UBS HSC Economics Day, May 29, 2024
I want to talk to you today about the federal budget two weeks ago and how it relates to the two key issues the managers of the economy need to keep under control: inflation and unemployment. Right now, inflation is still at the top of our worry list, but we shouldn’t forget that we’ve been doing exceptionally well on unemployment, and it’s important we do what we can to avoid fixing inflation at the expense of making unemployment our new problem.
Of course, what most voters see as our big economic problem – thereby making it the government’s biggest political problem - is the cost-of-living crisis. You may think that’s the same thing as what economists think of as the inflation problem, but it’s not that simple. When people complain about the pain they’re feeling from the cost of living, what they want is some immediate relief. By contrast, what economists want is a lasting reduction in high inflation. And this distinction matters because the economists’ standard solution to the pain caused by high inflation is to make it better by first making it worse. It’s actually the pain caused by this solution that people are complaining about most.
Economists know that the only cause of inflation their shorter-term macroeconomic levers can do anything about is inflation caused by the demand for goods and services growing faster than the economy’s ability to produce – supply - more goods and services. When demand exceeds supply, businesses use the opportunity to raise their prices. So, if you want to stop them raising their prices so freely, you have to reduce the demand for whatever it is they are selling. How do you do this? By putting the squeeze on households’ finances, thus making it harder for households to keep up their spending. How do you do this? The main way is for the RBA to raise interest rates, thus greatly increasing monthly mortgage payments. But it adds to the squeeze when bracket creep means the government takes a bigger tax bite out of workers’ pay rises. And it also helps if the government finds other ways to take more money out of the economy with its taxes relative to what it puts back into the economy by its own spending. That is, when you are reducing a budget deficit or increasing a budget surplus.
Before we get to this month’s budget, we need to understand where the economy is now by going back to see where it’s come from.
The recovery from the pandemic and the return to full employment
After the COVID virus arrived in Australia in early 2020, governments sought to slow its spread through the population until a vaccine could be developed. They closed our international borders, limited travel between our states, and locked down the economy, getting people to work from home if possible, closing schools and closing many shops and venues. The idea was for people to stay in their homes as much as possible. The result was a sudden collapse in economic activity – a sort of government-caused recession, with unemployment shooting up.
But governments knew they had to do what was necessary to hold the economy together during this temporary lockdown so that, as soon as it could be ended, the economy would quickly resume normal activity. So the economic managers unleashed huge monetary and fiscal stimulus. The RBA cut the official cash rate almost to zero, and the federal government spent loads of money on JobKeeper grants to employers and many other things. The state governments also spent a lot. From an almost balanced budget in the financial year to June 2019, the federal budget balance blew out to a deficit of $85 billion (equivalent to 4.3 pc of GDP) in the year to June 2020, then a peak deficit of $134 billion (6.4 pc of GDP) in the year to June2022.
But when the lockdowns ended, all the stimulus caused the economy to rebound. People started catching up with their spending, employment grew strongly and unemployment – and underemployment – fell like a stone. The economy boomed. With our borders still closed to immigrants, the rate of unemployment fell to 3.5 pc, it’s lowest in almost 50 years. So we had returned to full employment for the first time in five decades.
This strong growth did wonders for the budget balance. The temporary spending programs ended. When people go from being on JobSeeker to having a job, they start paying income tax – a double benefit to the budget. When people who want to are able to go from working part-time to full-time, they pay more tax. And when workers get bigger pay rises, their average rate of income tax rises, often because they’ve been pushed into a higher tax bracket. People call this “bracket creep”. But economists call it “fiscal drag”. They know it’s the budget’s inbuilt “automatic stabilisers” changing direction and acting to reduce workers’ after-tax income, thereby limiting the rate at which the economy is growing and adding to inflation pressure. (Another factor increasing tax collections was the world prices for iron ore and other commodities we export, which stayed high and cause our mining companies’ payments of company tax collections to be higher than expected.)
You can see this in the change in the budget balance. From a deficit of $134 billion (6.4 pc of GDP) in the year to June 2021, it fell to a deficit of $32 (1.4 pc) in the year June 2022. And then, in the first financial year of the Albanese government, it flipped to a budget surplus of $22billion (0.9 pc). This was all very lovely. But while it was happening, trouble was brewing: inflation was building up.
The return of high inflation
Since the early 1990s, we – and the other advanced economies – had enjoyed a low and stable rate of inflation within the RBA’s 2 to 3 pc target range. Or, in recent years, even a bit lower than the target. But with the economy booming, from early in 2022 the rate of inflation started rising rapidly. In May 2022, just before the election in which government passed from the Morrison Coalition to Albanese’s Labor, the RBA started raising interest rates to slow the growth of demand. By November 2023, it had raised the official “cash” interest rate 13 times, from 0.1 pc to 4.35 pc. Now, 4.35 pc is not high by the standards of earlier decades, but this was the biggest and quickest increase in interest rates we’ve seen, imposing great pain on households with big home loans. For separate reasons, we’ve seen an acute shortage of places to rent, allowing landlords to make big increases in the rent they charge.
So, while the RBA was raising interest rates to slow demand, consumer prices kept rising, with the inflation rate reaching a peak of nearly 8 pc – 7.8 pc to be exact - by December 2022. Last year, 2023, the RBA kept tightening monetary policy, and the inflation rate started falling, reaching 3.6 pc over the year to March, 2024.
It’s important to remember that not all of the rise in prices was caused by strong demand within Australia. A fair bit of it was caused by overseas disruptions to the supply of various goods we import. The disruption was caused by the pandemic and by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up the prices of petrol and gas. The resolution of these disruptions helped get our inflation rate down. And while all this was happening, the squeeze on households’ budgets had pretty much stopped any growth in consumer spending, thus slowing the economy’s growth. This meant a weakening in the demand for labour, causing the rate of unemployment to rise from its low of 3.5 pc to 4.1 pc by April this year. Now, that was where the economy was at when Mr Chalmers announced his budget two weeks’ ago.
The 2024 budget
The part of the Mr Chalmers’ budget that got most attention from the media was the decision to give all households a one-year, $300 rebate on their electricity bills. This had the political benefit to the government of giving voters some relief to cost-of-living pain they have been demanding the government provide. But it was designed also to produce a benefit to the economy: combined with an increase in the rent allowance paid to people on welfare payments, it is expected to reduce the consumer price index by 0.5 percentage points during the coming financial year, 2024-25. This device will come at a cost to government spending of $4.4 billion over two years. Some economists criticised the rebate, arguing that its cost to the budget would actually add to inflationary pressure. They noted that all the new measures announced in the budget would worsen the budget balance by almost $10 billion in the new financial year, and by a total of $24 billion over the coming four years. So they denounced the budget as inflationary at a time when the RBA and the government were still battling to get inflation heading down to the inflation target of 2 to 3 per cent, so that the RBA could start lowering interest rates.
But what the critics have missed is that the measure that will do by far the most to worsen the budget balance from an expected further surplus of $9 billion (equivalent to 0.3 pc of GDP) in the financial year just ending, to a deficit of $28 billion (1 pc of GDP) in the coming year, is the stage 3 tax cuts. These have been government policy since 2018, but were rejigged a few months ago to ensure that more of their benefit went to low and middle-income taxpayers. Their cost in the first year of $23 billion, accounts for more than 60 pc of the total expected turnaround in the budget balance of $37 billion.
The other big announcement in the budget was the government’s Future Made in Australia program. This is a most important change in the government’s micro-economic policy. But the expected cost to the budget of about $23 billion will be spread over 10 years, with little of it spent over the next few years. This means it is not a big issue for the short-term management of the macro economy.
The new macro “policy mix”
So where does the budget leave the authorities use of the two instruments of macro demand management – monetary policy and fiscal policy? It leaves us with the “stance” of monetary policy having got progressively more restrictive over the past two years, with the long lag in policies having their full effect on demand meaning there is more contractionary effect to come.
The huge growth in tax collections caused by the budget’s automatic stabilisers has caused the budget to have two financial years of surpluses, meaning a restrictive stance of fiscal policy has added to the contractionary pressure from monetary policy. But, although Mr Chalmers has denied it, there can be no doubt that, thanks mainly to the stage 3 tax cuts, the budget changes the “stance” of fiscal policy from restrictive to expansionary.
The government’s critics argue that this expansion will jeopardise our efforts to get inflation down to the target range. I disagree. The economy is weak, expected by Treasury to have grown by only 1.75 pc in the financial year just ending, and to grow by only 2 pc in the coming year. If anything, that’s probably on the optimistic side. At 3.6 pc over the year to March, the inflation rate has already fallen close to the 2 to 3 pc range, and it’s easy to believe it will keep falling in the coming year, as Treasury forecasts. After a lag, the tax cut will take some of the pressure off household spending. But, with luck, it will help ensure the economy’s slowdown doesn’t become a recession. Even so, Treasury’s forecast that the economy’s continuing weakness will push the rate of unemployment no higher than 4.5 pc is probably also on the optimistic side.
Outlook for the budget and the public debt
Treasury’s forecasts and projections suggest the budget is likely to remain in small but declining deficits over the decade to 2034-35. The federal government’s gross public debt is expected to be $904 billion (34 pc of GDP) at June, 2024. The gross debt is projected to peak at 35 pc of GDP in June 2027, then decline to 30 pc by June 2035. This proportionate decline would occur because the economy was growing faster than the small deficits were adding to gross debt.