Readers will draw their own various conclusions from these two modest but compelling essays. It may nevertheless be helpful to spell out briefly some of the lessons from the Ord as they here emerge so that the reader can proceed more comfortably from the general to the particular. Most obviously it is clear that at the time the major
decisions were made there was no clear and public argument about the respective virtues of private and public investment. It was indeed argued at one stage that the moneys invested in the Ord might have been better invested by the government of the day in some other project. But to argue that, is to argue only one half of the case. The test must surely be that the best possible investment by government must offer a return better, not than any alternative public investment but than the best private investment. That argues, in the simplest case, that the investment must be known to be better than the use to which individual taxpayers would put their moneys had government not deprived them of their choices. Clearly in the case of the Ord, the decision does not stand up to either test.
The delightfully stoic comment by Sir Robert Menzies (on page 32) leads us into another area where rational public argument has been lacking, namely, fiscal responsibility in our federal system. The Ord Scheme, indeed, offers ample ammunition for those who take the extreme view that responsibilityis directly proportional to the taxing power.
Certainly even those who hold a less extreme position may argue that the history of the Ord shows that our federal system has insufficient discipline built into it. That leads us to another political consideration, of the role of our parliaments in the scrutiny of expenditure. It would be pleasant to think that these days the enabling Bills would stand a fair chance of being referred to one or another parliamentary com mittee. But it would not happen of necessity, and that in itself shows how little we have learnt since 1967. One of the virtues of such scrutiny is that it enables access to alternative sources of advice. Indeed one of the more interesting subsidiary themes of this study is the varying quality of bureaucratic advice, which may lead readers to wonder to what degree the worth of expert opinion varies in relation to its independence from government.
