The mid-year budget update we’ll see next Monday presents the government and its econocrats with a threshold question: can their battered credibility withstand one more set of economic forecasts based on little more than naive optimism?
Or won’t it matter if first the industry experts, and then the Quiet Australians in voterland, get the message that budgets are largely works of fiction - based on political spin, with forecasts crafted to fit - and so are not to be believed?
Last week’s national accounts confirmed five successive quarters of weak growth in the economy and left Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe’s lovely thought of the economy reaching a “gentle turning-point” looking pretty ragged.
Maybe if you squint you could see a pattern of improvement, with the economy’s weakness concentrated in the last two quarters of 2018 (growth in real GDP of 0.3 per cent and 0.2 per cent), and strength returning in the first three quarters of this year: 0.5 per cent, 0.6 per cent and now 0.4 per cent.
Trouble is, that ain’t economics, it’s numerology: looking at a pattern of numbers without troubling your head with the varying factors that are driving them. Look at what’s driving those numbers and the illusion is dispelled.
Every part of the private sector is weak: consumer spending, home building and business investment, so much so that, as a whole, it’s actually contracting. That consumer spending is weak and getting weaker – despite the tax cut and three cuts in interest rates – is hardly surprising when you remember how weak the growth in wages has been.
It’s a great thing that public sector spending is providing most of what little growth we’re getting while the private sector goes backwards, but it doesn’t count as a sign the economy’s getting back on its feet.
As for the contribution from net exports, it would be more encouraging if it weren’t for the knowledge that a fair bit of it comes from the fall in imports you’d expect to see when domestic demand is “flat to down”.
But for a disillusioning summary statistic, try this: real household disposable income per person – a good measure of average material living standards - has essentially been flat since the end of 2011. So the Quiet Australians have nothing to show for eight years of toil. The rest is a conjuring trick where high population growth is passed off as growing prosperity.
Three quarters into our run of five weak quarters, Scott Morrison fought the election on a claim to have delivered a Strong Economy. The two subsequent sets of national accounts have destroyed that masterpiece of the marketer’s art.
But Morrison’s misrepresentations came bolstered by Treasury forecasts and projections showing the economy would quickly recover from weakness to strength, whereupon it would enter a five-year period of above-trend (3 per cent) annual growth before reverting to trend for the rest of a decade.
This flight of back-of-an-envelope fancy not only appeared to be Treasury’s endorsement of Morrison’s unfounded claims about strong growth, they supported the government’s claim that the budget could easily afford to double the tax cuts announced in the previous year’s budget – taking the cumulative cost to revenue to $300 billion over a decade – and still achieve healthy annual surpluses, eliminating the government’s net public debt by June 2030.
Just eight months later, these fearless forecasts aren’t looking too flash. They had the economy returning to trend growth of 2.75 per cent this financial year and inflation returning to 2.5 per cent by June 2021.
Most wonderful of all, they had annual wage growth accelerating to 2.5 per cent by June (actual: 2.3 per cent, falling to 2.2 per cent following quarter), to 2.75 per cent by June next year, then to 3.25 per cent by June 2021 and 3.5 per cent by June 2022 and in all subsequent years.
Wages are such a central driver of the economy, this triumph of hope over experience was essential to any forecast recovery in consumer spending and economic growth, not to mention any return to (bracket-creep-fuelled) budget surpluses despite tax cuts.
See the problem Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and his troops face in preparing next Monday’s mid-year budget update? Do they keep playing the budgetary version of the with-one-bound-our-hero-broke-free game and leave themselves open to growing derision, or do they stop pretending, offer plausible forecasts and adopt a more defensible projection methodology, and start on the long road back to being respected and authoritative?
But if the days of Treasury being game to give the boss (Morrison) forecasts he won’t like are long gone, that raises a courage question for the Reserve heavies: when will they stop ensuring their forecasts tick-tack with Treasury’s and start telling us what they really think?
