H. C. Coombs

Herbert Cole Coombs
Coombs at the Lapstone Conference in 1948
1st Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia
In office January 1960 – July 1968
Preceded by	none, initial officeholder
Succeeded by	JG Phillips
Personal details
Born	24 February 1906 Kalamunda, Western Australia, Australia
Died	29 October 1997 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Alma mater	B.A. (Hons), M.A., University of Western Australia Ph.D., London School of Economics
Profession	Economist

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, was an Australian economist and public servant.

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.

Early life

Coombs was born in Kalamunda, Western Australia, Australia, one of six children of a country railway station-master and a well-read mother.

After five years at Perth Modern School (where Bob Hawke was also educated), to which he had won a scholarship, he worked as a pupil-teacher for a year before spending two years at the Teachers' College. He then spent two years teaching at country schools, during which he studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree in the University of Western Australia (UWA), at the time the only university in Australia that did not charge fees. Transferring to a metropolitan school for the final two years, he graduated B.A. with first-class honours in economics and won a Hackett Studentship for overseas study. This was deferred for a year, at the end of which, in 1931, he graduated M.A. also from UWA and married a fellow teacher, Mary Alice ('Lallie') Ross. As a student at UWA, Coombs was elected as the 1930 Sports Council President and subsequently the 1931 President of the Guild of Undergraduates. He then proceeded to the London School of Economics, where he studied under Harold Laski, one of the most influential Marxists of the 20th century. In 1933 he was awarded a Ph.D. for a thesis on central banking.

In 1934 he returned to a teaching position in Perth and combined this with part-time lecturing in economics at UWA.

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. Coombs played a leading role in the preparation of the White Paper on Full Employment in Australia which, for the first time, committed the government to maintaining full employment from the post World War II years.

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.

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 became 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.

During Howard government administration, the "Coombs legacy" in Aboriginal affairs came under increasing criticism. It has been 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.

Recognition

On 2 January 2008, it was announced that a suburb in the future Canberra district of Molonglo would be named Coombs .

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

External links

• Reserve Bank of Australia official website
• Commonwealth Bank official website
• Professor Helen Hughes on the "Coombs experiment"

Sources

• Unknown (5 November 1971), Prime Minister MacMahon turns to old fabian master, The Australian League of Rights
• A.S. Podger (24 September 2003), Trends in the Australian Public Service: 1953-2003 (text illustrations), Australian Public Service Commission
• Gough Whitlam (14 November 1997), Nugget Coombs, The Whitlam Institute