And his writings emphasised the importance of spending public money wisely and the dangers of excessive and poorly designed regulation. I suspect that if Shann was among us this evening, he would see much that he liked in the Australian economy of 2015.
While we still have work to do, in many respects we are closer to the world that he advocated than we were in the 1920s when he was doing much of his work. Most of us, I think, would agree that the general move to a fairly liberalised marketbased economy has served Australia and its people well.