A voice for reason and commonsense that will be missed

Dear ,

Professor Tony Makin was perhaps the most active of our Academic Advisory Board. He looked like he was in his 50s, so I was shocked to hear that he died of a heart attack last week, age 66.

Tony made a significant contribution to Australian economics as one of the few monetarist economists still in the wild in academia (and surprisingly in his case in the environment of Griffith University, which was established on a swamp of woke postmodernism in the ‘70s).

I arranged to meet Tony after reading on of his op-eds in The Australian where he pointed out that the “Go Hard, Go Households” program of the Rudd government couldn’t have rescued us from the GFC, because most of the money wasn’t spent until after the economy had recovered.

It says something about contemporary economic analysis that such an obvious point had lain in the academic scrub, undetected by its professional and academic practitioners.

Tony was also the first that I could recall pointing out that Australia had had a couple of recessions measured by per capita GDP, rather than national GDP, and that high immigration rates were partially responsible for the Australian miracle, which was therefore not quite so miraculous after all.

I met Tony that first time at a coffee shop near his home on the Gold Coast. That was one clue to his character. When it comes to academic enterprise, the Gold Coast hinterland is not noted for its collection of fashionable intellectual salons. It is a place of tradies, and families. Young people growing-up in what used to be a traditional Australian suburban background. This is the “real” Australia where most economists, academic or otherwise, and unlike Tony, are only ever tourists, not residents.

Tony was in touch with ordinary aspirations, and obviously had them himself. And those values spoke through his work. Work hard, save hard, be responsible, invest wisely, don’t take on obligations that you can’t repay. It works well for individuals, and it also works well for nations.

A few months BC (Before COVID) Tony and I discussed the possibility of him doing some work on the Queensland state debt. 6 months AC we realised our timing was all wrong as all Australian governments, including the ones who professed to care about balanced budgets, became Bastard Keynesians and Modern Monetarists.

COVID has provided us with a valuable test case for some of the modish economic nostrums, like bastard Keynesianism, Universal Basic Income and Modern Monetary Theory. Tony would have been in his element, and indeed had started to write about the inflation that has started to take hold in the USA as an effect of printing too much money.

There is a lot more work to be done to pull Australia, if not the rest of the world, back to economic virtue, and it is a great shame that Tony will not be one of those doing it. When it comes to sane economic analysis, it always seems there are too few to begin with. Now there are even fewer.

More importantly he will be missed by those who were closest to him. His wife Brenda, and his children Hugh and Claire.

Regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR