30 July 2025
Published in The Australian
St John’s Anglican Church, Ashfield
E&OE
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With John Stone, whom we honour and mourn, it’s hard to find any sphere in which he did not excel. He was a brilliant student. He was outstanding at sport. He was the 1951 West Australian Rhodes Scholar. He swiftly rose through the ranks of Treasury – in those days, clearly, the elite of the Australian Public Service. For five years, he was Treasury head; and, in that capacity, helped tutor Paul Keating, Labor’s greatest treasurer and less, directly, Bob Hawke, Labor’s greatest prime minister.
John was, for three years, a member of the Senate and a Coalition frontbencher. He is the only federal departmental head, thus far, subsequently elected to the federal parliament. And after leaving parliament, as well as serving on the boards of some leading public companies, he was a fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs, a friend of the Centre for Independent Studies, and the leading spirit in the foundation of two important intellectual bodies: the HR Nicholls Society, to promote freedom of association in the workplace, and; the Samuel Griffith Society, to promote respect for our Constitution and for the rule of law more generally.
As well, John was a prodigious contributor to newspapers and magazines – especially Quadrant – to which he gave an almost sublimely perceptive essay on the imperfectability of politics, in which he declared, rightly in my opinion, that John Winston Howard was our greatest-ever prime minister.
In everything he did, his great stay and strength, his soulmate, was his late wife, Nancy, and his great pride was his children – all of whom, in their own way, are faithful reflections of their parents.
John Stone was an intellectual perfectionist. He wanted everything to be the very best – whether that was a Treasury minute, the policy of a government, or the state of our nation. Naturally enough, he was often disappointed – especially with politicians – because politics is the art of the possible, even if its best practicians are constantly seeking to expand the bounds of what’s possible in the best possible direction. It’s typical of John that he wanted governments to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way.
It’s often said that he opposed the decision of the Hawke government, late in 1983, to float the dollar. Indeed, this canard has been repeated in some of the obituaries. In fact, what he opposed was the lack of due process: a governmental decision, made without a proper cabinet discussion, and without proper Treasury advice, about all the other policies that might have to be changed in order to optimise the decision to float. But as he said in his rightly celebrated Shann Memorial Lecture in 1984 – delivered, quite properly, after he had already resigned as Treasury head – the decision to float the dollar was one of the best decisions ever made for the long-term benefit of our economy. It’s also typical of John that, having made it abundantly clear what he thought, he never bothered to take issue with the critics – leaving the crystal-clear record to speak for itself.
In that Shann Memorial Lecture – ostensibly about fiscal extravagance, tariff protection, and industrial arbitration – John was actually highlighting three much deeper and more abiding faults in our Australian approach to government: first, our tendency to think that government – especially government spending – can solve all problems; second, our tendency to think that somehow we can shield ourselves from competition and what’s going on in the wider world, and; third, that workers live in a different economic universe – one governed by a Thomistic notion of the just price. John’s message, then, is just as relevant today as it was in 1984. We are running deficits stretching as far as the eye can see. We have a government addicted to subsidising politically correct business ventures. And we have a workforce once more being subjected to attempted union control – even if that means fewer jobs and less prosperity. Not for a moment, though, do these recurring challenges suggest that John failed in his efforts to counter economic folly – merely that some battles are never finally won.
In that 1984 Shann lecture, he described our political class as “unworthy men masquerading as leaders”. Perhaps that was an overly harsh description of the parliament that then included our best Labor and best Liberal prime ministers. But it did hint at the great truth: that no elected politician – indeed, probably no human being – can be as good as he or she should be. Our challenge is not to achieve an impossible perfection, but “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” in the quest to be better.
The fact that he himself sought, just three years later, to become one of those “unworthy men masquerading as leaders” was actually John’s tribute to the significance of public life. And his failure, in 1990, to win the seat of Fairfax was no reflection on him – just on a generally miserable national campaign. Anyone, indeed, who could beat Bob Hawke in an election – the 1951 University of Western Australia Guild election – had the right stuff for public life.
Inevitably, there is a sense of loss; we are sad because we are human. But really, we should be uplifted and inspired by this life that testifies to so many wonderful possibilities, if only we are prepared to “have a go”, which John always was. There’s a figure of speech referencing “drips wearing down stone”; I like to think John was a stone wearing down drips!
At the close of his Shann lecture, John posed the question: “Have Australians, today, the will to do great things together again?” He believed that we were. So what is there to be said but this: we should not let him down.