Fred Gruen

Fred Henry George Gruen AO (14 June 1921 – 29 October 1997) was an Australian economist, an early and influential voice in favour of free trade and tariff reductions in the 1960s and 1970s.

His father Willy, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer while he was at school in England and his mother Marianne (née Zwack) was engulfed in The Holocaust being taken first to Theresienstadt and thence to Auschwitz after which she was not seen again.

They encountered a more relaxed attitude in Australia – one guard summing up the character of the 'friendly enemy aliens' and famously asking one of them to hold his rifle while he lit a cigarette.

Both on the boat trip to Australia and thence at Hay, Gruen benefited from the ubiquity of highly educated fellow inmates from musicians to philosophers of considerable standing in Europe.

Though he completed the examinations for his PhD, Gruen did not finish the degree as the intensity of his study led to a serious thyroid condition.

Gruen also published a theoretical curiosity with Max Corden in 1970 "A tariff that worsens the terms of trade", though it was focused on a specific policy problem.

In response to growing unease at Monash University, Gruen attempted to engage with the more reasonable student radicals and set up complaints mechanisms.

When those mechanisms sometimes found against his colleagues, his faculty became – unsurprisingly – less congenial to him and so, when he was offered a chair at the ANU in late 1971, he "accepted with alacrity".

Shortly afterward, following the election of the first Labor Government in 23 years under the leadership of Gough Whitlam, Gruen was approached by the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to become a special consultant to the department to enable it to provide economic advice that was independent of the Federal Treasury.

In 1973 with Australia experiencing sharply rising inflation and strong current account surpluses, Gruen proposed a 25 percent across the board tariff cut, which was adopted by the Whitlam government.

He hired Bob Gregory, Bruce Chapman, John Quiggin, Steve Dowrick and Cathy Baird, all of whom were exceptionally talented, productive and sensible.

At Gruen's testimonial dinner in 1986, former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam joked about Gruen's retirement, about the improved stature of economics in response to recent economic difficulties, and about the resignation of John Stone from his position as Secretary to the Federal Treasury to become a politician with the right of centre National Party.

In the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours Gruen was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) "for service to education, particularly in the field of economics".

Dr David Gruen has forged a successful career as a professional economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and then as a senior official at the Federal Treasury, where he headed the Macroeconomic Group.