They were not alone in this. Australia's mistake was essentially that we followed slavishly behind the Federal Reserve and of course most other highly developed economies. We failed to make our own analysis. We failed to see what was good for our own economy - and to advocate sensible policies to our friends. Let me digress a little.
Inflation means that too much money is chasing too few goods and services.
To beat inflation, you need either to raise production or cut consumption. We got something that we called stagflation. Sometimes we kidded ourselves that it came from the oil-price hikes. Some of it did. But it was there before 1973 and it was there for twenty years after 1980 - except as we point out below, domestic inflation became distorted into b of p imbalances.