Gough Whitlam’s 25 per cent across-the-board cut in import tariffs 50 years ago this week marked the beginning of the end of industry protectionism in Australia. Hailed by The Australian Financial Review at the time, it was mostly designed to combat inflation just as the great stagflation of the 1970s started to take hold, fuelled by the first oil shock, Labor’s madcap public spending and wild trade union wage claims.

But it came also because, despite his faults, Mr Whitlam was an internationalist not a protectionist. He called himself a “Rattigan man”, after the great public servant Alf Rattigan, who headed up the Tariff Board, the predecessor of today’s Productivity Commission, and who led the charge for the 1973 tariff cut.