- Title
- D.B. Copland and the aftershocks of the Premiers' plan 1931-1939
- Creator
- Millmow, Alex
- Date
- 2005
- Type
- Text; Conference paper
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/34511
- Identifier
- vital:1491
- Abstract
- Since Roland Wilson’s (1951) tribute to L. F. Giblin as ‘the grand old man’ or father figure of modern Australian economics there has been a tendency to underestimate the achievements and legacy of Douglas Berry Copland. It became fashionable, moreover, with the post-war generation of economists to belittle his contribution to interwar Australian economic thought especially that relating to stabilisation policy. Copland was quite aware of the chiselling away at his reputation. Commenting to a friend while reading Harrod’s biography of Keynes he wrote ‘Still reading Keynes and I remember most of the controversy and the discussion he was involved from the 1920’s onwards. A few of us had been working on similar lines and I have somewhere a set of memorandums to the government of NSW from 1932 to 1936 urging with all the persuasion I could muster an expansionist policy, but we could not get pass the Commonwealth Treasury. It would be fun to dig them out now and circulate for the younger brethren who still think we are past praying for. I’m sure he (Keynes) would disown Coombs and his school if he was with us now’. By that reflection Copland revealed not just his close dealings with Keynes but his fear that a hydraulic Keynesianism was taking hold within the Australian economics fraternity. It also showed Copland’s pride of the policy advocacy and controversies he had actively participated in during the 1930’s.
- Publisher
- Melbourne : University of Melbourne
- Relation
- Paper presented at the Australian Conference of Economists, 2005, Melbourne : 26th September, 2005
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- Copyright Unknown
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Premier; Economy
- Full Text
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