J. W. Wainwright key to new economic strategy for South Australia under premiers Richard Butler, Tom Playford
Future South Australian government auditor general J.W. Wainwright (right) and government actuary and later Adelaide University foundation economics professor Leslie Melville wrote the pamphlet,The Economic Effects of Federation, in 1929, highlighting the economic disadvantages faced by South Australia.
J. W. (John William) Wainwright, South Australia’s government auditor general 1934-45, was credited with strongly influencing premier Richard Butler and then Tom Playford in reinforcing the state’s economic strategy away from a primary industries base.
Wainwright, a Naracoorte-born former schoolteacher and son of a head teacher, rose from 1908 as one of the more educated members of the South Australian public service by completing an Adelaide University bachelor of arts degree and accountancy course at evening school. The university later employed Wainwright as a part-time lecturer in public finance.
Parallel to Wainright rise in the public service, Leslie Melville had been appointed South Australia’s public actuary, at the age of 22, in 1924, and became the foundation professor of economics at Adelaide University five years later.
Melville and Wainwright wrote a 1929 pamphlet, The Economic Effects of Federation, highlighting the shift in balance between commonwealth and state powers, with tariff policies disadvantaging states (such as South Australia) that produced the least-protected goods and relied most on exporting primary products.
Wainwright became a general economic adviser to South Australian government, sitting on royal commissions on railways, dairy produce industries, transport and electricity supply, and committees on public service efficiency, secondary industries, public transport, regional development, forestry, dairying, abattoirs, building materials, tax, and financial relations with the commonwealth government.
His consistent Keynesian approach, with effective business regulation, advocated a whole-of-industry approach by the government, including price controls to preserve cost cutting as an incentive when competing for enterprises with other states. Wainwright also saw public enterprises as being as efficient as private ones, as long as they were run by a non-executive board of directors of experts and laypersons.
Wainwright believed economic development also needed a productive culture and collective purpose. In 1942, he and Tom Garland, a communist union secretary, founded a movement called Common Cause. Its priority was to intensify the World War II effort but also to '”generate a new and vital attitude to society and ourselves”, with business and labour leaders, churchmen and academics agreeing on statements of social purpose, and on the need for social research to aid political consensus.
In 1931, Leslie Melville left the Adelaide University economics chair to become Australia's Commonwealth Bank first economist. Australian Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane in 2002, assessing Melville career advising Australian governments from the 1920s to the 1970s, concluded that "you could be forgiven for thinking that Melville was the central bank" and "any objective assessment of achievements would place Sir Leslie among the most distinguished Australians of the past century".
