The tariffs imposed on imported goods to protect Australian manufacturers from competition were extraordinarily high. For clothing, they reached 55%; for motor vehicles, 45%.
Then, with absolutely no public indication he had been considering anything as drastic, at 7pm on Wednesday July 18, the recently elected prime minister Gough Whitlam made an announcement.
Every tariff cut by one quarter overnight
From midnight, all tariffs would be cut by 25%. As Whitlam put it: “each tariff will be reduced by one quarter of what it is now”.
If Australian businesses (and the Australian public) were caught by surprise, it was because Whitlam had planned the whole thing in secret.
He had given a six-person committee just three weeks to work out the details.
Although the committee was chaired by the head of the Tariff Board, Alf Rattigan, and included an official from Whitlam’s own department, the department of industry and the department of trade, it met in an obscure location in Canberra’s civic centre rather than in public service offices, where the project might be discovered.
Not included in the committee was a representative of the treasury, which its then deputy head John Stone said “knew nothing” about what was unfolding.
https://theconversation.com/how-a-secret-plan-50-years-ago-changed-australias-economy-forever-in-just-one-night-209378
