It's slowing the spin doctors' spin that keeps me busy

Do you remember former prime minister John Howard’s ringing declaration that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”? It played a big part in helping him win the 2001 federal election. But it’s only true in part.The job of economic commentators like me is supposed to be telling people about what’s happening in the economy and adding to readers’ understanding of how the economy works.But...

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Australia's future to be made under Treasury's watchful eye

The Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia has had a rapturous reception from some, but a suspicious reception from others (including me). In a little-noticed speech last week, however, one of our former top econocrats gave the plan a tick.Rod Sims, former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and now chair of Professor Ross Garnaut’s brainchild, the Superpower Institute, has been reassured by the...

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Is a Future Made in Australia a good or bad idea? Maybe a bit of both

What exactly is a Future Made in Australia? You can read the long speech Anthony Albanese made about it and still not be sure. My guess is it’s a slogan designed by spin doctors to mean whatever you’d like it to mean.As I wrote on Monday, what I hope it means is that the government intends to secure our economic future by ensuring all the income we’re going to lose from the world’s decision to stop buying our exports of fossil...

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How Albanese can make Australia's future the smart way

Thank goodness we’ve finally got someone saying something sensible about Anthony Albanese’s Future Made in Australia. So far, it’s been a phoney war between the old fogeys from the Productivity Commission – all government subsidies are rent-seeking – and the Bring Back Manufacturing Brigade, pushing the notion that making goods is more economically virtuous than providing services and quoting bulldust measures of “economic complexity”...

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The last thing we need: neutering the free-trade referee

With the coronavirus putting the world economy into its worst dive in almost a century, it would help if the surviving trade in goods and services between countries was continuing in an orderly way. But, as if we didn’t have enough problems, the future of the international body responsible for ensuring free and fair trade, the World Trade Organisation, is in grave doubt. The eternal temptation in international trade is protectionism:...

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Morrison's dream: climate fixed with no changes to jobs or tax

When I was new to journalism, there was a saying that the two words which, when used in a newsagents’ poster or a headline, would attract the most readers, were "free" and "tax". These days, the two words politicians use to suck in unwary voters are "jobs" and "tax". These words have magical powers because we attach our own meaning to them and assume the polly is using them to imply what we think they imply. They evoke in us...

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Both sides of politics play along with costly con trick

Since there’s probably more madness to come, it’s too soon to tell how much Donald Trump’s uncomprehending machinations on trade will do to make America’s economy less great, let alone the rest of us. But it’s safe to predict damage to our economy – much of it self-inflicted. Yes, self-inflicted. It won’t just be what Trump and others do to us, but also the damage we do to ourselves by hitting back in ways that hurt us more...

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Why protection from imports isn't smart

With The Donald now busy playing poker with Little Rocket Man, the threat of a trade war has receded. Good. Gives us time to get our thinking straight before the threat returns. Everyone knows a trade war would be a terrible thing, but most people's reason for thinking so is wrong. This misunderstanding means such a war could happen, even though everyone knows it would be bad. It seems common sense for a country to want to...

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How we could gang up against a Trump trade war

A possible trade war looms and, as always, an adverse overseas development has caught poor little Oz utterly unprepared. Well, actually, not this time. Just as Treasury had been war-gaming the next big world recession well before the global financial crisis of late 2008, so the Productivity Commission began thinking about our best response to a trade war soon after the election of Donald Trump. In July last year it published...

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Free-trade agreements aren't about freer trade

You may think spin-doctoring and economics are worlds apart, but they combine in that relatively modern invention the "free-trade agreement" – the granddaddy of which, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is presently receiving CPR from the lips of our own heroic lifesaver, Malcolm Turnbull. It's not surprising many punters assume something called a "free-trade agreement" must be a Good Thing. Economists have been preaching the virtues...

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Little right, much wrong with Trumponomics

For years I've wondered how America's business elite could grab almost all the proceeds of the country's growth, leaving real wages permanently stagnant, without having ordinary workers rioting in the streets. Now I know. The anger kept building until a political huckster called Trump found the way to exploit it for personal advancement. The bitter joke is that the populist promises he made to keep out Muslims, Mexicans and...

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