the dismissal of Whitlam's government by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. He advised Whitlam not to resort to unorthodox means of financing government operations when the Senate blocked supply, but Whitlam ignored his advice. Although he regarded the dismissal as scandalous, his estrangement from Whitlam meant that he took little subsequent part in politics. In 1975 he was chairman of a Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, whose report was largely ignored by the incoming Liberal government of Malcolm Fraser.

In 1976 Coombs resigned all his posts and became a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, where he developed a new interest in environmental issues. But Aboriginal affairs remained his greatest passion, and in 1979 he launched the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, calling for a formal treaty between Australia and the Aboriginal people. The idea gained much public support, but neither the Fraser government nor its successor, Bob Hawke's Labor government, took it up. He deplored the breakdown of the postwar Keynesian economic consensus represented by Thatcherism, and in his 1990 book The Return of Scarcity he proposed a Common Wealth Estate to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. He died in Sydney in 1997.

Under the Howard government, the "Coombs legacy" in Aboriginal affairs came under increasing criticism from ideological conservatives. They argued that the communal land ownership implicit in Aboriginal land rights was keeping Aboriginal people poor and dependent on welfare by preventing the private ownership of land.

[edit] Further reading

  • H. C. Coombs, Trial Balance, MacMillan 1981
  • Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: a Reforming Life, Cambridge University Press, 2002
  • Tim Rowse, Obliged to be Difficult: Nugget Coombs' Legacy in Indigenous Affairs, Cambridge University Press, 2000

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

Preceded by:
HT Armitage		 Governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
1949–1960		 Succeeded by:
(none)
Preceded by:
(none)		 Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia
1960–1968		 Succeeded by:
JG Phillips
Preceded by:
Howard Walter Florey		 Chancellor of the Australian National University
1968–1976		 Succeeded by:
Sir John Crawford
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