Why bribery is key to boosting our economic prosperity

By MILLIE MUROI, Economics Writer

Of all the incentives in the world, money must be among the most powerful. Since its birth thousands of years ago, dosh – chasing it, saving it, and paying it back – has driven us to ruin but also some remarkable feats. So, it shouldn’t be any different when it comes to the “p” word.

Before your eyes glaze over at the mention of productivity, you should know that had it improved more in recent years, we’d all probably have a lot less to complain about when it comes to issues such as cost of living – and the Reserve Bank wouldn’t be so worried about wage rises feeding into inflation.

What if I told you that boosting our productivity starts with bribing our state governments?

In a speech to the Queensland Economic Society of Australia in Brisbane last week, economist and former corporate watchdog boss Karen Chester identified one of the biggest hurdles to lifting our living standards: a problem called “vertical fiscal imbalance”.

Here’s the issue. Some of our most fundamental needs are taken care of by the state government: education, health, transport, and law and order to name a few. This all requires mountains of cash which the state governments have little ability to raise.

It’s the federal government that has the power to raise a lot of money – mostly through taxation, meaning there’s a mismatch: state governments might be tasked with the big asks, but it’s the federal government that has the cash to splash. As Chester puts it: “The states wear the political pain and the budget loss in doing the right thing.”

Money can’t buy happiness or solve all our problems, but without it, it’s hard to pay for – or incentivise – fixes in some of our biggest sectors, including boosting productivity.

Our productivity improves when we increase the quantity or quality of the goods and services we produce with a given set of resources, such as workers. Making people work longer hours doesn’t count towards improving productivity, but using better technology or other innovations does.

The reason we care so much about productivity is that it’s the main way capitalist economies have kept making us better off – at least materially – over the past few centuries. Innovations from the lightbulb to the assembly line to the internet have made us faster and better at doing our jobs.

Right now, we’re in a productivity slump. Despite a record-breaking increase in hours worked in 2022-23, the amount we’re producing hasn’t been climbing all that much.

Over the long-term, Australia’s productivity has grown by about 1.3 per cent every year. In 2022-23, our labour productivity – the amount of GDP we pump out for each hour we work – actually fell 3.7 per cent.

While pay rises are awesome, there’s a problem when we get them without productivity growth as we’ve had recently: it can feed into inflation. Why? Because it means we push up the cost that goes into providing goods and services without much change in how much we’re actually producing.

So, how do we push up productivity? And how do we fix the vertical fiscal imbalance problem strangling state governments’ ability to take some bold action? Chester says one way is for the federal government to take over chunks of the states’ existing debt which they’ve used for things such as building roads and other public infrastructure.

Why should the federal government scoop up this debt which they aren’t responsible for spending? Because it significantly cuts states’ annual interest bill and boosts their ability to borrow more for new projects. Why is this? Because the federal government can borrow at a lower interest rate than the states – mostly because those who lend to them see a smaller risk of the federal government defaulting, meaning it has a better credit rating.

The total amount being borrowed by the public sector can stay the same but the interest paid on it can be squashed down.

Now, this transfer of debt has to come with some strings attached. Namely, it should be conditional on the states making progress in implementing agreed reforms.

Chester says these reforms should be aimed at resuscitating flat-lined productivity through changes such as tax reform, jack-hammering entrenched disadvantage through measures such as more social housing for people with chronic and debilitating mental health, and relieving structural inflation pressures such as those arising from natural disasters and soaring insurance costs.

Instead of the federal government spending 96 per cent of its natural disaster budget on mopping up the mess, it should give states more money (the amount could also be matched by the states) to spend on mitigation efforts: reducing the risk of future harm from natural disasters such as floods, cyclones and bushfires. This would also put a brake on surging insurance costs.

It’s not the first time we’ve had the idea to give states more headroom to make meaningful reform. In the late 1990s, there were three tranches of payments from the Australian government to states and territories based on their populations – and only if they made satisfactory progress on their reform commitments.

These payments, known as national competition policy payments, cost roughly $1 billion annually (in today’s terms) over six years. But they helped push through reforms such as removing restrictions on retail trading hours, setting up the national electricity market and abolishing price controls on dairy. The Productivity Commission estimates the payments helped lift GDP by at least 2.5 per cent.

By comparison, Treasurer Jim Chalmers last month set up a $900 million fund to prod states and territories into enacting productivity-boosting reforms: a baby step forward – especially, as Chester says, because we confront a much bigger to-do list than we did a few decades ago.

The idea to transfer debt from the states to the Commonwealth government would be a lot cheaper than the old competition policy payments – and it’s a huge opportunity to make big steps forward in improving productivity and wellbeing.

Why do we need this? Because of the sad truth that the vertical fiscal imbalance we’ve talked about has sunken the states into a mentality where they don’t want to make any reforms that the Commonwealth government wants them to make unless they’re bribed into doing so.

Chalmers this week said his government was bold and reforming. But reform needs to take foot in some of our most consequential sectors including health and education. To achieve this, we need states to buy into the vision and, most importantly, act on it.

The good news? Chester says implementing the buyback program is relatively quick. We just need the guts to do it.

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Unthinking privatisation leaves much mess to be cleaned up

It’s been a week of facing up to the various troubles caused by the fad of governments trying to solve their problems with help from the private sector.

All governments have indulged in the fashion of privatising their businesses and outsourcing the provision of public services to a greater or lesser extent, with varying degrees of success. Victoria was first with the idea of selling off its electricity monopoly, and it’s had its own adventures with private toll roads.

But this week it was NSW’s turn to grapple with the almighty mess it’s made of its toll roads, guided by two visiting Victorians – Professor Allan Fels and Dr David Cousins. There is much for Victorians to learn from the northerners’ travails, as they struggle to keep the schadenfreude off their face.

First, how did this supposed “reform” push get started? Partly, it was ideological – many people believe private businesses are always efficient, whereas governments are always inefficient.

But mainly it was politicians trying to do the impossible – or look like they’d done it. How can the government do more without getting bigger? How can we respond to the voters’ unceasing demand for us to provide more without increasing taxes or adding to government debt?

I know, let’s use “public-private partnerships” to work their magic. This thinking has left Sydney ringed by 13 toll roads, 11 of which are majority-controlled by the ASX-listed giant tolling company Transurban, along with many minority partners.

Toll roads now make up almost half of Sydney’s motorway network. It has more toll roads than any other Australian capital city, which hasn’t stopped it from being the most congested. These toll roads have grown like Topsy, each with differing tolls and rules about how the toll is regularly increased.

Taken together, the toll road system is regarded as inefficient, unfair and lacking transparency.

This week’s final report of Fells’ and Cousins’ independent review found that tolls are higher than they need to be and higher than they should be. Unless something is done, they’ll increase too quickly in coming decades.

Tolls are too high in the sense that they probably encourage trucks to use less suitable roads, and lead to greater congestion on other roads as motorists try to save money. There is no provision for pricing rules set to run for decades to be reviewed to ensure they still make sense.

A toll road contract is a natural monopoly, but not all the contracts were awarded after competitive bidding. Where bidding did occur, contracts weren’t necessarily awarded to the firm offering to charge the lowest toll.

Often, the government set what the toll would be, with the contract awarded to the firm offering to take on the most of the government’s obligation. This was a way of shifting costs that should have been covered by the taxpayer onto motorists, thereby making budgets look better and taxes lower.

Sometimes the cost to motorists was disguised by contracts where the toll started low but rose excessively over time.

All the contracts involved the private firms borrowing the money to pay for the motorway, even though governments can borrow much more cheaply than businesses can. This made government debt look lower, but hid the higher interest costs in higher tolls.

All the contracts involved the company accepting “traffic risk”. When fewer cars use the road than had been predicted, the company’s out of pocket, but when there are more cars than predicted, the company makes a windfall gain.

By now, windfall gains are common, and the companies are cleaning up. But this is an unnecessary burden on motorists. Why? Because companies have to be paid to take on the risk, whereas governments are much better at bearing such risks. They can spread any costs over millions of taxpayers so that they become trivial.

The system of tolls is biased against motorists who live in the outer western suburbs, and biased in favour of those in better-off northern suburbs using long-established, government-owned toll roads crossing Sydney Harbour.

For some years NSW governments have sought to reduce this unfairness by paying subsidies to western suburbs motorists with excessive weekly toll bills. This makes the system less unfair by adding a cost to taxpayers with no loss to the toll companies. They actually benefit because more motorists can now afford to pay their high prices.

The Minns Labor government has vowed to bite the bullet and renegotiate the contracts. This week’s final report recommends that it replace the hodgepodge array of tolls with a uniform system where the price is based on distance travelled, with those travelling longer distances charged less per kilometre.

The Harbour Bridge and Harbour Tunnel tolls would be included in the pricing mechanism, so that northern suburbs motorists paid more, while western suburbs motorists paid less.

The government says it will compensate the toll companies for losses from changes to their contract arrangements, but would transfer “traffic risk” and its windfall gains to the government. This would help cover lower tolls in the west.

Transurban has belatedly agreed to renegotiate, but proposes setting the toll on a different basis, suggesting the negotiations may be long and hard. But getting agreement from all Transurban’s many minor partners could take an eternity. The government wants a deal by Christmas.

To this end, the report recommends that the NSW government take back control of tolls by setting up a state-owned entity, NSW Motorways. Its changes to tolling arrangements would be overseen by the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal. The new entity should look for opportunities to add competition to the system, especially for any new roads.

The existence of the new tolling entity would allow the government to act should it take Transurban and its many partners too long to agree to a satisfactory deal.

The private companies have rights, but they don’t have the right to impose on the people of NSW and their government an unfair and unsustainable arrangement lasting forever and a day.

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Yes, we need tax reform, but it offers no easy answers

When we’re reminded that income tax cuts represent merely the partial return of the proceeds of earlier bracket creep, and that the process of clawing back the latest tax cut starts the same day it arrives, it’s easy to join the impassioned cry for tax reform. Sorry, it ain’t that simple.

Surely if we could end the crazy business of bracket creep, we’d pay less tax? Well, yes – but no.

Bracket creep occurs because our income tax scales ignore the reality of inflation. When our wages rise to take account of inflation, we’re no better off in real terms, but we’re often pushed into a higher tax bracket, which raises the average rate of tax we pay on the whole of our income. (If we’re not literally pushed into a higher bracket, our average tax rate still goes up because a higher proportion of our income is now taxed at a higher rate.)

So we’ve long known how to (largely) end bracket creep: do what the Americans do and increase all the bracket limits once a year, in line with the annual increase in the inflation rate. Then, it would only be rises in your real income that pushed up your average tax rate, which is fair enough.

Mission accomplished. Now we’ll all be paying less tax.

Except that the net profit the taxman makes after all the to-ing and fro-ing on bracket creep isn’t just kept in a jam jar somewhere. It’s used to help cover the ever-growing cost of all the services the government gives us, and thus to limit the size of budget deficits and government debt.

So, without the benefit of bracket creep, governments would be forced to keep making explicit increases in the rates of income tax, or to announce new taxes.

Wouldn’t that be an improvement? In principle, yes. In practice, our (politician-fed) aversion to paying higher taxes would just make politics an even bigger shoot-fight than it already is. The pollies would spend more time abusing each other and less time getting on with fixing our problems.

One thing we can be sure of is that it wouldn’t do much to slow the growth in government spending. Why not? Because our demand for more and better government services is insatiable. Because both sides of politics fight every election campaign promising more and better services – and by never showing us the tax price tag on whatever it is they are selling.

How can I be sure tax indexation would do little to slow the growth in government spending? Because that’s what happens in America. They keep running bigger budget deficits and amassing more government debt than the other rich countries (except Japan).

But they get away with it because their economy’s so big, and they’re the centre of the world financial system. A middle-level economy like ours could never pull it off.

So tax indexation isn’t high on my list of desired tax reforms. Bracket creep turns out to be just one of the dirty little tricks by which the politicians who’ve done so much to make our political system almost unworkable keep it staggering along.

It’s easy to agree on the need for tax reform, but its advocates want to reform differing things and have differing motives. “Reform” is a lovely, positive word, but you need to beware of people whose idea of reform is: I pay less, you pay more.

All the alleged reform advocated by the (big) Business Council, for instance, takes that form. They want a lower rate of company tax and a lower top rate of personal income tax – all paid for by a higher goods and services tax.

Spruikers for the highly paid make a big fuss about the government’s heavy reliance on income tax – which they exaggerate – and always claim discourages them from working and investing.

But economic theory doesn’t support these claims, and the empirical evidence – which would be more persuasive – doesn’t either. The people whose behaviour is influenced by the rate of tax on additional earnings are “secondary earners”, who have more ability to increase or decrease the hours they work because they have part-time jobs. But the nation’s executives don’t worry much about them.

No, the tax reform I think we need is higher tax on capital gains, less concessional tax on the superannuation of people such as me, a decent tax on highly profitable mining companies and, probably, a tax on big inheritances.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

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Contrary to appearances, the stage 3 tax cuts will leave us worse off

It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves about the looming tax cuts. They’re what you get when neither of the two big parties is game to make real tax reforms, and the best they can do is lumber us with yet another failed attempt to wedge the other side.

If you want real reform, vote for the minor parties, which may be able to use their bargaining power in the Senate to get something sensible put through.

The stage 3 tax cuts always were irresponsible, and still are. They’ve caused interest rates to be raised by more than they needed to be, and they’ll leave us with substandard government services, as well as plunging us back into deficit and debt.

Only an irresponsible (Coalition) government would commit themselves to making a huge tax cut of a specified shape more than six years ahead of an unknowable future, hoping they could trick Labor into making itself an easy political target by opposing them.

Back then, the Libs thought the budget was returning to continuing surpluses. Wrong. They didn’t think there’d be a pandemic. Wrong. They had no idea it would be followed by an inflation surge and a cost-of-living crisis.

Only an irresponsible (Labor) opposition would go along with legislating the tax cuts five years ahead of time, then promise not to change them should it win the 2022 election.

Let’s be clear. Just because Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s changes made the tax cuts less unfair, that doesn’t make them good policy. And just because many families, hard-pressed by the cost-of-living crisis, will be pleased to have the relief the tax cuts bring, that doesn’t mean the tax cuts are now good policy.

Don’t be misled by the Reserve Bank’s acceptance of Albanese’s claim that his changes would not add to inflation. Any $20 billion-a-year tax cut is a huge stimulus to demand, imparting further upward pressure on prices.

All the Reserve was saying was that diverting a lump of the tax cut from high-income earners to middle and low earners wouldn’t make much difference to the degree of stimulus. Why wasn’t it worried about a $20 billion inflationary stimulus? Because it had known it was coming for years, and had already taken account of it, increasing interest rates sufficiently to counter its future inflationary effect.

Get it? Had there been no huge tax cut in the offing, interest rates would now be lower than they are, and causing less cost-of-living pain.

As the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates and Kate Griffiths have reminded us, the big loser from the stage 3 tax cuts – whether the original or the revised version – is the budget.

The budget has done surprisingly well from the return to full employment, the effect of continuing high commodity prices on miners’ payments of company tax and from wage inflation’s effect on bracket creep. So much so that it returned to a healthy surplus last financial year. It may well stay in surplus this financial year.

Great. But next year it’s likely to return to deficit and stay there for the foreseeable future. Why? Because we can’t afford to give ourselves a $20 billion annual tax cut at this time. As if we didn’t have enough debt already, we’ll be borrowing to pay for our tax cut.

In theory, of course, we could pay for it with a $20 billion-a-year cut in government spending. But, as the Coalition was supposed to have learnt in 2014 – when voters reacted badly to its plans for big spending cuts, and it had to drop them post-haste – this is a pipe dream.

No, in truth, what voters are demanding is more spending, not less. The previous government went for years using fair means or foul – robo-debt, finding excuses to suspend people’s dole payments, neglecting aged care, allowing waiting lists to build up – to hold back government spending as part of its delusional claim to be able to reduce taxes.

As Dr Mike Keating, a former top econocrat, has said, we keep forgetting that the purpose of taxation is to pay for the services that our society demands, and which are best financed collectively.

So when we award ourselves a tax cut we can’t afford, the first thing we do is condemn ourselves to continuing unsatisfactory existing services, and few of the additional services we need.

Those additional services include education – from early education to university – healthcare, childcare, aged care, disability care and defence. (Another thing the Libs didn’t foresee in 2018: our desperate need to acquire nuclear subs.)

But don’t hold your breath waiting for any politician from either major party to explain that home truth to the punters. No, much better to keep playing the crazy game where the Libs unceasingly claim to be the party of “lower, simpler and fairer taxes” and Labor says “I’ll see you and raise you”.

Anyone who knows the first thing about tax reform knows that achieving that trifecta is impossible. But if the Liberal lightweights realise how stupid repeating that nonsense makes them seem to the economically literate, they don’t care.

All they know is that the punters lap up that kind of self-delusion. Which, of course, is why Labor never calls them out on their nonsense.

The other thing we do by pressing on with tax cuts we can’t afford is sign up for more deficits and debt. Coates and Griffiths remind us that the high commodity prices the budget is benefitting from surely can’t last forever.

If you exclude this temporary benefit, Grattan estimates that we’re running a “structural” budget deficit of close to 2 per cent of gross domestic product, or about $50 billion a year in today’s dollars.

We’re ignoring it now, but one day we’ll have to at least start covering the extra interest we’ll be paying. How? By increasing taxes. How else? Ideally, we’d introduce new taxes that improved our economic efficiency or the system’s fairness. Far more likely, we’ll just be given back less bracket creep.

It’s the pollies’ bipartite policy of not stopping bracket creep by indexing the income tax scales each year that makes their unceasing talk of lower tax so dishonest and hypocritical. They’ve demonised all new taxes or overt increases in existing taxes, while keeping bracket creep hidden in their back pocket.

Which is not to argue we must eradicate it. Most of the tax reform we’ve had – notably, the introduction of the goods and services tax – has come with the political sweetener of a big, bracket-creep-funded cut in income tax. (Would-be reformers, please note.)

Another name for bracket creep is “automatic stabiliser”. When spending is growing strongly and inflation pressure is building, bracket creep is one of the budget’s main instruments working automatically to help restrain demand by causing people’s after-tax income to rise by a lower percentage than their pre-tax income.

The pollies can’t just let bracket creep roll on for forever. You have to use the occasional tax cut to return some of the proceeds. But July 2024 turned out to be quite the wrong time to do it.

So even if the Reserve starts to cut interest rates towards the end of this year, the tax cuts mean rates will stay higher for longer than they needed to.

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What they don't tell you about how the budget works

Now we have some space, there are things I should tell you that there’s never time for on budget night. If you don’t know these things, the media can unwittingly mislead you, and the government spin doctors can knowingly mislead you.

A budget’s just a plan for how much income you’re expecting in the coming period, and what you want to spend it on. Governments have budgets and so do businesses and families.

You may think you know a lot about budgeting and that all you need is common sense, but the federal government’s budget ain’t like any other budget you’ve known.

Where people go wrong is assuming the government’s budget is the same as their own household budget, only much bigger. Families budget so they don’t end up spending more than they earn.

But governments often spend more than they raise in taxes – run at a “deficit” – and only occasionally spend less than they raise – run a “surplus”. When they run deficits, they borrow to cover it; when occasionally they run a surplus, they can pay back a bit of it.

Governments can borrow, and keep borrowing, in a way families can’t. Why? Because they can’t go broke. When they run short of money, they can do what no family can do: order all the other families to give them money. It’s called taxation.

And national governments can go one step further and print their own money. Money is just a piece of plasticky stuff that’s worth, say, $50. Why is it worth $50? For no reason other than that the government says it is, and everyone believes it.

Actually, these days the government doesn’t print money so much as create it out of thin air, by crediting bank accounts. This is done not by the government itself, but by a bank the government owns: the Reserve Bank. It created hundreds of billions during the pandemic (although now the Reserve is making the government gradually pay it back, by actually borrowing the money).

Everyone knows that whatever you borrow has to be paid back. What’s more, you have to keep paying interest on the debt until it is paid back. Parents know they have to get any home loan paid back before they retire.

The trouble with a family is that eventually it dies. The kids grow up and start families of their own, then mum and dad pop off. But governments don’t die. The nation’s government acts on behalf of all the families in the country. There are always some families dying, but always others taking their place.

This is why families have to pay back their debts, but governments don’t – and often choose not to. Because governments go on and on, the main way they get on top of their debts is by waiting for the economy to outgrow them, so the size of their debt declines relative to the size of the economy.

Remember, unless you add to it, a debt is a fixed dollar amount, whereas the size of the economy – gross domestic product – grows with inflation and “real” economic growth.

The final thing making government budgets different from family budgets is that a particular family’s budget is too small to have any noticeable effect on the economy, whereas the federal budget is so big – about a quarter the size of the economy – that changes the government makes in its spending and taxing plans can have a big effect on an individual family’s budget and indeed, many families’ budgets.

But it also works the other way: what happens to one family won’t have a noticeable effect on the budget, but what happens to many families – say, everyone’s getting bigger pay rises, or many families are cutting back because they’re having trouble coping with the cost of living – certainly will affect the budget.

What common sense doesn’t tell you is that there’s a two-way relationship between the budget and the economy. The budget can affect the economy, but the economy can affect the budget.

Whenever a treasurer announces on budget night that he (one day we’ll get a she) is expecting the budget deficit to turn into a surplus, the media usually assume this must be because of something he’s done.

Possibly, but it’s more likely to be because of something the economy did. In this month’s budget, it’s because the economy’s been growing strongly, leading families and companies to earn more income and pay more tax on it.

Because many in the media imagine the government’s budget is the same as a family’s budget, they assume that budget deficits are always a bad thing and surpluses a good thing.

Not necessarily. If the budget was in surplus during a recession, that would be a bad thing because it would mean that, by raising more in taxes than it was spending, the budget would be making life even harder for families.

Only when the economy’s growing too fast and adding to inflation pressure is it good to have the budget in surplus and so helping to slow things down. And deficits are a good thing when the economy’s in recession because this means that, by spending more than it’s raising in taxes, the budget’s helping to prop up the economy.

But not to worry. When the economy goes into recession, the budget tends to go into deficit – or an existing deficit gets bigger – automatically. Why? Because people pay less tax and the government has to pay unemployment benefits to more people. Economists call this the budget’s “automatic stabilisers”.

Hidden away in the budget papers you find Treasurer Jim Chalmers quietly admitting he has no intention of trying to pay off the big public debt he inherited. His “overarching goal” is to “reduce gross debt as a share of the economy over time”.

Finally, for a family, a $4 billion surplus is an unimaginably huge sum of money. But for a federal government, it’s petty cash.

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Debt and deficit fixed in just Labor's second budget. Really?

Small things amuse small minds. Too many people have allowed their excitement over an expected budget surplus of a tiny $4 billion this financial year to distract them from noticing a much bigger deal.

Remember that mountain of government debt we ticked up fighting the pandemic? Now Treasurer Jim Chalmers tells us it’s more like a big hill. Remember the frightening spectre of the “structural” budget deficit? Not to worry, it’ll have disappeared in a decade – if you can believe it.

Assuming it happens, achieving an infinitesimally small, and one-off, surplus of $4 billion may be significant politically, but from an economic perspective, it’s not worth popping the champagne cork. In a budget worth $630 billion a year, in an economy worth $2600 billion a year, it’s no more than a rounding error.

No, what’s genuinely significant is not that magic word “surplus”; it’s that this time last year we were expecting a deficit of $78 billion. It’s the absence of another big deficit that’s the big deal. It represents the passage of a year in which we didn’t add to the existing public debt. And, as a consequence, didn’t add to the size of our annual interest bill every year until we’re all dead.

What’s more, the absence of a deficit this year suggests the expected deficits for the next few years will also be smaller than we thought. So next year will see not just a smaller than expected annual interest bill, but a smaller than expected addition to the debt, and thus an even smaller than expected addition to the following year’s interest bill, and so on and on forever.

Well, in principle, anyway. What this news also shows is how hopeless Treasury (and all economists) are at predicting the future.

Next, note that this year’s expected deficit disappeared not thanks to Chalmer’s superior management, but thanks to Treasury’s failure to realise how strong the economy would be. More people are in jobs and paying tax (and not needing to be paid the dole).

Company profits are up, as is the tax they pay. Export commodity prices have stayed higher than Treasury was expecting, so mining companies’ taxes are well up. And remember this: inflation causes taxes to rise faster than government spending does.

But though nothing Chalmers did caused the big improvement, he’d like a round of applause for not spending much of the extra dosh.

And he’s got some very impressive news he’d love me to tell you about. Treasury hasn’t just produced revised forecasts for the financial year just ending and for the budget year 2023-34, it’s done “projections” for a further three years. It’s also made “medium-term” projections right out to 2033-34.

What they show is truly amazing. Unbelievable, even. The budget papers say the absence of the formerly expected $78 billion deficit this financial year, and consequent improvement in forecasts for the following few years, “will avoid $83 billion in interest payments over the 12 years to 2033-34. It also means [the government’s] gross [public] debt, as a share of gross domestic product, will be 7.1 percentage points lower in 2033-34.”

That bit you can believe. It’s just compound interest – which, of course, works in reverse for a borrower rather than a saver.

Now it gets hairy. The Albanese government’s various decisions to limit the growth in government spending mean real spending growth is now “expected to average 0.6 per cent a year over the five years [to] 2026-27”.

This compares with average real (inflation-adjusted) spending growth of about 4 per cent in the eight years before the global financial crisis of 2008, and 2.2 per cent a year over the eight years to 2018-19, before the pandemic.

Really? That’s a truly Herculean achievement. And with so little blood on the floor.

What used to be a mountain of debt is now just a big hill. Phew. And we thought it was only Scott Morrison who could call forth miracles.

Except, of course, that it hasn’t been achieved. It’s just “projected” to happen. All those other averages are “actuals” whereas, the unbelievable 0.6 per cent is simply a projection.

Projections are based on assumptions, which are then mechanically multiplied out, year after year. One assumption is that the economy, and the budget, will just move in a straight line over the next five years, with nothing unexpected – say, a pandemic or a recession – blowing us off course.

The five-year projection says the gross public debt is now expected to peak at 36.5 per cent of GDP in June 2026. Now, get this: this would be 10.4 percentage points lower, and five years earlier, than projected just seven months ago in Labor’s first budget.

And if you keep cranking the projection handle, the public debt “will” (their word) be down to 32.3 per cent of GDP by June 2034.

Next, remember all the economists wringing their hands over the “structural” budget deficit? This is the part of the budget balance that’s left when you take out the part that’s just the product of where the economy happens to be in the business cycle at the time.

The balance will look good when you’re at the top of the boom (as we are now) and bad when you’re at the bottom of a recession (as we may be in a year or two). The structural deficit or surplus is a calculation of what the balance would be if we were in the dead middle of the cycle, neither up nor down.

In Chalmers’ first budget, last October, Treasury took its projection of the budget balance out 10 years, and estimated the structural component to be steady at a deficit of about 2 per cent of GDP.

That’s $50 billion a year in today’s dollars. A medium-size economy with a big debt can’t live with that. We have to get it down, so we’re well placed to borrow heavily in the next recession or pandemic.

Well, has Chalmers got good news for those economist worrywarts. Seven months later, the projection (budget paper No. 1, page 131) shows the structural deficit steadily withering away until it reaches almost nothing in 2033-34.

So, how did Chalmers magic it away? Assumptions, dear boy, assumptions. For years, the biggest single program driving the growth in government spending has been the explosive growth in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

But the government has decided to take steps to limit its growth to a mere 8 per cent a year. The projections are based on mechanically projecting “existing policy”, so the 8 per cent target – which may or may not be achieved – is baked in.

Take that monumentally optimistic assumption, add further optimism about restraint in other spending areas, allow them to magnify the believable bit (that a disappeared deficit right at the beginning of the projection significantly reduces our formerly expected interest payments over a decade) and you’ve eliminated the problem.

If only reality was as easy.

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Look up, we're on the verge of employment greatness

“Visionary” and “inspirational” aren’t words normally used about economists, but they certainly apply to Professor Ross Garnaut, of the University of Melbourne, and to his Thursday dinner speech to the jobs and skills summit. His message to Anthony Albanese is that he’s taken the helm at the worst of times. But, if he can rise to the challenge, he can lead us to the best of times.

Garnaut’s message is in two parts. First, we must stop kidding ourselves about the state of the economy and the budget. Second, we can make the seemingly impossible changes needed to gain all the material and social advantages of economic success.

First, we are kidding ourselves about how well our economy has been performing. It’s true our economy bounced back more quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic recession than did most developed economies - because our stimulus from the budget was bigger and faster.

Since then, however, Garnaut says, “we have looked ordinary in a troubled developed world”.

“We can’t turn the economy back to before the pandemic,” he says. “Even if we could, pre-pandemic conditions aren’t good enough. That’s high unemployment and underemployment and stagnant living standards.”

Recently, our problems have been compounded by the invasion of Ukraine and its disruption of global energy markets. But, unlike the Europeans and most other rich countries, Australian energy companies benefit when gas and coal prices rise.

“We are kidding ourselves if we think no deep wounds will be left in our polity from high coal and gas – and therefore electricity - prices bringing record profits for companies, and substantially lower living standards to most Australians,” he warns.

And “we have to stop kidding ourselves about the budget”. We need unquestionably strong public finances to have low cost of capital, private and public, for our transformation from fossil-fuel loser to Superpower exporter of clean energy and minerals, and to shield us from a disturbed international economy and geo-polity.

We’ve emerged from the pandemic with eye-watering public debt and large budget deficits, when high commodity prices should be driving budget surpluses.

“We talk about [the need for] much higher defence expenditure, but not about higher taxes to pay for it.

“We say we are underproviding for care and underpaying nurses, and underproviding for education and failing to adequately reward our teachers.”

The latest Intergenerational Report tells us that the ratio of over-65s to people of working age will rise by half over the next four decades, bringing higher costs and fewer workers to carry them, he says.

But, “in the face of these immense budget challenges, total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of gross domestic product is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed-country average”.

Get it? Yet another economics professor telling us taxes must go up – not down.

The budget update issued at the start of this year’s election campaign predicted real wages would decline by 3 per cent over the two years to next June. Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ update three months later increased the decline to 7 per cent.

So, says Garnaut, “the facts have changed, and we should be ready to change our minds”. When we stop kidding ourselves, we’ll recognise the need for policies we now think impossible. That’s Garnaut’s second, more inspiring point.

“Australians accepted change that had been impossible on two earlier occasions when we faced deep problems, and responded with policy reforms that set us up for long periods of prosperity, national confidence and achievement.”

The most recent was the reform era starting in 1983. The first was postwar reconstruction of the economy in the 1940s, which was followed by a quarter of a century of full employment and rising incomes.

Back then, the Curtin and Chifley governments were determined Australians would not return to the high unemployment and economic insecurity of the interwar years.

“The 1945 white paper on full employment was premised on the radical idea that governments should accept responsibility for stimulating spending on goods and services to the extent necessary to sustain full employment ...

“This would achieve the highest possible standards of living for ordinary Australians.”

The Menzies Liberal government’s political success – it stayed in power for 23 years – “was built on full employment, helped by Menzies insulating policy from the influence of political donations to an extent that is shocking today”.

Garnaut says he grew up in a Menzies world of full employment. (So did I, as it happens.)

The authors of the white paper wondered how low the rate of unemployment could fall before it caused high or accelerating inflation. They were surprised to find it fell to below 2 per cent, and stayed there for two decades without a problem.

It’s tempting to think that, with all the problems of controlling inflation and decarbonising the economy, this brush with our glorious past will soon disappear, and we’ll be back to the 5 to 6 per cent unemployment we’ve learnt to think is the best we can do.

But Garnaut’s inspiring vision is that, with the right, seemingly impossible policy changes, we can complete the return to a fully employed economy and stay there, reaping its many material and social benefits.

In the world he and I grew up in, “workers could leave jobs that didn’t suit them and quickly find others – often moving from lower- to higher-productivity firms. Employers put large efforts into training and retraining workers.

“Labour income was secure and could support a loan to buy a house. Businesses that could not afford rising wages closed and released their workers into more productive employment.”

Steadily rising real wages encouraged firms to economise in their use of labour, which lifted productivity.

Sounds worth striving for, to me.

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Welcome to the job, Treasurer. Rather you than me

Very occasionally, some poor misguided letter-writer suggests to my boss that I’d make a better treasurer than the incumbent. I’m flattered, of course, but it’s never been a job I’ve lusted after. Nor do I delude myself I’d be much good at it. And that goes double for the present incumbent, Jim Chalmers.

I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes (especially not with people like that grumpy old bugger Gittins offering a critique of my every move).

When, within days of taking up the job, Chalmers declared the budget situation was “dire”, people thought he was just softening us up. But I suspect it had finally dawned on him (with a little help from his new treasury advisers) just what an unhygienic sandwich he’d promised to eat: the more so because he’d played his own part in making such a meal of it.

Chalmers’ problem comes in two parts. First, he inherited an almighty mess from Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg. They hadn’t exactly tidied the place up before leaving.

Justifiably, they’d racked up huge additional government debt to tide us through the worst of the pandemic, and now the economy was growing strongly. But they were still looking at a decade or more of budget deficits continuing to increase the debt.

It was a problem they’d think about when and if they were re-elected. Meanwhile, nothing mattered more that avoiding doing anything that could cost them votes.

All this we knew before the election. What was less obvious were the many stopgap measures they’d used to hold back the growth in government spending, building up a dam that would inevitably burst.

The stopgaps included making oldies wait many months for a homecare package, making people wait months for a visa, keeping the unemployed below the poverty line and thinking of excuses to suspend their payments.

And that’s before you get to the various, hugely expensive problems with the National Disability Insurance Scheme – problems that can’t be solved by telling the disabled to like it or lump it.

The Morrison government’s projections of continuing budget deficits assume those dams will never overflow. Much of the deficit is explained by the continuing cost of the Morrison government’s already legislated stage-three tax cut in July 2024, which the Parliamentary Budget Office now estimates will have added almost a quarter of a trillion dollars to our deficit and debt by 2032-33.

The second element of Chalmers’ budget problem is that, as part of its small-target strategy for finally winning an election, Labor promised never to do anything anyone anywhere would ever dislike.

When it came to the budget, while banging on about our trillion-dollar debt, they painted themselves into a corner by promising not to do what they’d need to do to stop adding to it. Not to rescind the stage-three tax cut, nor do anything else to increase taxes apart from a tax on multinational companies. (Talk about pie in the sky: make the wicked foreigners pay their fair whack and all our problems are solved without any pain.)

In theory, eliminating the budget deficit is easy. Just slash government spending to fit. All you’d have to do is, say, suspend indexation of the age pension, or cut grants to the states’ public hospitals and schools (while taking care not to touch private hospitals and schools).

In practice, making cuts sufficient to fill the gap is politically impossible. It’s true the government is busy reviewing all their predecessor’s spending, looking for waste and extravagance. But all that’s likely to achieve is to make room for their own new spending promises.

As several former top econocrats have told me, what’s needed to eliminate the deficit is to increase tax collections by about 4 per cent of gross domestic product – about $90 billion a year. See what I mean about Labor boxing itself in?

One thing that wasn’t clear before the election was the full extent of our problem with inflation, even though the Reserve Bank did increase interest rates a fraction during the campaign.

It’s made the need to reduce the budget deficit more pressing because the more the government reduces its own stimulus of the economy, the less the Reserve has to increase interest rates to get inflation down.

And the less rates rise, the less the risk that – as has happened so often in the past – the Reserve’s efforts to reduce inflation send us into recession. One of the side-effects of recession would be to increase deficit and debt greatly.

After his “dire” remark, I expected to see Chalmers edging quietly towards a door marked Sorry About That, and preparing a Keynes-like speech about how “when the facts change, I change my promises”.

But so far, he seems still to be painting himself into the corner. Apparently, keeping promises, no matter how ill-judged and overtaken by events, is more important to Labor than managing the economy well or even avoiding becoming a one-term government.

I’d never seen Chalmers and his boss as martyrs to the cause of Unbroken Promises.

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What we weren't told before the election: taxes to rise, not fall

The rule for Treasury bosses is that, as public servants, any frank and fearless advice they have about the state of the federal budget must be given only to their political masters, and only in private.

But last week the present secretary to the Treasury, Dr Steven Kennedy, used a speech to economists to deliver a particularly frank assessment of the Labor government’s budgetary inheritance.

We can be sure his remarks came as no surprise to his boss, Dr Jim Chalmers, who would have been happy to have his help to disabuse us of any delusions lingering from an election campaign which, as always, was fought in a confected fantasy-land of increased spending on bigger and better government services and lower taxes.

Surprise, surprise, the post-election truth is very different. The budget released just before the campaign began foresaw a budget deficit of a huge $80 billion in the financial year just ending, with only a trivial decline in the coming year and continuing deficits for at least another decade.

Neither side admitted to any problem with this prospect during the campaign, but Kennedy’s first bit of frankness about such a leisurely approach was to observe that “a more prudent course” would be for the budget deficit to be eliminated and turned to a surplus. (By the standards of bureaucratic reticence, this was like saying, “You guys have got to be joking”.)

Eliminating the deficit would mean adding no more to our trillion-dollar debt. Running budget surpluses would actually reduce the debt, thus leaving us less exposed should there be a threatening turn in the economy’s fortunes.

The two obvious ways of improving the budget balance are to cut government spending or to increase taxes. Some people love making speeches about the need to absolutely slash government spending, but they usually mean spending that benefits other people, not themselves.

The sad truth is that “waste and extravagance” is in the eye of the beholder. There’s always some powerful interest group on the receiving end of government spending – medical specialists, say, or the nation’s chemists – and they don’t take kindly to any attempt to slash their incomes.

The last time a serious attempt was made to cut government spending – by Tony Abbott in his first budget, in 2014 – the public outcry was so great that the Coalition beat a hasty retreat, and never tried it again.

Instead, it limited its parsimony to quietly restraining money going to the politically weak – the jobless, the public service, overseas aid – but this didn’t make a huge difference to the more than $600 billion the government spends each year.

Kennedy’s next frank observation was that, even excluding the many billions in spending related to temporarily supporting the economy during the lockdowns, government spending as a proportion of the nation’s income is expected to average 26.4 per cent over the coming decade, compared with 24.8 per cent in the decades before the pandemic.

In other words, government spending is likely to grow much faster than the economy grows, to the tune of about $36 billion a year in today’s dollars.

The new government is undertaking a line-by-line audit of all the Coalition’s “rorts, waste and mismanagement”. But, to be realistic, it’s unlikely to find much more in savings than it needs to cover its own new spending promises.

Kennedy said that most of this additional spending is driven by money going to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (by far the biggest), aged care, defence, health and infrastructure. “Further pressures exist in all these areas,” he said.

To that you can add underfunding by the Coalition in tertiary education and healthcare, plus a massive capability gap over the next 20 years or more which can only be fixed by an immediate increase in spending on defence, diplomacy and foreign aid.

Which leaves us with taxes. Higher taxes. Scott Morrison’s promise to guarantee the delivery of essential services while reducing taxes was delusional – a delusion many of us were happy to swallow.

The simple, obvious truth is that if we want more services without loss of quality, we’ll have to pay higher taxes.

Kennedy warned that the expected (but, in his view, inadequate) improvement in the budget balance over the coming decade will rely largely on higher income tax collections. “Inflation and real wages growth will result in higher average personal tax rates.”

This is a Treasury secretary’s way of saying “the plan is to let bracket creep rip”. And unless other taxes are increased, there’s “little prospect” of giving wage earners any relief via tax cuts.

“This would see average personal tax rates increase towards record levels,” he said, meaning more of the total tax burden would fall on wage earners.

The election saw both sides promising not to introduce new taxes or increase the rates of existing taxes (apart from, in Labor’s case, promising to extract more tax from multinationals).

But neither side made any promise not to let inflation push people into higher tax brackets. One way or another, we’ll be paying higher taxes.

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Treasury boss’s message: higher taxes the cure for debt and deficit

Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer, Dr Jim Chalmers, have inherited many problems that won’t be solved quickly or easily. Nor will they be solved without the new government being willing to persuade voters to accept the sort of tax changes no pollie wants to talk about in an election campaign.

That’s the conclusion I draw from Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy’s belated annual speech to the Australian Business Economists this week.

Election campaigns are times when we hear about all the wonderful things the politicians want to do to improve the public services we get and reduce the taxes we pay. It’s after the election that pollies present the bill.

Especially when the election has changed the government. This wasn’t Chalmers bringing us the bill, it was the waiter reminding us we’d eaten quite a lot and the bill was getting pretty long.

The economic story had “shifted significantly”, Kennedy said. Inflation pressures had emerged faster and more strongly than most people expected. These were likely to persist into next year “at the very least”.

This, of course, is why the Reserve Bank has been raising the official interest rate – to eventually bring inflation back to acceptable levels.

“Interest rates are at near-record low levels and therefore highly accommodative and should normalise”, Kennedy said. In other words, they need to be increased until they’re back to more-normal levels. If so, they have a lot further to go.

But, Kennedy says that “just as fiscal [budgetary] and monetary [interest-rate] policy worked together to respond to the pandemic, they will need to work together in managing the risks to inflation and the economy more broadly”.

Ah yes, the dreaded duo, Debt and Deficit. Not a subject to be dwelt on during election campaigns, but one to return to afterwards. Presenting the bill, remember?

Chalmers is, understandably, anxious to remind us that our trillion-dollar public debt is inherited from his predecessors. What Kennedy does is implicitly confirm that the previous government’s “medium-term fiscal strategy” - to “focus on growing the economy in order to stabilise and reduce debt” - is still the go.

With an important, after-the-election qualification: “a more prudent course would be for the budget to assist more over time”.

How? We’ll get to that. But first, he gave the best explanation I’ve seen of how a government can get on top of a big debt simply by ensuring the economy grows at a faster annual rate than the rate of interest on the debt.

To “get” the explanation you have to accept one proposition that many otherwise sensible people and media commentators can’t get their head around: that the government of a nation is in a radically different position to an individual household.

Households have to repay any money they borrow sooner or later, but governments don’t. That’s because every family gets old and dies, whereas nations are a collection of many millions of households that, though the faces change, goes on forever.

For a nation, what matters is not its ability to repay the debt, but just its ability to afford the interest payments on it. As long as the nation continues to exist, it can re-borrow by issuing a new government bond to replace an old government bond as it falls due for repayment.

Kennedy explained that strong economic growth and interest rates that are low compared with what’s been normal for the past 50 years are likely to ease the burden of the debt. This is by reducing its size not in dollar terms, but relative to the size of the economy, measured by the dollar value of all the goods and services the economy produces annually (nominal gross domestic product) in coming years.

Interest payments add to the amount of debt the nation owes, but growth in the economy (nominal GDP) increases the economy’s capacity to “service” (pay the interest on) that debt. “When the economy grows quicker than the interest payments add to the debt, the debt burden will decrease,” he said.

That’s the basic mechanism all governments in all the rich countries have relied on since World War II to get on top of their debt. It’s what the Morrison government was relying on, and it will be what the Albanese government continues relying on.

But – with Treasury there has to be a but – there was a weakness in the previous government’s strategy: their projections showed the budget remaining in deficit for the next decade and, indeed, the next 40 years.

That means it wasn’t just the interest bill that was adding to the debt each year, it was also the continuing deficits.

“The current projected reduction in the debt [relative] to GDP is unusual in that it is relying solely on favourable growth and interest-rate dynamics [that the average rate of interest on the debt will rise more slowly than the rising rate of interest on the new borrowing because the average government bond takes about seven years to fall due] to reduce the ratio [of debt to GDP],” Kennedy said.

So here’s the post-election But (which, since it’s the same Treasury, would probably have happened even without a change of government): “A more prudent course would be for the budget to assist more, over time,” Kennedy said.

How? By getting the budget deficit down a lot faster than the Liberals were planning to. Maybe even by running budget surpluses for a while – which would involve repaying a bit of the debt.

Sure, but how do you get the deficit down? The government will be reviewing all the spending programs left by the Coalition, looking for savings. But what savings it finds will mainly be used to pay for Labor’s promised new spending.

So the main way to improve the budget balance will be by “raising additional tax revenues”. Kennedy implied that this would be done by reducing businesses’ and households’ tax concessions.

The next three years will be interesting.

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Huge public debt isn’t the worry, it’s continuing budget deficits

There’s an easy way to tell how much someone understands economics: those at panic stations about the huge level of our government debt just don’t get it. But that’s not to say we don’t have a problem with the budget deficit.

Australia’s public debt isn’t high by international standards. It doesn’t have to be repaid by us, our children or anyone else. Since budget surpluses – which do reduce debt – have always been the exception rather than the rule, government debt is invariably “rolled over” (when bonds become due for redemption, they’re simply replaced with new ones).

The time-honoured way governments get on top of their debts is simply to outgrow them. So Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s plan to reduce the relative importance of the debt by striving for strong economic growth is neither new nor radical.

If the debt panickers took more notice of what’s actually happening, they’d see that this approach is already bearing fruit. The remarkable strength of the economy’s rebound from the coronacession – much of which is owed to the success of the much-criticised JobKeeper scheme – is helping in two ways.

First, it’s causing the budget deficit to fall much quicker than expected, thus reducing the amount we’re adding to the debt in dollar terms. Second, the faster growth in the economy is slowing the growth of the debt in relative terms – that is, relative to the size of the economy that services the debt.

Most of the unexpected improvement in the budget balance has been allowed to stand, with only a small proportion of it used for further stimulus. That’s particularly true of last week’s budget, notwithstanding its blatant vote-buying.

The media have given us an exaggerated impression of the cost of those measures (particularly when you take account of the decision to discontinue the $8 billion-a-year low and middle income tax offset, which most of them failed to notice because there was no press release).

So the biggest burden present and future generations bear from the debt is the interest bill on it. But with interest rates at an unprecedented low, there’s never been a better time to borrow. And though it’s true long-term rates have started rising, they’ll still be unusually low for at least the rest of this decade.

What’s more, the average interest rate payable on the debt rises even more slowly because the higher rate applies only to the small part of the debt that’s being newly borrowed or reborrowed each year.

The budget’s gross interest payments are projected to stay below 1 per cent of gross domestic product until at least 2026. Which, as the independent economist Saul Eslake reminds us, means they’ll stay far lower than they were at any time in the 30 years to 2000. Frightening, eh.

Yet another point to remember is that the Reserve Bank’s resort to “quantitative easing” (buying second-hand bonds with created money) meant that, in effect, more than all the stimulus spending of the past two years was borrowed not from the public, but from another part of government, the central bank. It’s just a book entry.

But though there’s no reason to worry about either the level of the public debt or the interest bill on it, that’s not to say we can go on running budget deficits for another decade at least – which is what the budget papers project will happen “on unchanged policies”.

We had good reason to borrow heavily to protect ourselves from the global financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008-09, and good reason to borrow heavily to save life and limb during the pandemic.

(The reason the debt continued growing between the two crises, was partly because we kept cutting income tax despite our continuing deficits, but also because economic growth was unusually weak.)

But what we shouldn’t be doing is continuing to run budget deficits after the effect of the temporary stimulus measures has ended. That is, we shouldn’t be running a “structural” deficit because we haven’t been raising enough tax revenue to cover the ordinary (but growing) business of government.

Some economists estimate the structural deficit is roughly $40 billion a year. Treasury’s projections show it falling steadily as a proportion of gross domestic product over the 10 years to 2032-33, but that’s owing to continued growth in the economy plus the no-policy-change assumption that the big tax cut in 2024-25 will be followed by eight years of bracket creep without further tax cuts.

One thing we should have learnt by now is to expect further unexpected major shocks to the economy that require further heavy borrowing. It would be imprudent to add to our debt, and use up borrowing capacity, merely because we didn’t feel like paying our way during the intervals between crises.

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Despite all the hoopla, budget's extra economic stimulus isn't huge

Sensible economists accept that, because they’re determined by politicians, budgets are more about politics than economics. Pre-election budgets are more political than other budgets. And budgets coming before an election a government fears it may lose are wholly politically driven.

Welcome to this week’s budget. But here’s the point: whatever the motivation driving the decisions announced in the budget to increase this or reduce that, all the decisions have an effect on the economy nonetheless.

It’s a budget’s overall effect on the economy that macro-economists care about, not so much the politicians’ motives. So good economic analysis involves leaving the politics to one side while you focus on determining the economic consequences.

A glance at this week’s budget says that, with all its vote-buying giveaways, the budget will impart a huge further stimulus to an economy that was already growing strongly, with unusually low unemployment, but rising inflation.

What on earth are these guys up to, ramping an economy that doesn’t need ramping just to try to buy their re-election? But glances are often misleading, and the story’s more complicated than that.

You can’t judge the “stance” of fiscal (budgetary) policy adopted in a particular budget – whether it will work to expand aggregate (total) demand (spending) in the economy or to contract demand – just by looking at the few of its many “measures” (policy changes) that hit the headlines, while ignoring the other hundred measures it contained.

And, as with many concepts in economics, there are different ways you can measure them, with the different ways giving you somewhat different answers.

The simplest way to judge the stance of policy adopted in a budget – it’s expansionary, contractionary or neither (neutral) – is the way the Reserve Bank does it. You just look at the direction and size of the expected change in the budget balance from the present financial year to the coming year.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg expects the budget deficit for the year that will end in three months’ time to be $79.8 billion, and the deficit for the coming year, 2022-23, to be slightly smaller at $78 billion.

In an economy as big as ours, that decrease of $1.8 billion is too small to notice. The difference between how much money the budget is expected to take out of the economy in taxes and how much it puts back via government spending is expected to be virtually unchanged.

So, judging it the Reserve’s way, the budget will neither add to aggregate demand (total private plus public spending) nor subtract from it. The stance is neutral.

However, there’s a two-way relationship between the budget and the economy. The budget affects the economy but, by the same token, the economy affects the budget.

The size of the budget’s deficit or surplus is affected by where the economy is in the business cycle. When the economy’s booming, tax collections will be growing strongly, whereas government spending on unemployment benefits will be falling, thus causing a budget deficit to reduce (or a surplus to increase).

On the other hand, when the economy’s dipping into recession, tax collections will be falling and the cost of benefit payments will be rising, thus increasing a deficit (or reducing a surplus).

The Keynesian approach to deciding the stance of policy adopted in a budget is to distinguish between this “cyclical” effect on the budget balance – what the economy’s doing to the budget – and the “structural” effect caused by the government’s explicit decisions.

So, many economists believe that when assessing the stance of a new budget, you should ignore the cyclical component and focus on the change in the structural component – what the government has decided to do to the economy.

You can determine this by looking at what the great budget-expert Chris Richardson, of Deloitte Access Economics, calls “the table of truth”, table 3.3 of budget statement 3 in budget paper 1, page 18 in the PDF (page 86 in the printed version).

The table shows that in the few months since the mid-year budget update last December, the economy has strengthened more than expected - mainly because of the growth in consumer spending and employment but, to a lesser extent, because of the rise in the prices we get for our exports of coal and iron ore.

This means the cyclical component of the budget deficit (what Treasury calls “parameter and other variations”) is now expected to be $28 billion less in the present financial year, and $38 billion less in the budget year, 2022-23.

Adding in the “forward estimates” for three further years to 2025-26, gives a total expected improvement of $143 billion – all of which comes from higher-than-expected tax collections.

So, had the government done nothing in the budget, that’s by how much the string of five budget deficits would have been reduced, relative to what was expected last December.

However, the table also shows that the new policy decisions announced in the budget (and in the few months leading up to it) are expected to reduce that cyclical improvement by $9 billion in the financial year just ending, and $17 billion in the coming year.

These are additions to the expected “structural deficit”. Over the full five years, they should total $39 billion, with more than three-quarters of that total coming from increased government spending.

So, relative to where we expected to be in December, the government’s spending in the budget won’t stop the next five budget deficits – and the government’s debt – being more than $100 billion less.

Even so, judged in Keynesian terms, the government has added to the structural deficit, so the budget is expansionary.

The independent economist Saul Eslake calculates that the budget involves net stimulus equivalent to 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product in the present financial year, and 0.7 per cent in the coming year.

So, he concludes, “the budget does put some additional upward pressure on inflation...but it’s fairly small”.

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Frydenberg right to put full employment ahead of budget repair

It’s hard to feel sympathy for a government that used ignorant scaremongering about the public debt to get elected in 2013, but now doesn’t want to mention the D-word and is being attacked by its own deluded conservatives (plus point-scoring Laborites). Even so, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has his priorities right in leaving budget repair for later.

It’s noteworthy that the governments’ critics have turned their guns on the likelihood that Scott Morrison will use next year’s pre-election budget to announce yet another one-year extension of the low and middle-income tax offset at a one-off cost to the budget of $8 billion, while studiously ignoring the stronger case for abandoning the stage three tax cut legislated for July 2024, with an ongoing cost of double that.

Stage three is aimed at benefiting higher income-earners. Could this be mere coincidence? Trouble is, as Frydenberg has explained, “we have been working to a clear fiscal [budgetary] strategy to drive the unemployment rate to historically low levels” as we emerge from this great economic shock.

This being so, the only justification for a country with so much debt awarding itself another unfunded tax cut is that most of it will be spent rather than saved and thus hasten our achievement of very low unemployment.

But since households’ rate of saving tends to rise with their income, that makes the cheaper temporary low-and-middle tax cut likely to help much more than the dearer and long-lasting tax cut aimed at higher income-earners.

The belief that cutting tax rates helps by giving people greater incentive to work is an article of (self-interested) faith among high income-earners. And for the Liberal Party. Indeed, Frydenberg repeats this supposed self-evident truth many times a week.

But it’s not based on economic theory, nor supported by empirical evidence. The evidence is that a person’s marginal tax rate (the tax on any extra income they earn) doesn’t greatly affect the work effort of primary earners (mainly, men with full-time jobs) but does affect the work effort of secondary earners – particularly those with young children.

This is why the government’s decision in this year’s budget to greatly reduce the cost of childcare for second and subsequent children should do far more to raise workforce participation than the stage three tax cut ever could. Money well spent.

This, however, doesn’t fit the biases of many of those who profess to be so worried about our high public debt. Their real motive is just to pay less tax, which explains why they think all tax cuts and tax concessions are good, but all government spending is bad. This is economic nonsense.

Leaving aside the self-interest of high income-earners, many conservatives’ concern about our high level of debt is just instinctive. They have a gut feeling that it must be dangerous. They really ought to give the matter more study.

But here’s something even many well well-versed people don’t realise, mainly because it hasn’t suited the politicians and econocrats to tell them: effectively, all the bonds the government has had to issue to cover the huge budget deficits since the pandemic are now held by . . . the Reserve Bank of Australia - which, of course, is owned by the federal government.

So most of the extra interest the feds are paying will find its way back to the budget in the form of higher dividends from the Reserve.

This is not because the Reserve bought the new bonds directly from the government, but because its extensive program of “quantitative easing” – buying second-hand government bonds and paying for them by creating money out of thin air – has amounted to a sum roughly equal to the new bonds sold to the public (mainly to superannuation funds).

But the most important thing to understand is Frydenberg’s repeated statement that the government’s strategy is to “repair the budget by repairing the economy”. This is not just another meaning-free slogan, it’s a statement of fundamental economic truth and political reality.

Governments rarely pay off the debt they incur. Rather, they reborrow to cover their bonds as they fall due, and concentrate on ensuring the economy grows faster than the debt’s growing, thus reducing the debt relative to the size of the economy – and the taxes being paid by the people in the economy.

Which brings us back to where we started: Frydenberg’s strategy of forcing the pace of economic growth to get the rate of unemployment sustainably down to the low 4s or even lower.

This strategy – to keep pushing unemployment down until it’s clear the inflationary pips are squeaking – was first suggested by Professor Ross Garnaut in his book, Reset, and taken up by Peter Martin, of The Conversation website.

It was inspired by the example of the United States which, before the pandemic, got unemployment down to near 3 per cent before wages got moving.

The first point is that there’s nothing better you could do to make the economy bigger (and bigger relative to the public debt) than to ensure more of those who want to work actually get jobs, earning incomes and paying taxes.

Labour lying idle is the worst kind of economic inefficiency.

But the strategy has a deeper objective: to make the market for labour so tight that employers have no option but to increase wages to retain the people they need.

Like all sensible economic managers, Frydenberg’s unspoken concern is the risk that, once the economy has rebounded from the coronacession - with considerable help from temporary fiscal stimulus - it falls back into the “secular stagnation” low-growth trap that the rich countries have been caught in since the global financial crisis.

Our wage growth has stagnated since this government came to power. It’s the most important single cause and consequence of our low growth. Labor will be making hay with this in the election campaign.

Ending wage stagnation is the key to a sustainable return to a healthy rate of economic growth. And given the Coalition’s tribal objection to using regulatory reform to get wages moving, getting unemployment down and tightening the labour market is the right solution to the problem.

Once it has been solved, the budget balance will be improved and the public debt will be less worrying to the unversed. If Frydenberg can get us back to the lowest unemployment since the 1970s, he’ll be up there with Paul Keating as one of our greatest treasurers.

In this column last Monday I overstated the regressiveness of the stage three tax cut. I quoted a summary of the findings of analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office, but should have checked it. The office’s actual findings are that about two-thirds of the tax cut will go to taxpayers earning $120,000 or more. The highest-earning 20 per cent of taxpayers will receive more than three-quarters of the money. My statement that only a third will go to women remains correct.

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Beware of governments using algorithms to collect revenue

A great advantage of having children and grandchildren is that they can show you how to do things on the internet – or your phone – that you can’t for the life of you see how to do yourself. But a small advantage that oldies have over youngsters is that we can remember how much more clunky and inconvenient life used to be before the digital revolution.

When you had to get out of your chair to change the telly to one of the other three channels. When you spent lunchtimes walking to companies’ offices to pay bills. When you had to visit your own branch of a bank to get cash or deposit a cheque.

When you had to write and post letters, rather than dashing off an email or text message. When we were paid in notes and coins rather than via a direct credit. When buying something from a business overseas was too tricky to ever contemplate.

Computers connected by the internet are transforming our world, making many of the things we do easier, more convenient, better and often cheaper. Businesses are adopting new technology because they see it as a way to cut costs, compete more effectively, attract more customers and make more money.

Governments have been slower to take advantage of digitisation, websites, artificial intelligence and machine learning. But there’s a lot to be gained in reduced red tape, convenience for taxpayers, efficiency and cost saving, and now governments at all levels are stepping up their use of new technology – which most of us would be pleased to see.

But, as with so many things, new technology can be used for good or ill. The most egregious case of government misuse of technology was surely Centrelink’s “automated income compliance program” aka robo-debt.

Here, a dodgy algorithm was used to accuse people on benefits of understating their income over many years and to demand repayment. Despite assurances by the two ministers responsible – Christian Porter and Alan Tudge – that all was fair and above board, huge anxiety was caused to many unjustly accused poor people.

The Coalition government obfuscated for years before a court finally ruled the program unlawful and the government agreed to return $1.8 billion. For a scheme intended to cut costs, it was an immoral own goal.

But last week the NSW Ombudsman, Paul Miller, revealed that something similar had been going on in NSW. Between 2016 and 2019, the state’s debt-collection agency, Revenue NSW, unlawfully used an automated system to claw back unpaid fines from financially vulnerable people, in some cases emptying bank accounts and leaving them unable to buy food or pay rent.

The automated system created garnishee orders, requiring banks to remove money from debtors’ bank accounts, without the debtors even being informed. The computer program took no account of any hardship this would impose.

Between 2011 and 2019, the number of garnishee orders issued by Revenue NSW each year jumped from 6900 to more than 1.6 million. The Ombudsman began investigating after receiving “a spate of complaints from people, many of them financially vulnerable individuals, who had discovered their bank accounts had been stripped of funds, and sometimes completely emptied.

“Those people were not complaining to us about the use of automation. They didn’t even know about it.”

As usually happens, we find out about this long after the problem has been (apparently) rectified. Unlike the feds, the NSW Revenue office agreed to modify its process in 2019, so that garnishee orders are no longer fully automated.

People identified as vulnerable were excluded from garnishee orders. And a minimum amount of $523.10 (!) is now left in the garnished account.

But Revenue NSW didn’t seek advice on whether the original scheme was legal, so the Ombudsman did. It wasn’t. The lawyers say the law gives the right to extract money from people to an “authorised person” – not to a machine.

So, two isolated incidents – one federal, one state – and everything’s now fixed? Don’t be so sure. Miller says that, in NSW, other agencies are known to be using machine technologies for enforcement of fines, policing, child protection and driver licence suspensions.

How do we know it isn’t happening – or will happen – in other states?

NSW Finance Minister Damien Tudehope said garnishee orders were a last resort after a person had been contacted multiple times in writing and given options about overdue fines.

“For those who have chosen to ignore our notices and simply don’t want to pay, the community has an expectation we take action to recover what is owed,” he said.

Yes, but few of us want governments riding roughshod over people who can’t pay because they’re on poverty-level social security benefits.

I leave the last word to Anoulack Chanthivong, NSW opposition finance spokesman: “The pursuit of economic efficiency through artificial intelligence should never come at the expense of treating our more vulnerable citizens with dignity and decency.

“Governments at all levels are meant to serve our community and make their lives better, not find unlawful ways to make them worse.”

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We won’t be paying back government debt, but we WILL be paying

If you’re one of the many who worry about how we’ll pay off the massive debt the Morrison government has incurred during the pandemic, the Parliamentary Budget Office has reassuring news.

The budget office – which is responsible to the whole Parliament and so is independent of the elected government – has prepared its own projections of the budget deficit and debt over the decade to 2032.

It’s also assessed our “fiscal sustainability” over the 40 years to 2061, testing the budget against 27 different best, worst and middle scenarios with differing assumptions about economic growth, the level of interest rates on government debt and the size of our budget deficit or surplus.

It finds that the federal government’s debt is projected to keep growing until it reaches a peak equivalent to about 50 per cent of gross domestic product in 2029. After that it’s projected to keep growing in dollar terms, but at a slower rate than the economy is growing, so that it slowly declines relative to the size of the economy, to reach 28 per cent of GDP in 2061 in the middle scenario.

We don’t pay off any debt unless we get the budget back into annual surplus. But this happens only in the best-case scenario, where the debt is completely repaid by 2058. Don’t hold your breath.

So the budget office’s reassuring news is not that we’ll be able to repay the debt – it’s unlikely we will – but that it accepts Scott Morrison’s assurances we don’t have to repay it to keep out of trouble. That, unless our leaders go crazy, we can outgrow the debt and that the interest bill isn’t likely to become a significant burden on taxpayers even though the debt remains unpaid.

These are not controversial propositions among economists. If you find them hard to believe then – forgive me – but you don’t understand public finances as well as you should. It’s a mistake to think that a national government of 25 million people has to live by the same rules as your household.

Households must pay off their debts before they’re too old to work, but governments go on forever and always have most of their population working and paying taxes. Their populations keep growing and getting a bit richer every year, so they can keep rolling over their debts.

They can do what no household can do: pay their bills not by working but by imposing taxes on other households. So stop thinking governments have to pay off their debts the way you and I do.

And stop thinking our kids will be lumbered with massive government debts; they won’t be. Indeed, it won’t be government debt our kids and grandkids will hold against us, it’s our generation’s failure to act early enough to stop global warming.

But that’s not to say government debt doesn’t matter or that it comes without a price tag. In its projections over the next decade and its scenarios over the next 40 years, the budget office assumes that the “shocks” causing ups and downs in the economy in the future will be no worse than those we’ve experienced over the past 30 years or so. Maybe; maybe not. As well, it assumes that present and future governments will be no more reckless spenders than governments have been over past decades.

It judges that our deficit and debt position will be sustainable over the next 40 years – will cause no need for “major remedial policy action” (no horror budgets) – “provided fiscal strategy is prudent”. We can continue to run budget deficits provided they’re “modest”.

We’ll need “a measured pace of fiscal consolidation”. Translation: if governments stop trying to keep deficits low, all bets are off. So governments will need to avoid wasteful spending. And they’ll need to ensure tax collections are sufficient to cover most of any growth in government spending.

It’s here I think the budget office’s projections of an ever-diminishing budget deficit out to 2032 are hard to believe. They’re based on assumptions that government spending grows no faster than the economy grows, but tax collections grow a lot faster than the economy.

How? By letting bracket creep rip. The tax cuts we’ve been promised for 2024 will be limited to high-income earners, and will be the last we see for the decade.

That’s not hard to believe. What’s hard is believing governments can keep the lid on government spending for another decade. We know we’ll be spending hugely more on nuclear subs and other defence equipment, on aged care and on the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

So how is government spending supposed to grow only modestly? Because spending on social welfare – age pension, family tax benefits, disability support pension, JobSeeker and sole parent payment – will fall as a share of GDP.

Get it? The only way we’ll keep on top of our debt and deficit is by driving the disadvantaged further into poverty. If we’re not that heartless, we’ll be paying a lot more tax – whatever we’re promised at the election.

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Morrison's surprise investment in a better class of economic debate

When he was appointed chair of the Productivity Commission, Michael Brennan looked to be just another political appointment by a government that disrespected the public service and was busily installing its own men – and I do mean men – to plum jobs and key positions.

Three years later it’s clear that, whatever Scott Morrison’s motives in insisting he be appointed, Brennan is his own man, with his own inquiring and “well-furnished” mind. His disposition is conservative and he’s expert in the neo-classical orthodoxy of economics.

He’s what Treasury-types used to call an “economic rationalist”. But Brennan is no narrow-minded dogmatist who, having discovered the truth, sees no need to look further. He’s learnt from behavioural economics and is interested even in “evolutionary economics”.

Brennan’s appointment to head the Productivity Commission coincided with the early departure of John Fraser as secretary to the Treasury and then-treasurer Morrison’s decision to replace Fraser with the chief of staff in his own office, Philip Gaetjens.

Fraser, you recall, had been hand-picked for Treasury secretary by Tony Abbott, after his first act as prime minister had been to sack the existing secretary, Dr Martin Parkinson, and several other top econocrats.

The fact that Brennan had previously worked for Liberal ministers, federal and state, and had once run for Liberal preselection, framed his appointment as political. What this misses, however, is that Brennan is his father’s son.

Geoff Brennan, an economics professor at the Australian National University, won an international reputation for his contribution to the theory of public choice. All professors have sharp minds; Brennan’s is sharper than most.

In all its previous incarnations, going back to the pre-Whitlam Tariff Board, the Productivity Commission has been a bastion of economic orthodoxy. Its influence on elite thinking played a big part in the transformation of the economy under Hawke and Keating.

It’s usually been led by neo-classical, rationalist warriors. Brennan fits the bill, but he’s far more open-minded, widely read and persuasive than his predecessors.

In a speech last week, Brennan noted that the commission will soon release research on working from home: what it might mean for cities, for our work health and safety regime, the workplace relations system; what it might mean for productivity.

“We analyse these things from an economic perspective,” he explained, “and our starting point is a fairly conventional neo-classical framework.

“The conventional economic framework is useful because it helps us think through the forces acting on wages, rents, productivity and – importantly – overall wellbeing. But I do think that to really understand the path of digital technology and its economic impact you really need to combine those traditional neo-classical insights with the insights gleaned from a more evolutionary approach.”

Eh? What?

“The evolutionary approach to economics – of which [Professor] Jason Potts [of RMIT University] is a leading practitioner – eschews that narrow profit maximising assumption in favour of the more realistic view that firms face uncertainty – both about the state of things and the future – and do their best to navigate their way through the fog.

“The evolutionary approach stresses the importance of variety – the idea that different firms make different bets based on their subjective hypotheses about what will work; with these experiments submitted to the test of the market and society.

“It stresses that variety can foster novelty. It is not an aberration, but that it’s actually fundamentally important – particularly in the early stages of a new technology.”

None of Brennan’s predecessors at the commission would ever have said anything like that. Recognise that the neo-classical model is just one way of trying to understand how the economy works, and that there are other, quite different ways of analysing economic activity that could add to our understanding of how it ticks? Never.

In an earlier speech, Brennan gave a warning about the relaxed approach of some to the massive build up in deficit and debt since the pandemic. All his predecessors would have shared that concern. But they would never have expressed the warning in such a well-reasoned way.

The new conventional wisdom among economists (to which I subscribe) is that high public debt doesn’t necessarily have to be paid back. It will decline in relative terms – relative to the size of the economy, gross domestic product – so long as nominal GDP grows at a faster rate than the rate of interest on the public debt – and, of course, so long as you’re not adding to the debt.

Brennan’s warning: “The risk in the public debate is that this insight – that GDP growth tends to exceed interest rates – is taken to imply something altogether different and much bigger: that debt and deficit no longer matter at all.

“That we can afford the next and the next ‘one-off’ rise in debt on the grounds that growth rates will continue to outpace bond yields . . .”

Brennan outlines various reasons for not being seduced by this life-was-meant-to-easy view, but focuses on the micro-economic case for caution. He notes, as economists do, that hidden behind the amounts of mere money being spent is the use of “real resources” in the economy. We can print as much money as we want, but what can’t be produced from thin air are the land and raw materials, capital equipment and labour that money is used to buy.

And there are physical limits on the extent to which real resources – as opposed to money – can be borrowed from the future. Real resources bought by the government are no longer available to be used by business for investment and innovation.

True. Good point. Surprise, surprise there’s no free lunch. But this tells me we should be trying a lot harder to ensure the money governments spend isn’t spent wastefully. We should spend on things governments are prepared to ask taxpayers to pay for.

What doesn’t follow is neo-classical economics’ implicit assumption that spending decisions made by the private sector are always superior to the things governments spend on.

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Afterpay tells us we're suckers for the illusion of 'free'

There’s more to be learnt - sorry, there are more “learnings” – from the phenomenal success of Aussie “fintech” start-up Afterpay before it drifts off into corporate history. Learnings about human nature, public policy and what switched-on economists call “market design”.

Economists need to do more thinking about the way markets are – and should be – designed. The sub-discipline of market design recognises that, increasingly in the real world – especially the digital world – markets don’t work in the simple, transparent, what-you-pay-is-what-you-get way assumed by economics textbooks.

This means there’s more scope for “market failure” – market forces not delivering the benefits that economic theory promises they will.

Afterpay’s first “learning” is that, far from being “rational” – carefully calculating – consumers (and taxpayers) are hugely attracted by the illusion that something is free. Afterpay’s success seems explained by Millennials being greatly attracted by its promise to let them BNPL - buy now, pay later - without charging any interest.

It seems young people are turning away from credit cards and their very high interest rates in favour of BNPL. When you think about it, however, you see there isn’t much difference between a credit card and an Afterpay BNPL interest-free loan.

A standard credit card is also an interest-free BNPL loan provided you pay it off at the end of the month, in full and on the dot. Fail to manage that, however, and you soon see how high credit card interest rates are.

(Warning to all lawyers and judges: apparently, your legal learning robs you of the ability to understand the argument that follows. To a lawyer, any payment to a lender can’t be a payment of interest unless it’s wearing a label that says “interest” and is expressed as a percentage of the amount lent. You’d all make good Millennials.)

With an Afterpay BNPL loan, it’s only interest-free if you make four equal fortnightly repayments on time. If you’re late with a repayment, you’re charged a $10 late fee. And if you’re more than a week late you’re charged another $7.

The usurious nature of these charges is disguised by their small absolute size (but the amount borrowed is also pretty small) and by our practice of expressing interest rates on an annual basis (this loan is only for eight weeks, not 52).

But that’s not all. As Milton Friedman didn’t win his Nobel prize for discovering, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the borrower using either a credit card or BNPL manages to repay their loan without incurring any penalty, the lender still has to receive the equivalent of an interest payment to make the transaction worth funding.

In the case of both credit cards and Afterpay loans, this is achieved by a “merchant fee” paid by the retailer that made the sale. The fee is a percentage of the amount lent although, in the case of Afterpay, it’s a huge 4 to 6 per cent plus a flat 30c. (My guess is the 30c is there to fool lawyers into thinking the fee couldn’t possibly be payment of interest).

Whatever the reason, Afterpay has managed to convince the lawyers that, since BNPL obviously has nothing to do with borrowing and lending, it cannot be subject to the Credit Act, meaning Afterpay is not subject to the “responsible lending obligation” and so escapes the expensive obligation to do credit checks and verify the borrower’s ability to repay the debt. (We’re assured, however, that Afterpay and its many imitators are subjecting themselves to a voluntary code of conduct.)

This raises another “learning” right there. Almost invariably, the many market disrupters produced by the digital revolution – including Uber and Airbnb – amount to the combination of a genuine, productivity-enhancing innovation (something every economist wants to encourage) and a trumped-up claim that, because we’re so new and different, none of the regulation that shackles the existing industry applies to us.

“Their workers are employees, ours aren’t. The firms we’re disrupting have to provide employee super contributions, annual and sick leave, and workers compensation insurance, as well as comply with health and safety requirements, but we don’t.”

This, of course, is why we’re developing a two-class workforce, where those unfortunate enough to be able to find work only in the “gig economy” have badly paid, precarious employment with bad conditions and few rights.

The thought that this regression to feudal conditions for some should be allowed to persist in an economy as rich as ours is utterly repugnant. And to respond to it by introducing a universal basic income is an admission of defeat.

But before we leave Afterpay, there’s another learning. Using merchant fees to hide the interest cost of BNPL schemes, whether credit cards or Afterpay-style, involves an arrangement that’s both inefficient and unfair. It encourages retailers to recover the effective interest cost by raising their prices to all their customers, thus obliging those who pay cash or with a debit card to subsidise those who choose to BNPL.

Afterpay prohibits retailers from recouping the cost by asking those who choose BNPL to pay a surcharge. Just as Visa and Mastercard used to prohibit retailers from imposing a surcharge on those who choose to pay by credit card.

For obvious reasons, the promoters of supposedly interest-free loans want the true cost of this free lunch to remain hidden. The Reserve Bank – which has oversight of payment system regulation – laboured for years to get the prohibition on credit-card surcharges outlawed, and finally succeeded.

These days, credit-card surcharges have become common. My guess is that these surcharges, not just the advent of Afterpay and its imitators, help explain the big shift from credit to debit cards. This is just what the Reserve wanted to see.

But it’s utterly inconsistent for the authorities to stop the banks from banning surcharges while allowing Afterpay to ban them. Maybe they’re applying some kind of infant-industry argument. Let them get established, then rope them into the regulatory fold.

Final learning: look around and you find our human susceptibility to the illusion of “free” in lots of places. Starting close to home, free-to-air television and – until Google and Facebook stole our business model – almost-free newspapers and websites were so much a part of the furniture that it was easy to forget that the cost of all the advertising they carried was buried in the cost of most of the things we buy.

The internet still carries a host of free sites with interesting and useful information, even if the legacy newspaper companies have finally moved to making most of their money via subscriptions.

Then there are Google and Facebook, for whom the market-design people have invented a new bit of jargon. They are “multi-sided platforms” whose ostensibly free services are paid for by selling to advertisers the myriad information the platforms have gathered about the preferences, actions and locality of their users.

But our love of the supposedly free – our preference for having the true cost of things hidden from our sight – applies just as much to us as taxpayers. It took the Liberals a long time to realise how much voters loved Medicare, and didn’t want it fiddled with. Why the great love? Bulk billing. The way it makes visits to GPs and hospitals appear free.

Despite all their speeches on the evils of higher taxes, the Libs (like Labor) have never needed to be told of the one tax increase we don’t mind because we don’t see it: bracket creep. When it comes to kidding ourselves, we’re past masters.

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