The ongoing energy crisis in Australia — battering sawmillers and operators across the forestry and agriculture sectors — reveals clear failures within the Australian public service and, by extension, the political representatives who rely upon its advice. Tough language, perhaps, but justified, because one would expect the public service to know Australian history.
The Australian National Energy Market was partly initiated by the late Sir John Carrick, an Australian who also served as Energy Minister in the Fraser Liberal–National Party Government, the government that prosecuted the policy now described as “drill, baby, drill.”
Finding anyone who knew Sir John in his official capacity is difficult, but an interview with someone who had four conversations with him during his later years offers a rare window into his thinking.
Sir John held that there were five fundamental and essential areas of public policy — in no particular order of importance — being energy, education, housing, the arts, and Indigenous affairs.
In terms of energy, Australia needed to be self-sufficient and provide affordable power to businesses and the community. As a trading nation carrying high wages, the single biggest controllable business cost was energy, and cheaper energy was therefore a vital pillar of a productive and prosperous economy.
An economist by training, Sir John grounded his policy worldview in that discipline, placing affordable energy at the centre of national competitiveness and living standards.
In his framework, education offered the community a pathway to future employment and progress, equipping Australia with a pool of skilled workers with advanced knowledge in research and science.
Housing was essential because it provided stability for families and, in turn, for the broader community, underpinning support for economic prosperity.
The arts mattered, in Sir John’s view, because the artist community expressed the soul of the nation.
Policy for Indigenous Australians was important because Australia, as a wealthy nation, should not have the social disadvantage linked to its First Peoples — a position Sir John regarded as a matter of national character.
Sir John and Lady Carrick were of the Christian faith, and Lady Carrick served as his secretary for many years. Each Friday, the pair would travel to Kings Cross and Darlinghurst in Sydney to work alongside the homeless and less fortunate who gathered there.
One must ask what has changed since 1949, when Sir John assumed the role of State Director of the NSW Division of the Liberal Party of Australia.
He spent many years running his own policy committees to keep himself abreast of community issues — managing an arts committee, for instance, and regularly inviting community leaders to develop responsive, improved policy positions. This work is largely unrecorded.
In the years after 1949, as Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies won seven consecutive elections, Sir John would present the PM with a written “appreciation”—a WWII Defence term meaning a written appraisal and planned response —a practice shaped by Sir John’s own experience as a Changi prisoner of war. The PM would read the document and approve its implementation, often with words to the effect: “Go and do it and tell me what I have to do.”
The expression “You cannot fatten the pig on market day” — credited by members of the Canberra press gallery to former PM John Howard — was, in fact, a saying of Sir John’s, referring to the practice of beginning to campaign the day after polling day in readiness for the next election.
That expression applies with equal force to both Coalition and Labor governments, which have rushed headlong into building an economy on renewable power, guided by public service climate ideologues and by polling drawn from professional-class electorates — not the communities where energy prices directly determine household budgets and employment prospects.
Sir John was fully aware of the danger posed by overpriced energy in Australia, spending his post-Whitlam years rebuilding the economic and business conditions necessary for oil exploration to recommence after exploration had all but ceased under the previous government.
He worked to develop the national energy market with one overriding aim: to keep Australian energy prices as low as possible through reliable supply and grid sharing, viewing energy as a national issue rather than a state-based one.
Australians working in public policy — particularly within the public service — would be better served by going beyond IPC report summaries, which can be misleading when examined against the underlying documents. They might also study the public policy contributions of Sir John Carrick, Sir John Crawford, Sir Arthur Tange, and others whose records of careful, long-horizon thinking have been largely set aside.
With Australian energy costs still climbing and no credible long-horizon policy in sight, the institutional memory these figures represent is not a curiosity of political history — it is a resource the sector cannot afford to keep ignoring.
