''Whenever an idea is ventured publicly by a person, whether that person is a policy adviser or whether it's a government minister, there's at least a handful of academics who will contest it,'' he said.
''I'm not going to comment about the resource super profits tax but I will talk about the emissions trading scheme. Most academic economists accepted, at least behind closed doors, that it was a sound policy idea. Yet there were no end of academics who wanted to say for example, it's not bad, but a carbon tax would be better. That did not increase at all the chances of a carbon tax being legislated. All it did was reduce the chance of an emissions trading scheme being legislated.
''In the way in which political debate occurs in Australia, such statements do enormous damage to the prospects of sensible reform. There are times when it would serve the national interest if economists could just call a halt to the war for a while.''
