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Jonathan Pincus, ‘Two Very Different Visions’ Menzies’s Long Boom

One of the defining features of the Menzies era was a long economic boom where, apart from the occasional short hiccup, growth remained high while inflation and unemployment remained low. The eternal debate is to what extent did the Menzies Government facilitate this prosperity? While Menzies maintained a significant role for the state and the levers of Keynesian economic control that were already in place, there is no doubt that his anti-socialist vision contrasted with his predecessor who not only tried to nationalise the banks but also tried to expand the Commonwealth’s constitutional powers to organise marketing, dictate industrial employment, and even to control rents and prices. In this context, and combined with Menzies’s rapid push to abandon wartime controls and rationing, and also to open the door to foreign investment, there is a strong case to be made that his government gave the economy the freedom to flourish, at least by a comparative standard.

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Professor of Economics Jonathan Pincus, who picks apart the details of Menzies’s economic miracle.

Jonathan Pincus FASSA is Visiting Professor of Economics at Adelaide University, and an independent researcher and consultant. Jonathan was Principal Adviser Research at the Productivity Commission and is a former editor of the Australian Economic History Review and Australian Economic Papers. He holds a PhD from Stanford, and was first listed in Who’s Who in Economics in 1986. The Economic Society of Australia awarded him its Distinguished Public Policy Fellowship medal in 2015.