Alf Rattigan
|
Alf Rattigan CBE AO |
|
|---|---|
| Secretary of the Department of Customs and Excise | |
|
In office 25 July 1960 – 15 May 1963 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
Godfrey Alfred Rattigan 16 November 1911 Kalgoorlie, Western Australia |
| Died | 29 February 2000 (aged 88) Canberra, Australian Capital Territory |
| Nationality |
 Australian |
| Spouse(s) | Winifred (née Odgers) (m. 1940–2000; his death) |
| Occupation | Public servant |
Godfrey Alfred "Alf" Rattigan CBE AO (16 November 1911 – 29 February 2000) was a senior Australian Public Service official and policymaker.
Alf Rattigan was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia on 16 November 1911. In 1925 he joined the Royal Australian Navy as a 13-year-old cadet Midshipman at Jervis Bay.
Between July 1960 and May 1963 he was Comptroller General of Customs and Permanent Head of the Department of Customs and Excise.
Alf Rattigan was appointed to chair the Tariff Board in 1963, and was subsequently the first chairman of the Industries Assistance Commission when it replaced the Tariff Board in 1974.
His book Industry Assistance:The Inside Story, published in 1986, provided an account of the struggle against protectionism in Australia during the 1960s and early 1970s. It described the extent of entrenched opposition, by private interest groups and within government and bureaucracy, to policy transparency and to economic reform.
His commitment to reform was not the product of economic rectitude. He believed that rational—that is, nationally rewarding—economic policies are the means by which we can produce the additional wealth needed to achieve our social goals. He reasoned that the national wealth available to service those goals sets the limit on our ability to provide better education and improved health care, and argued that any compromise on economic reform lowers that limit.
The Tariff Board, which preceded the Industries Assistance Commission, was established as an independent statutory body, charged with recommending assistance to ‘economic and efficient’ industries. It was required to hold public hearings on the matters referred to it by governments and to provide its advice to governments in public reports. Until the mid-sixties its recommendations reflected the established ‘needs-based’ approach—that is, the level of protection needed to enable each industry to compete against international competition. Although its statute required it to report on ‘the operation of the Tariff and the development of industries’, its annual reports offered little insight into the economic consequences of the protection it recommended, and were generally limited to a description of those recommendations.
In the mid-sixties, following a wide-ranging review of economic policy commissioned by the then Australian government, the Board began to consider how the Board should respond to the quite limited policy guidance provided in its statute. Rattigan was aware of the adverse economic consequences of the established ‘needs-based’ approach to protection. In 1967 he outlined a new approach, developed to ensure that the Board's recommendations were consistent with the settled goals of national economic policy. This included a systematic public review of the structure and levels of protection, focusing on industries with high levels of protection, rather than the past focus on particular industries or products. It nominated levels of protection that indicated low, medium and high cost production (using ‘effective rate’, a measure of the protection accorded a process or industry rather than their outputs, developed by Professor Max Corden). The Board foreshadowed its intention to use the effective rate concept (measuring the net protection accorded an industry as a result of the opposite effects of protection on its inputs and outputs) in deciding which industries were highly protected and thus most in need of review. It also identified improvements needed in the policy information system supporting its work. Rattigan introduced these improvements, important in reporting on the economy-wide effects of protection, in the early life of the Industries Assistance Commission.
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