A response to John Stone.

SIR: John Stone's comment on my address to the National Archives on the 1976 Cabinet Papers and his reply to my response lead me to note the following points for the record:

* Stone has not attempted to defend the inaccurate advice which Treasury provided to the government in 1976 that the devaluation would have a very large inflationary impact;

* Stone regards the refusal of the departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Treasury to respond at the time to the requests of the Prime Minister to prepare a parliamentary statement as a "trivial' matter;

* Stone fails to comprehend the damage his inflated rhetoric did to the credibility of his own and Treasury advice at the time, including to the Treasurer's credibility.

On the puzzling matter of the "misquotation" to which I referred, my reference was to the actual text of the paper I prepared for the National Archives, which was also the reference provided at the end of John Stone's comment in Quadrant. The printed text has always contained within it the words "Stone told me". This text was provided to the National Archives on the day of my presentation. Despite the availability of this text long before Stone's Quadrant piece, it appears to have been consulted by Stone only after my reply. In my oral presentation on the day, I used the words "I was told". All Stone had to do to answer his own question, "Who told Kemp?" was to read the prepared text of my remarks.

The impact of the Public Service reforms of 1999 will doubtless be a matter of debate for some time. Stone continues by implication to disparage the quality of those senior officers who have come forward under the "new regime", for he places weight on the fact that of the five departmental secretaries I named, four were public servants under the "old regime". My own view is that our elected governments are today able to provide better government than they were able to do several decades ago, and that while there are a number of reasons for this, the contributions of many very high quality public servants working within the new framework are significant in achieving this outcome.

David Kemp, Melbourne, Vic.