Last week our political leaders spoke at a conference about building the economy. They spouted the now fashionable doctrine of economic irrationalism. They had all sorts of centrally planned, government-directed ideas for making us richer.

This reminded me that for a couple of decades this newspaper ran a weekly column called A Modest Member. It was written by Bert Kelly, a federal backbencher from South Australia. In the laconic but crystal-clear style of the farmer he was, Kelly dissected the economics of pork-barrelling and political populism, drawing readers’ attention to the net costs of these policies.