We owe more than we realise to our best econocrats

If you believe, as all of us do, that governments need to be accountable to the voters who elect them, then someone has to care about the way those governments account for all the money they raise in taxes and charges, plus all the money they borrow. Governments spend this money on myriad services they provide and the huge array of infrastructure they build for us, ranging from police stations to grand spaghetti junctions.

Our politicians are meant to care about how – and how well – money is raised and spent, but the control of all that money and the recording of where it comes from and goes to is the responsibility of bureaucrats in federal and state treasuries and finance departments, not forgetting the central bank.

The budgets and financial statements they produce are intended to account publicly for all the money that passes through the governments’ hands, but the econocrats know that the system of accounting must also help ensure that governments and their departments and agencies are well managed. That the money they spend actually achieves its intended objectives, with little waste.

Whereas political journalists spend much of their time talking to the politicians we read about, as an economic journalist, I spend most time talking to the technocrats standing in the shadows behind them.

The pollies are never keen for the econocrats to take much of the media limelight, and that usually suits the bureaucrats fine. But while they all work hard in the voters’ interests, some of them do an outstanding job in protecting and advancing those interests.

One such person was Percy Allan, who died at 78 last month. He was secretary of the NSW Treasury for about 12 years under three premiers – Labor’s Neville Wran, the Liberals’ Nick Greiner and Labor’s Bob Carr. Allan was a contact of mine who later became a friend.

You may think of economists and accountants as being as boring as the work they do. But that’s not the way they think of themselves, and no one who knew Allan ever thought of him as dull.

As we were reminded during the pandemic, whereas the federal government raises most of the taxation, it’s the state governments that are responsible for delivering most of the government services we rely on.

The six states and two territories have much autonomy. They compete against and copy each other. But usually, it’s the biggest states, NSW and Victoria, that initiate change.

If you want boring, try this: Allan led the way in getting federal and state governments to adopt the accounting profession’s general accounting principles and also the public sector’s budget reporting and financial statistics standards.

It helps make governments’ budgets and financial statements more accountable and transparent if all governments follow the same set of rules, rather than them each doing things their own way. And for the rules to make sense.

Governments provide many figures for publication by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It helps if those figures are calculated on the same, consistent basis, and if government figures fit with all the statistics provided to the bureau by the private sector.

Similarly, it helps if all the world’s governments use the same internationally agreed standards laid down by the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Statistical Commission.

Private businesses have long been required to report their annual profit or loss, and their balance sheet of assets and liabilities on the last day of the year, on an “accrual” basis. That is, to make a great effort to ensure that the income reported for a particular period was earned during that period.

Likewise, to ensure the expenses reported for the period didn’t relate to other periods. Accountants call this making sure the income and expenses reported for a period actually “match”.

If that sounds obvious, it wasn’t the way federal and state government budgets and financial statements were prepared until Allan and others led the way in conforming to private sector and international accounting and statistical standards.

Until then, federal and state budgets and financial statements were calculated on a “cash” rather than accrual basis. Revenue was any money that hit the government’s bank account during the period, even if some of the money was people paying last year’s tax late or others paying next year’s early. Similarly, all money that left the government’s bank account during the year was counted regardless of the year to which it applied.

Has the penny dropped yet? Compared to the cash basis, the accrual basis makes it much harder for the company or the government to fudge their annual figures by switching incomings and outgoings between years.

Now get this. The federal government has used accrual accounting since the start of this century. But to this day, federal budget documents are written in a confusing mixture of the two accounting languages – cash and accrual. The budget deficit or surplus the treasurer tells us about is always the “underlying cash” balance.

Treasury will tell you cash is the more appropriate basis from a macroeconomic perspective. That is, when you want to judge the budget’s effect on the economy, or the economy’s effect on the budget.

Maybe. But what’s undeniably true is that, unlike the states, the feds’ retention of the cash basis makes it a lot easier for the government of the day to engage in creative accounting – which it often does.

Another reform Allan was proud of was the “corporatisation” of various businesses the state government owns: the railways, the buses, water and sewerage, electricity generation and distribution, the ports and so forth.

Allan wanted all government-owned businesses to run, and be accounted for, as though they were commercial undertakings. When so many of them are natural monopolies, this has its dangers.

But when state-owned businesses aren’t run like businesses, they’ll tend to be run for the convenience of employees rather than customers, with overstaffing and other wastefulness.

So, better to have transparent accounting, leading to greater efficiency and higher profits going back to the government, to be spent on additional services without the need for higher taxes.

Linked to this was Allan’s role, during the term of the reforming Greiner government, in setting up the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal to ensure the prices charged by government-owned businesses rose by no more than could be justified.

But one of Allan’s greatest achievements was achieved long after he’d left NSW Treasury. He founded and ran the Evidence Based Policy Research Project, in which a right-leaning and a left-leaning think tank have been commissioned to examine more than 100 federal or state bills to assess whether they stack up.

Most have been found not to. Allan had a big win when the NSW upper house passed a standing order that all government bills answer a public interest questionnaire. The project has been taken over by the Susan McKinnon Foundation.

My mate Percy Allan devoted his life to trying to make the world work better. We all owe him thanks.

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Lest we forget the unknown public servant, working to inform us

Have you ever wondered how much taxpayers’ money is wasted by our politicians and public servants? Do you hope that every dollar governments spend is fully accounted for?

And would you like it to be made public not just how much was spent on public servants’ wages, rent, grants, paperclips and other administrative expenses, but how much was being spent on each of the individual programs within education, health, police, courts, roads and all the other government departments?

Better yet, would you like to see what were the outcomes of all that spending on this program and that? That is, hard evidence on whether they were achieving their stated purpose, and by how much things were getting better or worse.

You don’t have to be keen personally to spend hours poring over the books to believe that such information must be made available for others to study: the government’s auditor-general, of course, but also the opposition, the media, nosey investigative reporters, academic experts, and even the special interest groups.

I’m pleased to tell you that all those things you’ve just agreed we need are being provided. But I need to remind you that 40 years ago, they weren’t.

In those days, government financial reports – state and federal – were a dog’s breakfast of facts and figures. If you were able to form a conclusion from them, it would probably have been wrong.

The accounts concealed about as much as they revealed. This was partly because no one had made the effort to make them more reliable and informative. And partly because this laxity made it easier for bureaucrats and politicians to fudge the figures, making things look better than they were.

But we’ve had much improvement since those bad old days. Many people have played a part in this reform, and much has happened under pressure from professional accounting bodies, the International Monetary Fund and the UN Statistical Commission.

But if you were to single out one person who drove most of the many improvements over many years, it would be Don Nicholls.

Never heard of him? That’s the way he wanted it. He was a shy, self-effacing Treasury officer, who wore a cardigan in the office and always ate a long pink iced bun for lunch. He joined the NSW Treasury straight from school in 1948, he retired in 1990, and he has just died, at 93.

If he sounds boring, know this: when he told his first wife, a writer, that writing seemed easy, she challenged him to enter the SMH short story writing competition. He won it with a story about cricket.

Some people assume only second-class minds join the public service. They’re wrong, and never more so than in Nicholls’ case. He went to a selective school, Fort Street High (one of two I went to), gained an economics degree and an accounting qualification while working and, a year after he retired, he published the tome Managing State Finance, which became the Treasury bible.

Many public servants are intent on ensuring things are done the way they always have been, but Nicholls had a strategic mind and was always thinking of ways things could be improved.

These days, all the states produce multiple performance indicators for their many activities, on a uniform basis, collated and reported annually by the federal Productivity Commission.

Nicholls introduced “program budgeting” to Australian government accounting, and he also consolidated the NSW government’s accounts so they showed the “general government” sector separately from all the businesses it owned, plus a balance sheet outlining the state’s assets and liabilities. Money hidden from view in “special deposit accounts” was brought into the open.

Before Nicholls, the government didn’t even know the value of all the buildings, businesses and land it owned. Since the year dot, businesses have used “accrual” accounting to accurately match the amount they earned during a year with their expenses during that year.

It wasn’t introduced to state and federal government accounting until about 2000. Nicholls played a big part in this, insisting on uniform rules for the measurement of budget deficits and surpluses. (Federal Treasury, however, has stuck with the old “cash” accounting, so it can still fudge the figures.)

Nicholls’ influence spread throughout Australia because he was asked to conduct separate independent audits of the finances of the NSW, Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australian governments. He was, for a time, Victoria’s Treasury secretary.

A lot more Australians are indebted to his influence than they know.

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Let's use this election to raise the quality of the politics we get

This may be my 18th election as a journalist, but I confess I find the thought of a six-week campaign a bit daunting. Six weeks of unrelenting political argy-bargy?

Still, it does afford the luxury of one column discussing how we approach elections, before we get down to the many economic challenges the new government will face: climate change, wage stagnation, unaffordable home ownership and wasteful spending on infrastructure, not to mention integrity in government.

In elections, it’s always tempting to vote for the devil you know – a line pushed by all governments. But when you think about it, you see this notion is biased completely in favour of the incumbent. It seeks to shift the voter’s attention away from the government’s performance and play on our timidity.

What do you know about the other lot? Not much. How do you know they won’t be worse? You don’t. But, then again, they could be better.

If we always stuck to the devil-you-know rule, one side of politics would stay in power for ever. The other side would never get a go, and so would become more unknown – more unelectable – as each election passed.

Does that sound like the path to better government? Not to me, it doesn’t. In my experience, the longer governments stay in power, the worse they get. They get lazy and complacent. They worry more about helping their friends and less about keeping the rest of us happy.

They develop a sense of entitlement. They think they own the place and it’s their own money they’re spending. They get more and more reluctant to be held accountable by nosy outsiders and more inclined to keep their failures buried deep.

And that’s just the deterioration in government. The side kept out of power for year after year also goes off. Fewer and fewer of their leading lights have ever been a minister. They lose their corporate knowledge of how to run the country.

I’m old enough to remember the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, after 23 years in opposition. Wow, didn’t it show. And it wasn’t just their inexperience. They wanted to cram 23 years of “reform” into their first three years. Which, of course, is all they were given.

It wouldn’t be good for our governance if government changed hands every three or four years. But I long ago formed the view that no government – Labor or Liberal, federal or state, whether you voted for ’em or whether you didn’t – should be left in office for more than about 10 years.

With their ever-declining standards of behaviour, it’s tempting to give up on our politicians. “They’re all liars.” Actually, they rarely tell outright lies, though some do seem to have very bad memories.

What’s true is that they’re always saying things that are true from some limited perspective, but are calculated to mislead. “Record spending on health”, for instance, means provided you ignore inflation.

But when we give up on our politicians, it means they’ve won. They still get to run the place, but we’ve forfeited our right to a say in how it’s run. We’re happy for other people – including the pollies – to decide our fate. You want to make decisions that benefit your mates at my expense? Be my guest.

The trickier our politicians are, the more closely we should watch them. Whenever I speak to young people about politics, I warn them that the groups the politicians are most likely to screw are the ones that aren’t watching.

Another dangerous attitude is that there’s little difference between the two main parties. It’s true that both sides can be badly behaved, and that many policies are bipartisan. But there are differences between the parties’ approaches and, though the casual observer may find them hard to see, over time they do make a difference.

Paul Keating’s claim that when you change the government, you change the country, is right. Who we vote for in this election will change where we end up in 10 years’ time.

But the more the two major parties seem the same, the more people chose to vote for minor parties or independents – a trend likely to grow in this election. I regard this as a healthy development that will force the duopolists to lift their game.

As the number of independents grows, the possibility of a “hung” parliament increases. Both sides want us to believe this would be a bad thing, leading to instability. That’s the reverse of the truth. Minority governments are so common at state level that their presence goes unremarked.

And independents have a record of using their bargaining power to achieve reforms neither of the big parties fancy – fixed four-year terms in NSW, for instance – and moves towards greater transparency and accountability, such as freedom of information laws, and more resources for ombudsmen and auditors-general.

The way we vote in this election will make a difference. We should be using our votes to impose better quality governance on our wayward and self-serving political servants.

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