I knew both of them. Political opposites, John Stone and Tom Lehrer, nevertheless had a similar characteristic that shaped their lives. Two great intellects nurtured in their formative undergraduate academic years by the certainties of the mathematics in which they both excelled. This discipline, where answers are either right or wrong, with no room for grey areas or conditional conclusions, influenced their approach to their distinguished lives, the celebration of which has been prompted by their recent deaths.

John Stone, with his first class honours from the University of Western Australia in mathematical physics (before switching, as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar, to  graduate with first class honours in philosophy, politics and economics), never lost the mathematical certainty that a brilliant intellect and inescapable logic brought to his approach to life – no matter what the consequences. Stone was always certain that his considered views, of a conservative bent, were correct; those who disagreed were in error. In this context, he did not suffer fools gladly, especially if they were politicians – a position with some downsides when, in government, they are your theoretical (although lower remunerated) bosses.

If politics is the art of the achievable, rather than the acceptance only of perfection, ultimate failure was inevitable when Stone curiously chose to join the ranks of the despised politicians by joining the Joh for Canberra calamity. His attempt to give economic credibility to Bjelke Petersen’s tax push only served to damage his own.

For Harvard’s professor Tom Lehrer, mathematical clarity gave his leftist bent (enhanced, even more so than for the highly literate Stone, by an unrivalled facility with language) a similar sense of certitude that pervaded his ‘rebellious’ cynical songs and verses. The result was that his relatively modest volume of effective anti-establishment rhymed proselytising enjoyed a remarkable world-wide impact.

I first met Tom Lehrer 65 years ago in the Channel Nine studios in Sydney where I was one of the journalists (I was then on Donald Horne’s The Observer with Peter Coleman) in the David McNicoll Meet The Press panel that had Lehrer as its guest. He was on a lengthy and very successful performance tour of Australia promoting his mixture of whimsicality, bad-taste (some of his songs were banned in South Australia) and leftist political satire. He was brilliant television.

I had brought along a copy of an old Sydney University Rebel Songbook that included several left anthems like ‘The Red Flag’, ‘The Internationale’, ‘There once was a union made’, ‘When the red revolution comes’ and, two years before Peter, Paul and Mary made it famous, ‘If I had a Hammer’. When we had some drinks in the green room after the show, I gave it to him and he insisted that we sing some of them. So conservative Sir Frank Packer’s TV station rocked with a communist singalong. We got on so well that I held a riotous party for him at home and he gave me a copy of the then- banned Portnoy’s Complaint with his signed message wishing me well in my revolutionary way. Someone stole it.

The last time I spoke with him was in 2000 when I attended Harvard’s notorious Ig-Nobel Prize event, of which he had been an initiator and remained very much involved despite having given up writing satire (How can you write satire when real life is even more absurd?) and reverted to academia. My task was to accept the ‘honour’ on behalf of an Australian woman whose book claimed people could exist on air instead of food. How I copped the response is viewable on Harvard’s YouTube channel. In my last chat with Lehrer, he offered to return my Rebel Songbook if I needed it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him my rebel songs years were long since gone.

My relationship with John Stone was on a much less whimsical level, and once again as a journalist, but this time on the Australian Financial Review. My first link with this influential Treasury official was 60 years ago when the report of the Menzies-appointed Vernon Committee’s strongly protectionist three-year-long economic inquiry was tabled in federal parliament. In a speech reputed to have been written by Stone, Menzies excoriated the report, particularly its call for two independent economic advisory bodies to undertake ‘long-term trends into consideration in all areas of economic decision-making’. With Menzies’ philosophical position being hostile to the concept of ‘government by economists’ rather than elected politicians, he was an enthusiastic recipient of Stone’s demolition of Vernon, which was based on a very different agenda – Stone fiercely opposed the creation of any entity whose advice to government would have rivalled Treasury’s.

He was consistently critical of politicians having the temerity to seek and take advice from ‘meretricious players’ from outside Treasury. This could even extend to other government agencies and politicians’ advisers; When Stone’s gradualist advice was rejected in favour of the Reserve Bank’s ‘Just do it’, Stone was conspicuously not present when Keating and Reserve Bank Governor Bob Johnston announced the floating of the Australian dollar in December 1983.

This obsessive view of the primacy of Treasury was part of a tradition that reached its peak under the fearsome Roland Wilson. It gave Treasury an aura of arrogance – which, it is claimed, thrived under Stone’s leadership. Recently, Stone lamented, in an interview with the Australian newspaper’s Troy Bramston, that his old department had lost its authority. ‘Treasury has been vastly diminished over recent decades; it seems unwilling to speak truth to power, its forecasts are routinely wrong and it no longer has the status it once did.’

Despite my belonging to the despised politician class who were ruining Australia, in my role as Parliamentary Secretary to Treasurer John Howard (that post has since been up-graded to Assistant Treasurer), I always received every courtesy and cooperation from John Stone as Treasury secretary. My relationship no doubt soured, along with that of Treasurer Howard’s after the economically risky (and drought-affected) 1982-83 August budget. On the weekend before its presentation, Howard, his economic adviser John Hewson and I walked from Parliament House (the old one) to the Treasury to check the page proofs of the budget speech and papers and make any last-minute revisions. Reading through budget papers, I came across the insertion of many parenthetical clauses that had the effect of countering or at least implying uncertainty about the policy consequences that were in the text. This problem, that was up to the Treasurer to resolve, appeared to be the manifestation of Stone’s objection to the budget’s laxity that resulted in a projected horrendous $9.6 billion deficit when a successful Hawke government took office in March 1983. (However, the eventual outcome was $4 billion lower after Hawke made it rain to break the drought). So Stone voted Labor, Howard lost the Treasury and I lost my seat.

For many years as Spectator Australia colleagues , John Stone and I continued contributing thought-provoking articles of a conservative bent into our nineties. His death now leaves me, at 95, The Spectator Australia’s oldest regular columnist. May this continue to be the case.