Saturday, February 29, 2020

Despite neglect, we're muddling towards low-carbon electricity

To coin a phrase, Australia’s governments are making heavy weather of their efforts to give us an electricity system that’s secure, reliable and affordable – with declining carbon emissions. Progress is slow in every respect bar one: the move to renewable energy is showing “remarkable growth”.

That’s clear from this week’s annual Health of the National Electricity Market report, by the Energy Security Board of the Council of Australian Governments. The peak security board is composed of the heads of the three government agencies that share the running of the national electricity market, plus an independent chair, Dr Kerry Schott, an economist.

If it all sounds a bit bureaucratic, it is. The national market (which covers all states bar Western Australia and the Northern Territory) is a “market” created by government and managed by bureaucrats. You have to give six months’ notice of your intention to blow your nose. Schott’s energy board – a further layer of bureaucracy – was set up partly to get the three lower outfits to work together more co-operatively.

Having been written by bureaucrats, the report (littered with industry jargon) is too polite to remind us why the industry’s having so much trouble getting its act together: the federal Coalition government’s inability to tell the many businesses exactly how they'll be required to reduce their emissions as part of the government’s commitment under the Paris agreement.

Without that degree of certainty – ideally, a plan both sides of politics are committed to – businesses are reluctant to invest. The Turnbull government had such a plan – the national energy guarantee – but its minority of climate-change deniers refused to accept it. The plan was abandoned and, pretty soon, so was Malcolm Turnbull.

Of the three key objectives – security, reliability and affordability – the report rates the status of the first two as “critical” (bureaucratspeak for “a real worry”) and only the last as “moderate-critical” (“not as bad as it was”).

To be fair, coal-fired power and renewable energy are so different in their nature that moving the power system from one to the other – and don’t doubt that this is what’s already happening – was always going to be a tricky business. That, of course, is why decent politicians would be doing all they could to minimise the uncertainty.

“Security” is now “the issue of most concern” to the board. It means maintaining a consistent flow of power at the right frequency and voltage. Failure to do so can seriously damage the system and cause significant interruptions to power supply – that is, days or months, not hours.

The problem is caused by the increasing role of “variable renewable energy resources” (aka wind farms and solar farms) and “distributed energy resources” (aka rooftop solar panels and maybe batteries).

“Reliability” – that is, the avoidance of much shorter blackouts – is now a bigger worry than it was. It has improved since last year, but the balance between demand and supply is still very tight during the summer peak demand in Victoria, NSW and South Australia.

“The increased severity of weather events, especially over summer, coincides with an ageing, and hence less dependable, coal generator fleet,” the report says.

When we come to affordability, it has “improved slightly over the year for retail customers”. Considering that retail prices leapt by 80 per cent between June 2004 and June last year, I suppose you have to regard that as progress.

Why did prices go so high? Well, not for the reason Scott Morrison keeps diverting our attention to: Labor’s evil tax on carbon, which Tony Abbott soon abolished. No, the report explains that the years of soaring prices were “largely driven by overbuilt [transmission] networks in Queensland and NSW, rising wholesale fuel costs, retail market [profit-motivated] inefficiencies and the cost of a range of renewables subsidies”.

Why did affordability (that is, not price per unit of power, but the size of people’s bills) improve slightly last financial year? Mainly because the average amount of energy from the grid fell as people moved to rooftop solar and also used electricity more efficiently – say, by buying appliances with better ratings.

Now the good news: over the three years to 2021-22, prices are expected to fall by 7 per cent, mainly because wholesale prices will fall as more power comes from renewables generation, which is very cheap. Really? That much, eh?

So don’t imagine retail prices will ever fall back to anything like what they were. And even as more and more of our power comes from renewables, there’ll be a lot of new cost coming from the rejig of the transmission network needed to connect to the different locations of the renewables’ generators.

By June last year, the proportion of the national market’s electricity generated by wind and solar had reached 16 per cent. It’s expected to reach 27 per cent by 2022, and be above 40 per cent in 2030.

There is huge variance between the states on their rate of transition. With its hydro and wind, Tasmania is close to 100 per cent renewables. South Australia is up at 53 per cent, leaving the rest of us between 10 and 20 per cent.

Contrary to Morrison’s claim that we’re a “world leader” in renewables investment, the report says we’re in the same class as Ireland, California, Germany, Spain and Portugal.

All that’s before you take account of rooftop solar. The report says it’s our high prevalence of rooftop that’s uniquely Australian. It’s now equivalent to 5 per cent on top of the national market’s total generation, and expected to be 10 per cent by 2030.

So don’t let anyone tell you we’re not getting on with the shift to renewables. But, by the same token, don’t imagine we’re doing anything like enough. We need to get to carbon-free electricity long before 2050, not just to do our bit in limiting global warming but because, as the report confirms, Australia has a “global comparative advantage in renewable energy”. We’d be mugs not to exploit it.
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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Don’t forget: we all benefit from the magic of capitalism

The human capacity for adaptation – our ability to soon get used to our changed circumstances – is one of our great strengths. It means we can suffer a major misfortune – the death of a spouse, divorce, loss of a limb – and yet eventually get back to being pretty much as happy as we were.

But this pillar of human resilience has a big downside. It means when good things happen to us – even things we’ve long strived for – we soon stop being gratified and grateful, and within days or weeks start taking our advances for granted, part of the status quo.

It’s this adaptability that keeps many of us caught on what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill”. The new house we moved to a few months back is fine, but now we really need a new car. I’ve got more clothes at home in the wardrobe than I can wear, but I’d really get a kick from buying a new jacket. All I need is a bit more money and then I’ll be happy.

With the media continually reminding us of all that’s wrong with our economy – weak wages growth, still-high unemployment and underemployment, a government not game to tackle climate change – it’s too easy to take for granted all that’s right with it. We’re the richest generation of Australians who’ve ever lived, and we shouldn’t forget it (especially when our politicians try to tell us we can’t afford to help the poor).

Enter Michael Brennan, chair of the Productivity Commission. If you think Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe is our only top econocrat who sees our glass as two-thirds full, you need to meet Brennan. He’s on a mission to show us how well we’re doing thanks to . . . productivity improvement.

In his speeches in recent months, Brennan has noted that it’s “been the great fortune of humankind, particularly in . . . the developed economies, to have experienced rapid growth in incomes and living standards over the last 200 years”.

Before and after Federation in 1901, we were the richest country in the world – thanks to our “wealth for toil”, mainly in the form of gold and wool. As the American Century got under way, we lost that lead.

In the period after World War II, our real gross domestic product per person went from being nearly $6000 a year above the rich-country average in 1950, to below the average in 1990.

But we began opening up and modernising our economy in the mid-1980s. Over the past 30 years our real GDP per person – that is, after allowing for inflation and population growth – has out-performed all of the G7 economies of North America, Europe and Japan, and our incomes have risen back to being well above the rich-world average. (Take a bow, Paul Keating.)

We have one of the strongest budgetary positions (which remains true even if we don’t make it “back in the black” this year) and the most progressive tax-and-transfers system in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Contrary to any impression you may have gained, our inequality of income hasn’t worsened a lot over the past 30 years. And, although our household wealth (assets minus debts) is a lot more unequal than our incomes, it’s low by rich-world standards.

Brennan says our life expectancy is high, for spending on healthcare that’s modest as a share of GDP. We face neither the budgetary and demographic problems of the Eurozone, the inequality of the US or the stagnation of Japan.

Average incomes in Australia today are seven times higher than they were in 1901. Environmentalists should note is that only some of this growth has come from increased exploitation of natural resources and damage to the environment (which is certainly something we need to correct).

No, the great majority of this growth has come from the magic of the capitalist system: improved productivity (the very magic Brennan is paid to promote). The average worker today can produce hugely more value in goods or services per hour than the average worker in 1901. Why? Because we’re healthier, better educated and more highly skilled, and we’re not only given far more equipment to work with, but those machines can do tricks that were never dreamt of a hundred years ago. And factories and offices are more efficiently organised.

That’s the capitalist magic of productivity improvement.

Brennan’s party trick is to demonstrate what a seven-times higher real income means in concrete terms. He calculates, for instance, that whereas the average employee had to work 22 hours to rent the average Australian three-bedroom house for a week in 1901, today it takes 12 hours (and it’s a much better house).

The cost of a bicycle – which in those days was the main form of transport – has dropped from 527 hours of work to less than eight hours. The cost of a kilo of rump steak has gone from 143 minutes work to 38; a loaf of bread from 20 minutes to six; a litre of milk from 31 minutes to just over two.

It’s noteworthy that whereas the wage cost of manufactured goods has fallen hugely, the wage cost of services hasn’t – because the wage of the person delivering the service has gone up with the wage of the person buying it.

But Brennan says the point of economic progress isn't just having more and cheaper "stuff", but also having qualitatively different stuff thanks to innovation and technology. That includes all the stuff we take for granted around the home - television, refrigeration, indoor plumbing and airconditioning - not to mention cars, air travel, the internet and smartphones. Then there's statins, the polio vaccine, a much lower likelihood of dying in childbirth, and antibiotics, which can be bought with as little as a quarter of an hour's work.
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Monday, February 24, 2020

Phone users have a reason to cheer ACCC's black eye

How much do you pay for your mobile phone contract – a lot or a little? Do you wish there was more price competition in a market dominated by three big companies, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been stymied in its efforts to make that possibility more likely.

Last year the competition commission blocked a plan for Vodafone (one of the world’s biggest mobile phone companies) to "merge" with TPG (a mainly fixed-line phone and internet service provider) on the grounds that it could substantially lessen competition in the mobiles market.

Earlier this month the Federal Court overturned the commission’s ruling and allowed the merger to proceed – to much cheering from big business, which loves seeing the interfering competition regulator get a poke in the eye.

But phone users have nothing to cheer about. A chance to get more effective competition in the mobile phone market has been lost. Any threat of disruption to the comfortable life of the three-firm oligopoly – which already controls almost 90 per cent of the market – has been removed.

The competition commission thought the merger would do little to increase competition in the mobiles market, whereas allowing the smallest of the big-three oligopolists to take out the one outsider that could have threatened their cosy oligopoly – TPG – made it unlikely their cosy arrangement would ever be disrupted.

It thought this because, under the leadership of its swashbuckling chairman, David Teoh, TPG had turned itself into a company big enough to challenge Telstra and Optus in the internet provider market by acquiring various smaller providers and offering more competitive prices. And it had already spent $1.26 billion preparing to build a mobile network, before the government refused to let it partner with the Chinese-owned leader in 5G technology, Huawei.

Were the merger to be prevented, the commission believed, there was a good chance that TPG, with its record as a disrupter of markets, would revert to its plan to break into the mobile market, and do so by undercutting the incumbents’ prices.

The court rejected the competition regulator’s argument, primarily because it accepted Teoh’s assurance that he’d abandoned his plan to break into the mobiles market and wouldn’t return to it.

The court ruled that “it is not necessarily the number of competitors that are in the relevant market, but the quality of the competition that must be assessed. Further, it is not for the ACCC or this court to engineer a competitive outcome”.

Sorry, your honour, not sure what you mean. It’s certainly true that assessing the competitiveness of an oligopolistic market is more complicated than counting the number of dominant firms. The complexity comes in assessing the nature of the competition.

But what does it mean to “engineer” a competitive outcome? If it means the competition regulator and the court can’t do anything that would increase the likelihood of an industry being disrupted by a new and aggressive entrant, it’s telling us the law is biased in favour of maintaining the status quo and thus protecting the comfortable lives of the incumbents.

Does it mean the only views the authorities may hold about how the future may unfold for the industry must come from what the companies seeking permission to merge say about their intentions, not from the evidence economists have gathered about how oligopolists seek to compete in ways that maximise their profits and limit the benefit to their customers?

One of the main ways the rich countries have become rich is by firms’ continuous pursuit of economies of scale. The inevitable consequence, however, is that most of our markets have become dominated by a small number of huge firms with considerable power to influence the prices charged – especially if they reach an unspoken agreement to avoid competing on price.

The big question for public policy is how to ensure the gains from scale economies flow through to customers in lower prices and better service, rather than being retained as “super profit” in excess of the “normal profit” needed to cover the firm’s cost of capital and the risks it’s run. This is why economists have built up a great body of empirical knowledge about how oligopolists behave.

The court found that increasing the number of big players in the mobiles market from three to four (should the merger be blocked and TPG resume its plan to enter the market) would do little to increase competition, whereas allowing Vodafone to buy out the potential entrant and so become closer in size to its two rivals would improve competition.

Sorry, both conclusions run contrary to what the empirical evidence tells us was likely to happen. Remember, the chief tactic the world's digital megafirms have used to protect their pricing power is buying out small outfits looking like they could become a disrupter.
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Saturday, February 22, 2020

No progress on wages, but we’re getting a better handle on why

In days of yore, workers used to say: another day, another dollar. These days they’d be more inclined to say: another quarter, another sign that wages are stuck in the slow lane. But why is wage growth so weak? This week we got some clues from the Productivity Commission.

We also learnt from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that, as measured by the wage price index, wages rose by 0.5 per cent in the three months to the end of December, and by just 2.2 per cent over the year - pretty much the same rate as for the past two years.

It compares with the rise in consumer prices over the year of just 1.8 per cent. If prices aren’t rising by much, it’s hardly surprising that wages aren’t either. But we got used to wages growing by a percentage point or so per year faster than consumer prices and, as you see, last year they grew only 0.4 percentage points faster.

It’s this weak “real” wage growth that’s puzzling and worrying economists and p---ing off workers. Real wages have been weak for six or seven years.

So why has real wage growth been so much slower than we were used to until 2012-13? Various people, with various axes to grind, have offered rival explanations – none of which they’ve been able to prove.

One argument is that real wage growth is weak for the simple and obvious reason that the annual improvement in the productivity of labour (output of goods and services per hour worked) has also been weak.

It’s true that labour productivity has been improving at a much slower annual rate in recent years. It’s true, too, that there’s long been a strong medium-term correlation between the rate of real wage growth and the rate of labour productivity improvement.

When the two grow at pretty much the same rate, workers gain their share of the benefits from their greater productivity, and do so without causing higher inflation. But this hasn’t seemed adequate to fully explain the problem.

Another explanation the Reserve Bank has fallen back on as its forecasts of stronger wage growth have failed to come to pass is that there’s a lot of spare capacity in the labour market (high unemployment and underemployment) which has allowed employers to hire all the workers they’ve needed without having to bid up wages. Obviously true, but never been a problem at other times of less-than-full employment.

For their part, the unions are in no doubt why wage growth has been weak: the labour market "reforms" of the Howard government have weakened the workers’ ability to bargain for decent pay rises, including by reducing access to enterprise bargaining.

But this week the Productivity Commission included in its regular update on our productivity performance a purely numerical analysis of the reasons real wage growth has been weak since 2012-13. It compared the strong growth in real wages in the economy’s “market sector” (16 of the economy’s 19 industries, excluding public administration, education and training, and health care and social assistance) during the 18 years to 2012-13 with the weak growth over the following six years.

The study found that about half the slowdown in real wage growth could be explained by the slower rate of improvement in labour productivity. Turns out the weaker productivity performance was fully explained by just three industries: manufacturing (half), agriculture and utilities (about a quarter each).

A further quarter of the slowdown in real wage growth is explained by the effects and after-effects of the resources boom. Although the economists’ conventional wisdom says real wages should grow in line with the productivity of labour, this implicitly assumes the country’s “terms of trade” (the prices we get for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports) are unchanged.

But, being a major exporter of rural and mineral commodities, that assumption often doesn’t hold for Australia. The resources boom that ran for a decade from about 2003 saw a huge increase in the prices we got for our exports of coal and iron ore. This, in turn, pushed the value of our dollar up to a peak of about $US1.10, which made our imports of goods and services (including overseas holidays) much cheaper.

This, of course, was reflected in the consumer price index. When you use these “consumer prices” to measure the growth in workers’ real wages before 2012-13, you find they grew by a lot more than justified by the improvement in productivity.

In the period after 2012-13, however, export prices fell back a fair way and so did the dollar, making imported goods and services harder for consumers to afford. So there’s been a sort of correction in which real wages have grown by less than the improvement in labour productivity would have suggested they should. Some good news: this is a one-time correction that shouldn’t continue.

Finally, the study finds that a further fifth of the slowdown in real wage growth is explained by an increase in the profits share of national income and thus an equivalent decline in the wages share.

Almost three-quarters of the increase in the profits share is also explained by the resources boom. It involved a massive injection of financial capital (mainly by big foreign mining companies, such as BHP) to hugely increase the size of our mining industry – which, as the central Queenslanders lusting after Adani will one day find out, uses a lot of big machines and very few workers. Naturally, the suppliers of that capital expect a return on their investment.

But harder to explain and defend is the study’s finding that more than a quarter of the increase in the profits share is accounted for by the greater profitability of the finance and insurance sector. Think greedy bankers, but also the ever-growing pile of compulsory superannuation money and the anonymous army of financial-types who find ways to take an annual bite out of your savings.
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Wednesday, February 19, 2020

They should make benefiting you the goal of economics

I was reading yet more about the troubles besetting the rich economies when it struck me: we’d do a lot better if our politicians and their advisers just managed the economy in ways that gave first priority to benefiting the ordinary people who constitute it.

The bleeding obvious, you say? Well, of late, not so you’d notice. Just what we’ve always been doing, the pollies and economists say? Again, not so you’d notice. Too simple? Not if you do it right.

Economics is the study of “the daily business of life” – going to work to earn money, then spending that money. If so, the economy is nothing more than all those who work (paid or unpaid) and consume, which is all of us.

The fact that we are the economy means it’s actually our economy. So all the other players – politicians, economists, even business people – are there to serve our interests. Rather than becoming alienated from the process, we should be holding them to account.

During the past 30 or 40 years of what it’s now fashionable to call neo-liberalism, we were acting on the theory that the best way to benefit all Australians was to reduce the role of government in the daily business of life and give freer rein to businesses.

This indirect approach didn’t work well. We gave our bankers and business people greater freedom from government regulation, but they abused our trust. The lenience of regulators has seen business become remarkably lawless. Too much of the extra income the economy has generated has gone to the very highest income-earners, leaving too little going to middle and lower income-earners.

This era of “economic rationalism” and “microeconomic reform” has ended, leaving Scott Morrison with much damage to clean up. Meanwhile, many voters are disillusioned and distrustful of both main parties, and are turning elsewhere to populists such as Pauline Hanson, who not only have no answers to the problems that bother us, but also seek our support by blaming our troubles on unpopular scapegoats – Muslims, city-slickers etc.

The economic rationalists’ solution to misbehaving businesses, caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – is good advice but, in the modern complex world, it’s impractical. There aren’t enough leisure hours in the day for us to spend most of them checking that all the businesses we deal with aren’t overcharging us or taking advantage of us in some way, and our employer isn’t underpaying us.

So why don’t governments cut to the chase and simply make treating us in such ways illegal? And when doing so is already illegal – as it usually is – why don’t they resume adequately policing those laws?

Something almost everyone craves in their lives, but politicians and economists long ago lost sight of, is a high degree of security. We want the security of owning our own homes and we want security in our employment.

And yet we’ve allowed home ownership to become unaffordable to an increasing proportion of young people. Why? Because we’ve put the interests of existing home owners ahead of would-be home owners. We could fix the unaffordability problem if we were prepared to put the interests of the young ahead of the old.

Some degree of flexibility in the job market is a good thing provided it works both ways. Under economic rationalism, the goal was more flexibility for employers without any concern about what this did to the lives of casual workers mucked about by selfish and capricious employers.

It’s good that part-time jobs are now available for those who want one – students, parents of young children, the semi-retired – but we could do more to make part-time jobs permanent rather than casual.

Many young people worry that we’re moving to a “gig economy” in which most jobs are non-jobs: short-lived, for only a few hours a week and badly paid, with few if any benefits.

I don’t believe we are moving to such a dystopia, mainly because I doubt it would suit most employers’ interests to treat most of their employees so shabbily. But, in any case, the way to avoid such a world is obvious: governments should make it illegal to employ people on such an unacceptable basis.

And governments will do that as soon as it’s the case that not to do so would cost them too many votes. That is, we have to make democracy work for the masses, not just the rich and powerful.

Of course, the security many of us would like is to live in a world where nothing changes. Sorry, not possible. Economies, and the mix of industries within them, have always changed and always will – often for reasons that, though they disrupt the lives of some people, end up making most of us better off.

New technologies are a major source of disruptive, but usually beneficial, change. Another source of disruptive change is the realisation that certain activities are bad for our health (smoking, for instance) or for the natural environment (excessive irrigation and land clearing, burning fossil fuels) and must be curtailed.

Adversely affected interest groups will always tempt governments to try to resist such change – at the ultimate expense of the rest of us. The right answer usually is for change to go ahead, but for governments to help the adversely affected adjust. Just what we haven’t been doing.
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Monday, February 17, 2020

Home ownership has become a devouring monster


Like all the advanced economies, ours has stopped working the way we’re used to. Our obsession with home ownership is a fair part of the problem.

Let’s be clear: I’m a believer in the Great Australian Dream of owning your own home.

But right now, it’s adding to the economic troubles of many countries. I doubt if the preference for home ownership is causing those countries bigger problems than it’s causing us. We have one of the highest rates of household debt to household disposable income (although ours is made to look worse than the others because of our unusual tax breaks for negatively geared property investments).

Like a lot of people who care about the state of the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren (my four-year-old grandson is “helping” me as I write this), I was pleased to see the period of spiralling house prices come to an end a few years back and prices start falling.

But, for Sydney and Melbourne, this sorely needed correction came to an end last year, after three interest-rate cuts and a change in prudential lending rules saw prices resumed their upward climb.

If we can’t cut interest rates a little without an upsurge in borrowing causing us to resume bidding up house prices, we’ve got a problem. Our household debt is at near-record levels, but let’s add to it.

Meanwhile, when you add falling house prices to the economy’s deeper problem of protracted weak wage growth, many home buyers worry and slash their consumer spending to try to reduce their debt.

That huge household debt will be a drag on our economy for years, keeping growth low. Another issue that isn’t helping is our “new normal” of exceptionally low price and wage inflation.

Until recent years, first-home buyers (or any other borrowers for owner-occupied housing) used to be able to load themselves up to the gunnels in debt and monthly payment obligation, secure in the knowledge that, after a few years of high growth in nominal wages, those repayments (little changed in nominal terms) would be reduced to a much more manageable share of their income.

When such “norms” get stuck in people’s heads, it can take years for people to realise they can no longer be relied on. And for those couples for whom the memo arrived too late, they’ll be struggling to keep up their huge mortgage payments for many more years than they bargained for.

So, on one hand we’ve got the economy being held back by households’ huge level of debt and mortgage payments while, on the other, home ownership is becoming unattainable for an increasing proportion of the population. Those who do eventually manage to attain it have to scrimp on other aspects of their living standards, and often get there so much later in their working lives that their ability to save for retirement is diminished.

The devouring monster we’ve allowed home ownership to become is now eroding what’s long been the fourth leg of retirement income policy. More people are retiring without owning a home, whereas the level of the age pension is kept low under the assumption that almost everyone owns their home outright.

Get it? We’re suffering the wider economic disadvantages of huge household debt without the commensurate advantage of a higher rate of home ownership. The rate of home ownership is actually falling slowly as the oldies with high rates of home ownership are dying and being replaced by newly formed, young households, very few of which can afford a mortgage.

But Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has injected a note of hope. When measured against the ruler of household income, America’s house prices are much lower than ours. Why? Because of differing policies towards housing. The Yanks have kept land prices lower by allowing more suburban sprawl.

For our part, we’ve had various tax and pension policies seemingly intended to help would-be first-home buyers that, in reality, work to benefit existing home owners. We’ve made housing – whether owner-occupied or rental properties – a tax-preferred investment, not just a means to security of tenure. In the process, we’ve made it too hard for young first-home buyers to afford.

When parents respond to this by recycling to their offspring some of the capital gain they’ve enjoyed on their own property investment (as I have), they’re solving their own children’s affordability problem in a way that keeps house prices high, at the expense of those many young people whose parents aren’t able to help out.

No, if we want to make home ownership more affordable for more young people seeking security of tenure for their home, the answer is to make home ownership less attractive as a form of investment.
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Saturday, February 15, 2020

Lucky Country has lost its dynamism and can't find where it is

Do you know what economists mean when they talk about the nation’s “economic fundamentals”? I thought I did until I heard what Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe said they were.

When Lowe had a meeting with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg after last year’s election, I was puzzled by him saying that the economy’s fundamentals were “sound”. How could he say that when the economy had grown by an exceptionally weak 1.8 per cent over the year to March?

But at his appearance before the House of Reps economics committee last week, he had to respond to a challenging description of the state of the economy by Labor’s Dr Andrew Leigh, a former economics professor.

“We have seen declines in labour productivity for the first time on record, the slowest wage growth on record, declining household spending per capita, record household debt, record government debt, below average consumer confidence, retail suffering its worst downturn since 1990 and construction shrinking at its fastest rate since 1999,” Leigh said.

“The economy is in a pretty bad way at the moment, isn’t it?” he asked.

“That wouldn’t be my characterisation,” Lowe responded. “One thing you left out of that list is that a higher share of Australians has jobs than ever before in our history ... ultimately what matters is that people have jobs and employment and security.”

What’s more, “our fundamentals are fantastic”, Lowe went on – but this time he spelt out what he meant.

“We enjoy a standard of living in this country that very few countries in the world enjoy. More of us have jobs than ever before. We live in a fantastic, prosperous wealthy country, and I think we should remember that.”

Well, if that’s what he thinks our fundamentals mean, who could argue? Even if Leigh thought the weaknesses he was outlining were a description of our fundamentals. Maybe Lowe’s fundamentals are more fundamental fundamentals than other people’s are.

Under further questioning from Leigh, however, Lowe said he didn’t want to deny that “we have very significant issues, and the one that worries me most is weak productivity growth ... We’ve had four or five years now where productivity growth has been very weak ... in my own view it’s linked to very low levels of investment relative to gross domestic product.”

This is an important point. As former top econocrat Dr Mike Keating has been saying for some years, you can take a neo-classical, supply-side view that weak productivity improvement explains why the economy’s growth has been so weak (a view that assumes productivity improvement is “exogenous” – it drops on the economy from outside), or you can take a more Keynesian, demand-side view that weak economic growth explains why productivity improvement has been so weak (that is, productivity is “endogenous” – it’s produced inside the economy).

Keating keeps saying that it’s when businesses upgrade their equipment and processes by replacing the old models with the latest, whiz-bang models that improving innovations are diffused throughout the economy, making our industries more productive.

Why is it that our businesses (particularly those other than mining) haven’t been investing much in expanding and improving their businesses? The simple, demand-side answer is that they haven’t been seeing much growth in the demand for their products.

But Lowe sees something deeper. “I fear that our economy is becoming less dynamic [continuously changing and developing],” he told the economics committee. “We’re seeing lower rates of investment, lower rates of business formation, lower rates of people switching jobs, and in some areas lower rates of research-and-development expenditure.

“So right across those metrics it feels like we’re becoming a bit less dynamic. I worry about that for the longer term.

“Public investment is not particularly low at the moment. What is low is private investment. Firms don’t seem to be investing at the same rate that they used to, and I think this is adding to the sense I have that the economy is just less dynamic ...

“There’s something deeper going on, and it’s not just in Australia: it’s everywhere. At the meetings I go to with other central bank governors, this is the kind of thing we talk about. Something’s going on in our economies that means the same dynamism that used to be there isn’t there.”

Asked later by another MP what was causing this loss of dynamism, Low replied, “I wish I knew the answer to that ... My sense is, as an Australian and looking at what’s going on in our economy, that we’re becoming very risk-averse.” (A sentiment I know other top econocrats share.)

“It’s a global thing that happens – I think it probably happens partly when you’re a wealthy country. The standard of living here is fantastic. It’s hardly matched anywhere in the world, so we’ve got something important to protect,” he said.

“But I think in that environment you become more risk-averse. Probably with the ageing of the population, we become more risk-averse. When people have a lot of debt, they’re probably more risk-averse.

Risk-aversion seems to help explain the slow wage growth we’ve had “for six or seven years” now. “It’s the sense of uncertainty and competition that people have, and this is kind of global. Most businesses are worried about competition from globalisation and from technology, and many workers feel that same pressure.

“There are many white-collar jobs in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra that can be done somewhere else in the world at a lower rate of pay, and many people understand that ...,"Lowe said.

“So the bargaining dynamics ... for workers is less than it used to be. And firms are less inclined to bid up wages to attract workers because they’re worried about their cost base and competition,” he said.

Doesn’t sound too wonderful to me. But not to worry. Just remember, our fundamentals are fabulous.
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Wednesday, February 12, 2020

The Great Australian Dream is keeping the economy weak

Do you worry about the enormous size of your mortgage? If you do, it seems you’re not the only one. And the way Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe sees it, people like you are the main reason consumer spending is so weak and the Reserve and the Morrison government are having so much trouble getting the economy moving.

Until the global financial crisis in 2008, we were used to an economy that, after allowing for inflation, grew by about 3 per cent a year. The latest figures show it growing by barely more than half that. (This, of course, is before we feel the temporary effects of bushfires and the coronavirus.)

This explains why the Reserve cut its official interest rate three times last year, dropping it from a record low of 1.5 per cent to an even more amazing 0.75 per cent. Cutting interest rates is intended to encourage people to borrow and spend. So far, however, it’s shown little sign of working.

Similarly, the first stage of the massive tax cuts that were Scott Morrison’s key promise at last year’s election, a new tax break worth more than $1000 a year to middle-income-earners, was expected to give the economy a kick along once people started spending the much bigger tax refunds they got after the end of last financial year.

Despite Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s confident predictions, it didn’t happen. Why have the authorities had so little success at pushing the economy along? Why did real consumer spending per person actually fall in the year to September?

That’s what Lowe sought to explain to the House of Reps economics committee last Friday. His theory – which he backed up with statistical evidence – is that, the combination of weak growth in wages with falling house prices has really worried a lot of people with big mortgages.

So, rather than increase their spending on goods and services, they cut it and used whatever spare money they could to pay down their mortgage.

In principle when interest rates fall, people with home loans now have more money to spend on other things. In practice, however, most people leave their monthly payments unchanged. The amount they’re paying above the bank’s newly reduced minimum payment comes straight off the principal they owe, thus further reducing (by a little) the interest they’re charged.

That’s pretty much standard behaviour for Australian home-buyers. But this time they’ve also avoided spending their tax refunds, leaving the money in their “offset account”. They may or may not decide to spend it later. But for as long as it’s sitting in the offset account it’s reducing their net mortgage debt and the interest they’re paying.

But get this: not content with those two moves, households have also decided to cut their consumer spending and so save a higher proportion of their income. It’s a safe bet that people with home loans have got that extra saving parked in their offset accounts.

Lowe makes the point that, when worried home-buyers take money sent their way to get them spending and use it to reduce their debt, this does bring forward the day when they feel confident enough to start spending again. That’s true, but very much second prize.

If people with mortgages are feeling anxious, that’s hardly surprising. By June last year, household debt reached a record 188 per cent of annual household disposable income, before falling a bit in the September quarter (see above). About half that debt was for owner-occupied housing and about a quarter for personal loans and credit cards, leaving about a quarter for housing investment debt.

This is higher than in most rich countries, but that’s mainly because of our generous tax breaks for negatively geared property investors, a loophole most other, more sensible countries have closed.

But hang on. Those of us living in Melbourne or Sydney (but not elsewhere in Australia) know that, in response to the recent cuts in interest rates, people have resumed borrowing for housing, causing house prices to stop falling and start rising again.

Is this a good thing? Lowe can see advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, rising house prices are likely to make people with big mortgages feel less uncomfortable and so get closer to the point where they allow their spending to grow. It also brings forward the day when the building of new homes stops falling and starts rising again.

On the negative side, is it really a great thing for house prices to take off every time interest rates come down? How’s that going to help our kids become home owners?

Lowe asks whether we benefit as a society from having very high housing prices relative to the level of our incomes. “There are things that we could do on the structural side . . . to have a lower level of housing prices relative to income.” They’re much lower across the United States, for instance, even though, by and large, the Americans’ interest rates have been lower than ours.

What are these “things on the structural side” we could be doing to make our housing more affordable? He didn’t say. But I think he was referring to more liberal council zoning regulations and to getting rid of the many tax concessions that favour home owners at the expense of would-be home owners, including negative gearing.
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Monday, February 10, 2020

Unions conspire with bankers to make you pay more super

When is big business most successful at "rent-seeking" – winning special favours – from government? Often, when it’s got its unions on board. That way, both the Coalition and Labor are inclined to give it the privileges it seeks.

Despite the decline in the union movement’s power and influence in recent decades – and all the nasty things the bosses continue saying about unions – it’s very much a product of the capitalist system.

Over the decades, its greatest success has come in industries with some form of pricing power that’s allowing businesses to make outsized profits. The union simply applies pressure for the workers to be given their share of the lolly.

What kept Australia’s manufacturing industry heavily protected against competition from imports for most of the 20th century, before the Hawke-Keating government pulled the plug in the 1980s, was the manufacturing unions’ strong support for the manufacturers’ success in getting the Coalition committed to protection.

In the end, however, the manufacturing unions got screwed. While being protected in the name of preserving jobs, the manufacturers began automating and shedding many jobs. Turns out protection is better at protecting profits than jobs.

In last year’s election campaign, some part of Labor’s ambivalence on the question of new coal mines in North Queensland is explained by the support the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, one of the few remaining powerful unions, has thrown behind the foreign mine owners.

At present, however, there’s no more significant instance of the unions being in bed with the bosses than their joint campaign to have the government increase compulsory employee superannuation contributions.

When it comes to government-granted favours to business, there aren’t many bigger than the one that compels almost all the nation’s workers to hand over 9.5 per cent of their wage, every year of their working lives, to financial institutions which will charge them a small fortune each year to "manage" their money, until the government thinks they’re old enough to be allowed to get their money back.

I’ve supported compulsory super since it began because, when it comes to saving for retirement, most of us suffer from myopia. But it does leave the government with huge obligations to ensure the money’s safely invested, ensure super tax incentives aren’t biased in favour of the highly paid (such as yours truly) and ensure the money managers don’t abuse the monopoly they’ve been granted by overcharging the punters.

And, since most of us also save for retirement in ways other than super (such as by buying a house and paying it off), governments have an obligation to ensure that workers aren’t compelled to save more than needed to live in reasonable comfort in retirement.

Compulsory super is such an easy money-maker for the for-profit financial institutions (mainly bank-owned) that it’s not surprising they’ve gone for years trying to con governments into increasing the percentage of their wages that workers are compelled to hand over. They’ve done this by exploiting people’s instinctive fear that they aren’t saving enough, using greatly exaggerated estimates of how much they’ll need to be comfortable.

What’s harder to understand is why the non-profit "industry" super funds – with union officials making up half their trustees and the employer reps not taking much interest – go along with the for-profit industry lobby groups’ self-interested empire-building.

The main reason compulsory super isn’t a particularly good deal for most union members is that when forced to pay super contributions, employers reduce their workers’ pay rises to fit. This has been understood from the outset, but last week’s report from the Grattan Institute convincingly demonstrates its truth.

The second reason is that, by design and above certain limits, super savings reduce workers’ eligibility for the age pension. Treasury and independent analysts have repeatedly discredited the industry’s claims that the present contribution rate is insufficient to provide workers with a reasonably comfortable retirement.

The present legislated plan to raise the contribution rate to 12 per cent represents the industry funds’ gift to the army of ticket-clippers making their living off the super industry. It’s origins lie in the Rudd government yielding to industry fund pressure because it believed the huge cost to the budget would be more than covered by its wonderful new mining tax.

But, as an earlier Grattan report has shown, raising the contribution rate as planned would force many workers to accept a lower-than-otherwise standard of living during their working lives so their living standard in retirement could be higher than they ever were used to when working.

This is the union movement protecting its members’ interests? Sounds to me more like union officials expanding the union institution at the expense of their members – and delivering for the banks’ "retail" super funds while they’re at it.
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Saturday, February 8, 2020

Sorry, the government can't make the boss pay for your super

When the government compels employers to contribute to their employees’ superannuation, it seems obvious that it’s forcing the bosses to give their workers an extra benefit on top of their wage. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the nation’s economists.

They’re convinced it’s actually the workers themselves who end up paying because employers respond to the government’s compulsion by giving their workers pay rises that are lower than they otherwise would have been.

But can the economists prove their intuition is right? Not until this week.

The argument about who ends up paying for compulsory employee super is hotting up. The Hawke-Keating government’s original scheme required employers to make contributions equal to 9 per cent of a worker’s pay. But when former prime minister Tony Abbott took over from Labor in 2013, he inherited a law requiring the contribution to be gradually increased to 12 per cent.

The Coalition has never approved of compulsory super, which began as part of the union movement’s Accord with the Labor government. By the time Abbott got around to it, the contribution rate had crept up to its present 9.5 per cent, but he managed to persuade the Senate to delay the next (0.5 percentage point) increase until July next year, with the 12 per cent to be reached in July 2025.

Everything about this scheme’s history says Prime Minister Scott Morrison wouldn’t want the contribution rate to go any higher. It’s likely he’s hoping the looming inquiry into super will recommend this, and so help him persuade the Senate to change the law accordingly.

The superannuation industry has been campaigning for years to convince you and me that 9 per cent or so isn’t sufficient to pay for a comfortable retirement, and to get the contribution rate greatly increased. In this, the non-profit “industry” super funds (with much union involvement) are at one with the largely bank-owned, for-profit part of the super industry.

Apart from some important reports by the Productivity Commission, the most authoritative independent analysis of super comes from Brendan Coates of the Grattan Institute. Grattan has argued that raising the compulsory contribution rate would be contrary to employees’ interests, forcing them to live on less during their working lives so their incomes in retirement could be higher than they were used to and more than they needed.

To strengthen the case for continuing to raise the contribution rate, the industry funds have commissioned a couple of studies purporting to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong and contributions do indeed come at the employers’ expense.

So this week Grattan issued a paper providing empirical evidence supporting the economists’ conventional wisdom that, in the end, workers have to pay for their own super.

If the notion that employees pay for employers’ contributions strikes you as strange and hard to believe, it shouldn’t. Consider the goods and services tax. Have you ever sent the taxman a cheque for the GST you pay? No, never. The cheques are written by the businesses you buy from. So, does that mean they pay GST but you don’t? Of course not. Why not? Because the businesses pass the tax on to you in the retail prices they charge.

Economists have long understood that the “legal incidence” of a tax (who’s required to write the cheque) and the “economic incidence” or ultimate burden (who ends up paying the tax) are usually different.

It’s convenient for the government to collect taxes from a smaller number of businesses rather than from a huge number of consumers or employees. Economists know that businesses may pass the burden of the taxes they pay “forward” to their customers or “backward” to their employees. Only if neither of those is possible is the ultimate burden of the tax passed from the business to its owners.

Naturally, the business would like to pass the burden anywhere but to its owners. But whether it’s passed forward or backward (or some combination of the three) will be determined by the market circumstances the business finds itself in.

That is, the question can’t be answered from economic theory, but must be answered with empirical evidence (experience in the real world). Theory (using the simple demand and supply diagram familiar to all economics students – see page 12 of the Grattan report) can, however, clarify the exact question.

Theory suggests that the ultimate destination of the burden depends on how workers and employers respond when super is increased. There are two “effects”. First, when workers value an extra dollar of super, even if they value it less than an extra dollar of wages, then some (but not all) of the cost of super will come out of their wages.

Second, if workers’ willingness to work doesn’t vary much when wages change – that is, if labour supply is relatively “inelastic” – then they’d be expected to bear a larger share of the cost. Similarly, if employers’ willingness to hire people doesn’t vary much when wages change – labour demand is inelastic – then more of the cost will fall on the bosses.

Most overseas studies have confirmed the economists' conventional wisdom. But what about us?

Coates and his team examined the details of 80,000 federal workplace agreements made between 1991 and 2018. They found that, on average, about 80 per cent of the cost of increases in compulsory super was passed back to workers through lower wage rises within the life of an enterprise agreement, usually two to three years. (This leaves open the question of how much of the remaining 20 per cent was passed forward to customers in higher prices.)

Only about a third of workers are covered by enterprise agreements. For the many wages linked to the Fair Work Commission’s annual adjustments to award wages, it has said explicitly that when super goes up, award wages grow more slowly. As for workers covered by individual agreements, it’s a safe bet which way the employers will jump.

Whatever it suits the superannuation industry to claim, increased super contributions are no free lunch.
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Wednesday, February 5, 2020

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 an emotional reaction – welcoming in the case of "jobs", disapproving in the case of "tax" – and so we ask no further questions.

Those two words have the magical ability to cut through our distrust and disarm our powers of critical thought. Scott Morrison has been using both in his belated response to this appalling summer of bushfires, heatwaves, smoke haze and dust.

Many of us have realised how terrible climate change actually is, that it’s already happening and will keep getting worse – much worse – unless all the world’s big countries get serious about largely eliminating their carbon emissions, and doing so pretty quickly.

Although Australia is a big emitter relative to our small population, in absolute volume we’re not in the same league as America, China or Europe. But the rest of the world’s horrified reaction to our fire season has helped us see we’re in the vanguard, that the Wide Brown Land is going to cop it a lot harder than the green and pleasant lands.

So our self interest lies not just in doing our fair share, but in doing more than our share, so we’re well placed to press the big boys to try harder.

Initially, Morrison seemed to want us to believe he agreed with those saying we must do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better at it. In the years ahead, we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further," he said.

But then he wanted to reassure his party’s climate-change deniers, and those of us who want to fight climate change without paying any personal price, that nothing had changed. "But what I won’t do is this: I am not going to sell out Australians – I am not going to sell out Australians based on the calls from some to put higher taxes on them or push up their electricity prices or to abandon their jobs and their industries."

On the question of jobs, don’t assume it’s your job he’s promising to save. What we know is that jobs in the coal industry are sacred, but what happens to other jobs isn’t the focus of his concern. Don’t forget, this is the same government which, as one of its first acts, decided we no longer needed a motor vehicle industry. Favoured existing jobs take priority over future jobs – which can look after themselves.

But even this doesn’t fully expose the trickiness of the things politicians say about jobs. What governments usually end up protecting in an industry isn’t its jobs, but its profits. For instance, when not in the hearing of North Queensland voters, Adani boasts about how highly automated its mine will be. Apart from the few years it takes to construct a mine, mining involves a lot of expensive imported machines and precious few jobs.

Looking back, it’s arguable that most of the jobs lost from manufacturing were lost to automation, not the removal of tariff protection.

As for taxes, the latest turn in Morrison’s spin cycle is that his "climate action agenda" is "driven by technology not taxation". This, apparently, is a reference to technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, lithium production, biofuels and waste-to-energy.

Like many of politicians’ efforts to mislead us, this contains a large dollop of truth. It’s likely that our move to zero net emissions will involve the adoption of most if not all of those new technologies, in the process creating many job opportunities in new industries and – inevitably – doing so at the expense of jobs in existing fossil-fuel industries.

So this seems to have a lot of similarity with Professor Ross Garnaut’s vision of us becoming a renewable-energy superpower. But get this: Garnaut’s grand plan has been designed to require no return to any form of carbon tax.

Economists advocate "putting a price on carbon" because they believe it’s the best way to minimise the ultimate cost to the economy (and the punters who make it up) of moving to a low-carbon economy.

But if Australian voters are stupid enough to allow some on-the-make politicians to persuade them to reject the economists’ advice, then so be it. You prefer to do it the expensive way? Okay, have it your way. There’s no shortage of more costly alternatives.

So Morrison is busy demolishing a straw man. Why? Because he wants to distract your attention from the likelihood that his preferred way of skinning the cat will require a big increase in government spending to facilitate all those new technologies and industries.

You don’t think this increased spending will eventually have to be covered by higher taxes? Dream on.
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Monday, February 3, 2020

Lack of trust may have made economic reform impossible


Life’s getting a lot tougher for optimists. I’m starting to wonder whether our politics has passed the point of peak economic reform and controversial policy changes are no longer possible.

We keep berating our politicians, urging them to show leadership and have the courage to make much-needed reforms, but they never do. Right now, it’s easy to look at the way Scott Morrison has fumbled the bushfire response, the need to get real about climate change, and even his reluctance to take a stand against blatant rorting of taxpayers’ money, and decide we have a Morrison problem.

But though we’re discovering the miracle election-winner’s various shortcomings, it’s a mistake to think one man is the cause of our reform problem. It’s possible to argue things have got steadily worse in the revolving-door period since the departure of John Howard, but the greater truth is that the problem’s systemic.

It’s hard to think of any major improvements made by five prime ministers over the past 12 years, with the possible exception of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (which we’re still busy stuffing up).

The carbon tax was a significant reform before Tony Abbott abolished it, but Labor had sabotaged its mining tax long before Abbott got to it. Malcolm Turnbull took one look at the great goal of increasing the goods and services tax and realised it was politically impossible without full compensation of low to middle income-earners, but net of compensation it would have raised peanuts.

All this is just the Australian version of similar stories that could be told in most of the other rich democracies. But, sticking with our story, why has it become next to impossible for our governments to make controversial policy changes?

The pollies would tell you it’s because the 24-hour news cycle – the media are constantly demanding to be fed, and will turn to you opponents if you don’t oblige – and the power of social media to set hares running that have to be chased. This now gets so much attention from ministers and their staff they have little time left to get on with policy development.

Maybe. A less convenient explanation is the way politics has turned into a lifelong career – from staffer to minister to a late-career job advising big business – leading pollies to worry more about their careers and less about the ideals they espoused in their first speech on entering Parliament.

But however you explain it, there’s little doubt that the life of ministers has become pretty much all day-to-day tactics and no long-term strategy. This both explains and reinforces the long-established trend – which Morrison now freely acknowledges – for ministers to prefer the advice of the ambitious young punks in their office to the advice of their department.

The staffers know about what matters – political tactics – whereas the bureaucrats want to keep banging on about policy and warning you about looming problems. Worse, they’re obsessed by the notion that whatever governments do must be strictly in accordance with the law.

Partly because fixing problems usually costs money, the era of Smaller Government and the politically motivated obsession with returning the budget to surplus has heightened the politicians’ normal temptation to pigeonhole government reports warning about problems that need to be fixed now before they get much worse.

A bunch of former fire chiefs want a meeting to warn about how much worse this year’s bushfire season will be and the need for much more equipment and action to limit climate change? Sorry, too busy with more pressing matters.

Even the idea that politicians should “never waste a crisis” – that you won’t get broad support for unpopular measures until everyone’s up in arms about the actual arrival of the problem – and its corollary – don’t act on the multitude of mere warnings of problems ahead, wait and see which of them actually transpire – seem themselves to have been pigeonholed.

Why are politicians no longer game even to seize the moment to do something real when everyone’s demanding that something be done? Because years of declining standards of political behaviour mean that trust in political leaders is now lower than ever. There’s strong survey evidence of this.

Neither side of politics is trusted to take tough measures that are genuinely in everyone’s interests. It’s got to be a trick. Mainstream politicians are trusted only when they run scare campaigns against the other side’s reform plans. But hope springs eternal that some populist rabblerouser may have the answers.

The more impotent mainstream politicians are seen to be, the more disillusioned voters will turn to populist saviours – and the more the main parties will themselves turn to populist diversions and trickery. Freeing ourselves from this vicious circle won’t be easy.
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Saturday, February 1, 2020

It's official: too much banking is bad for you

When the newish boss of the International Monetary Fund, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva, contemplates the challenges of the new decade, she thinks of many things: increasing uncertainty, climate change and increasing inequality – particularly the role the financial sector in making it worse.

Georgieva foresees increasing uncertainty over geopolitical tensions, uncertainty that the trade truce between the US and China will last, and uncertainty that governments can fix the frustrations and growing populist unrest in many countries. "We know this uncertainty harms business confidence, investment and growth," she said in a recent speech.

On climate change, after observing that the "brush fires" blazing across Australia are a reminder of the toll on life that climate change exacts, she avoids saying that we are possibly the most vulnerable among the rich countries (something that might have surprised the she’ll-be-right Scott Morrison).

But she did note that it’s often the poorest and most vulnerable countries that bear the brunt of "this unfolding existential challenge". "The World Bank estimates that unless we alter the current climate path an additional 100 million people may be living in extreme poverty by 2030," she says.

The previous decade saw the rich world’s economists become much more conscious of the economic importance of inequality, with the IMF’s economists at the forefront of this realisation. "We know that excessive inequality hinders growth and hollows out a country’s foundations. It erodes trust within society and institutions. It can fuel populism and political upheaval," she says.

Many people think of using the budget to reduce inequality, which they should, "but too often we overlook the role of the financial sector, which can also have a profound and long-lasting positive or negative effect on inequality," she says.

"Our new staff research shows how a well-functioning financial sector can create new opportunities for all in the decade ahead. But it also shows how a poorly managed financial sector can amplify inequality."

"Financial deepening" refers to the size of a country’s financial services sector relative to its entire economy. Georgieva notes that, on one hand, developing countries benefit from the growth of their undeveloped financial sectors as small businesses and ordinary households gain access to credit and saving and insurance products.

The sustained growth in the financial sectors of China and India during the 1990s, for instance, paved the way for enormous economic gains in the 2000s. This, in turn, helped in lifting a billion people out of poverty.

On the other hand, the IMF’s latest research shows there’s a point at which financial deepening is associated with exacerbated inequality and less-inclusive growth. Many factors contribute to inequality, but the connection between excessive financial deepening holds across countries, she says.

Why is too much "financialisation" of an economy a bad thing? "Our thinking is that while poorer individuals benefit in the early stages of deepening, over time the growing size and complexity of the financial sector end up primarily helping the wealthy.

"The negative impact is especially visible where financial sectors are already very deep. Here, complicated financial instruments, influential lobbyists, and excessive compensation in the banking industry lead to a system that serves itself as much as it serves others."

The US has one of the most diversified economies in the world (it has a lot of everything). And yet, in 2006, financial services firms comprised nearly a quarter of the S&P500 share index and generated almost 40 per cent of all profits. (Read that again if it doesn’t amaze you.) Obviously, this made the financial sector the single biggest and most profitable part of the whole sharemarket.

Does that strike you as out of whack? What happened next – the global financial crisis and the Great Recession – tells us that excessive financial sectors increase the risk of financial instability and collapse.

The painfully slow recovery from that episode of financial crisis was the defining issue of the past decade. Research shows that, on average, a country’s financial crisis leads to a permanent loss of output (gross domestic product) of 10 per cent. This can cause a lasting change in the country’s direction and leave many people behind (as the Americans, with their opioid and middle-aged male suicide crises, know only too well).

The IMF’s latest research shows that inequality tends to increase before a financial crisis, suggesting a strong link between inequality and financial instability. But also, of course, the subsequent recession usually leads to a long-term worsening in inequality.

Much effort has been made since the global financial crisis to make the banks more stable and better regulated. But no one imagines this guarantees there couldn’t be another major crisis.

Georgieva says financial stability will remain a challenge in the decade ahead – for all the usual reasons, but also for "climate-related shocks". "Think of how stranded assets [such as now-unviable coal-fired power stations or coal mines] can trigger unexpected loss," she says. "Some estimates suggest the potential costs of devaluing these assets range from $US4 trillion to $US20 trillion."

The private sector and the banking industry, not just governments, have a critical role to play in making the financial system more stable, she says. That’s certainly the case when it comes to the climate’s effect on financial stability.

"The financial sector can play a critical role in moving the world to net zero carbon emissions and reaching the targets of the Paris agreement. To get there, firms will need to better price climate change impacts in their loans.

"Last year, climate change claimed its first bankruptcy of an S&P500 company. It is clear investors are looking for ways to adapt. If the price of a loan for an at-risk project increases, companies may simply decide the money for the project could be better spent elsewhere."

What has stopping climate change got to do with inequality? If we don’t, the consequences will fall hardest on the world’s poor (and Australians).
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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Zero net carbon choice: do we want to be losers or winners?

You may regard economists as a dismal lot, always reminding us of the cost of this or the risk of that. But there’s one prominent economist with a much more positive story to tell.

Professor Ross Garnaut is more prophet than gloomy economist, a man with the vision of a better future that our politicians have lost as they squabble over votes.

The Morrison government trembles at the thought of the Paris agreement’s goal of achieving zero net carbon emissions by 2050. All it can see is the need for higher taxes and the loss of jobs in coal mining. Garnaut, by contrast, sees a golden opportunity for us to shift from an industry in terminal decline to a new set of industries with bright prospects in the low-carbon world that’s coming.

Garnaut foresees that, if we rise to the challenge of climate change, we "will emerge as a global superpower in energy, low-carbon industry and absorption of carbon in the landscape".

This vision is set out in his latest book, Superpower, which seems to offer something for everyone. Do you regret the decline of manufacturing? Garnaut sees how we could give it a new lease on life.

Have you always thought that, rather than sending our minerals off for further processing abroad, we should do it ourselves? Garnaut sees how we can.

With climate change making the land hotter, drier and more prone to bushfires, do you fear for the future of farming? Garnaut sees the bush getting a whole new source of income and activity.

Do you fear that, with the decline of coal mining, regional Australia will be left even further out of the economic action? Garnaut see all the new industries created by the world’s move to renewable energy being located in the regions.

Of course, as the author of two government reports on our response to climate change, Garnaut has form as a prophet. In his first report in 2008, he relied on scientists’ advice to predict that "fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020."

On the other hand, Garnaut now admits that even his second report, in 2011, has been overtaken by events. Then, he calculated that the cost of moving to renewable energy would come early and reduce our rate of economic growth for many years before it was eventually outweighed by the benefits of climate change avoided.

Now, he sees that the move to renewable energy won’t cost a lot, low-carbon electricity will be cheaper and will give us major new export opportunities. These more positive benefits will come earlier than the benefit of less climate change.

The cost of moving to all-renewable electricity has been transformed by two things. First, the huge reduction in the cost of solar panels and lesser falls in the cost of wind turbines and batteries.

Second, by the fall in global interest rates to record lows, which seem likely to persist. Whereas much of the cost of coal-fired electricity comes from the cost of the coal, with solar and wind power almost all of the cost comes from setting up the system – sun and wind are free. Lower interest rates mean the capital cost is much reduced.

So far, a chunk of Australia’s prosperity derives from our huge natural endowment of coal and gas. Now Garnaut has realised that, relative to the size of our population, Australia is more richly endowed with sun and wind than any other developed country – or our Asian neighbours.

So zero-emissions electricity will be cheaper to produce (though we may have to pay more in transmission costs). More significantly, our carbon-free power will be much cheaper than other countries’.

Carbon-free electricity is the key to our efforts to achieve zero net emissions overall, and to our various opportunities to profit from the world’s move away from fossil fuels. Our transport emissions will be slashed by moving to electric vehicles and increased use of public transport.

The scope for exporting our electricity through submarine cables – or via tankers of electrolysis-produced hydrogen – is limited. But this will now make it economic to further process alumina, iron ore, silicon and ammonia before we export them. That processing is best done adjacent to the mine site.

At present, plastics and many chemicals used in manufacturing are produced from fossil fuels. But we will have more plentiful supplies of (renewable) biomass – plant material – than many other countries, which we can use to produce plastics and chemicals for ourselves and for export.

The "net" in zero net emissions implies that the world will still be emitting some carbon dioxide, but these emissions will be offset by "negative emissions" as atmospheric carbon is captured and sequestered in soil, pastures, woodlands, forests and plantations.

Guess what? Few countries have more scope for "natural climate solutions" such as carbon farming than we do. We need research to improve the measurement of carbon capture, but we have so much scope that, after meeting our own needs, we could sell carbon credits to the rest of the world. This could be a new rural industry, much bigger than wool.

To maximise our chances of benefiting from the move to a low-carbon world, however, we have to get to zero net emissions sooner than the other rich countries, not later.
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Monday, January 27, 2020

Getting and spending - what's it meant to prove?

In the Aussie calendar, tomorrow – the day after the Australia Day holiday – is the unofficial start to the working year. So today’s the last day we have a moment to pause and wonder what all our getting and spending – my usual subject matter – is meant to prove.

From a narrow biological and evolutionary perspective, our only purpose is to survive and replicate our genes, playing our part in the survival of our species. Apart from that, what we do on the way to our inevitable death is of little consequence.

Don’t like that idea? No one does. Enjoyable though we find the mechanics of reproduction, the human animal craves more than just sex, good meals and a bit of fun while we kill time until our funeral. We want somehow to find purpose and meaning in our lives.

Contrary to the message of much advertising and other marketing, this meaning can’t be supplied satisfactorily by the efforts of our business people, politicians and economists. Beneath the glitter, their message is simple: get back to your getting and spending. Just do more of it.

Is there anything scientists – as opposed to philosophers – can tell us about the meaning of life? Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, can, even though he’s not religious.

In a recent article on The Conversation website, he tells of his work over the past 10 years talking to people who’ve had what he calls “suffering-induced transformational experiences”. These include being diagnosed with terminal cancer, suffering a bereavement, becoming seriously disabled, losing everything through addiction, or having a close encounter with death during combat.

“What all these people had in common is that after undergoing intense suffering they felt they had ‘woken up’. They stopped taking life, the world and other people for granted and gained a massive sense of appreciation for everything,” he says.

They spoke of a sense of the preciousness of life, their own bodies, the other people in their lives and the beauty and wonder of nature. They felt a new sense of connection with other people, the natural world and the universe, he says.

“They became less materialistic and more altruistic. Possessions and career advancement became trivial, while love, creativity and altruism became much more important. They felt intensely alive.”

A man who experienced a transformation due to bereavement spoke explicitly about meaning, describing how his “goals changed from wanting to have as much money as possible to wishing to be the best person possible”.

He added: “before, I would say I didn’t really have any sense of a meaning of life. However, [now] I feel the meaning of life is to learn, grow and experience.”

Taylor stresses that none of these people were, or became, religious. The changes weren’t merely temporary and, in most cases, remained stable over many years.

He says we don’t have to go through intense suffering to experience these effects. “There are also certain temporary states of being when we can sense meaning. I call these ‘awakening experiences’.”

Usually they occur when our minds are fairly quiet and we feel at ease with ourselves. When we’re walking in the countryside, swimming in the ocean, or after we’ve meditated, or had sex.

“We find the meaning of life when we ‘wake up’ and experience life and the world more fully. In these terms, the sense that life is meaningless is a distorted and limited view that comes when we are slightly ‘asleep’.”

So what’s the meaning of life, according to Taylor? “Put simply, the meaning of life is life itself.”

Wow. From my own reading of what psychologists tell us about life satisfaction, let me add two more-prosaic points. First, humans are social animals and we get much of our satisfaction from our relationships with our family, in particular, and also with our friends.

When economists and politicians try to make us more prosperous materially without ever considering what strain they may be putting on our relationships, they’re not doing us any favours. They – like us, so often – are mistaking the means for the end. Cannibalising our ends to improve our means doesn’t leave us better off.

Second, the simple economic model assumes work is an unpleasant means to the wonderful end of having money to buy things. But, as they say, if you can find a job you like – or get more joy from the job you have – you’ll never have to work.

If politicians, economists and the business people we work for put more emphasis on helping us find satisfaction from our work, they’d be adding more meaning to our lives (and theirs).
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Saturday, January 25, 2020

Economics isn't as highfalutin' as the jargon makes it sound

If you’ve ever had the feeling you ought to know a lot more about economics than you do – even if only to make it harder for economists to bamboozle you – here’s my long-weekend special offer: the key concepts of the discipline explained in one article. As many as I can fit, anyway.

More than a year ago, the boss of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims – surely the most experienced senior econocrat evading retirement in Canberra – began a speech by saying economics had become too mathematical and that to be a good economist all you needed was a deep intuitive feel for 10 or 15 concepts.

He then rattled off what he regarded as the 15 most important concepts, “in no particular order”. From those I’ll explain, in order, the five I consider to be most significant.

1. Opportunity cost

The first is one you should have heard of: opportunity cost.

Many economists consider “opp cost” to be the single most important and fundamental concept in economics, and the discipline’s most useful contribution to the betterment of mankind. Indeed, that’s the view Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, takes in his book Economics in Two Lessons, which I recommend as the best book to introduce you to economics.

Quiggin says “the opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up to get it”. Our wants are almost infinite, but our resources are limited, so we have to make choices. Economists’ eternal message to individuals and to the community is: think carefully before you spend your money, make sure you’re spending it on what you really want because you can’t spend it twice.

Really? That complicated, huh? Quiggin says “the lesson of opportunity cost is easy to state but hard to learn”. We keep forgetting to apply it. For instance, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is saying he’s not going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions if the opportunity cost is to endanger jobs in the coal industry.

Sounds fair enough until you realise he’s saying jobs in a particular industry matter more to him than us doing all we can to help reduce global warming (which will destroy jobs in many industries).

We live in a market economy. We sell our labour in the jobs market, then use the money we earn to buy the goods and services we need in 101 product markets. Economics is the study of markets and, in particular, of how the prices set in markets work to bring supply and demand, sellers and buyers, into agreement (aka “equilibrium” or balance).

2. Invisible hand

The first of Quiggin’s two lessons is “market prices reflect and [also] determine the opportunity costs faced by consumers and producers” – which brings us to Sims’ next key concept, “the invisible hand”.

In a market-based economy (as opposed to a feudal economy or a planned economy), the differing objectives of workers, employers, consumers and producers are co-ordinated (brought together) not by the government issuing orders to people, but by the “price mechanism” (prices going up or down until both sides are satisfied).

That’s the invisible hand. And what motivates this invisible hand is the self-interest of workers, bosses, consumers and businesses. In the famous words of the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, in 1776, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

It’s amazing to think of, but it holds much truth: the invisible hand of markets and prices takes the self-interest of all those competing players and turns it into a situation where most of us have our wants satisfied most of the time.

3. Imperfect competition

But if that sounds a bit too pat – a bit too perfect – it is. It is, in fact, a description of what economists call “perfect markets” and “perfect competition”. And in real life, nothing’s ever perfect. The greatest female economist, Joan Robinson, was the first to formalise Sims’ third key concept, “imperfect competition” – the study of why markets and the price mechanism don’t always work as perfectly as the oversimplified “neo-classical” model of markets assumes they do.

4. Market failure

From the subtitle of Quiggin’s book you see that lesson one is “why markets work so well”, but lesson two is “and why they can fail so badly”. This takes us straight to Sims’ fourth key concept “market failure”. Markets are said to fail when they deliver results that aren’t “allocatively efficient” – when they don’t lead to the particular allocation of economic resources that yields the maximum satisfaction of people’s wants.

Economists have spent much time studying the various categories of factors that cause markets to fail. More recently they have turned to studying “government failure”, which is when governments’ attempts to correct market failures end up making things worse.

5. Externalities

Sims’ final key concept is “externalities” – a major category of market failure. These occur when transactions between sellers and buyers generate costs (or benefits) for third parties – known as “social” costs or benefits – that aren’t reflected in the market or “private” prices paid and received by the buyers and sellers.

These social costs or benefits are thus “external” to the private transaction and the private price mechanism. They constitute market failure because the market generates more costs (or fewer benefits) than is in the public’s interest.

One example of an external benefit is the gain to the wider community (not just the particular individual) when a student graduates from university (which is why uni fees are set at only about half the cost of the course, so as to “internalise” the positive externality).

As for external costs (“negative externalities”), Quiggin notes that the leading British economist Lord Nicholas Stern has described climate change as “the biggest market failure in history”. So now you know why so many of the nation’s economists are appalled by Morrison’s dereliction.
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Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Climate change: we can't stop it by refusing to change

After Donald Horne's book in the 1960s, we all know we live in the Lucky Country. What we've forgotten until now, however, is the qualification Horne added: "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people." We haven't been feeling so lucky this burning, smoky summer. But our present leader, Scott Morrison, has certainly been looking second rate.

This summer we've had our Pearl Harbour moment. Just as the Japanese bombing of Hawaii in 1941 stopped Americans viewing World War II as some distant threat, so our season of unprecedented drought, heatwaves, bushfires and smoke haze has woken us up to the present reality of global warming.

There we were thinking climate change would be a problem for our children and grandchildren – who, we hoped, wouldn't remember our refusal in 2013 to pay a bit more for electricity so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now we realise it's a problem – a frightening problem – for us. One likely at least to continue for the rest of our lives at its present level of harm and unpleasantness, and more likely get much worse in the years ahead unless something decisive is done by all the major economies, including us, to reduce net emissions to zero over the next 30 years and stop us cooking.

It's a wake-up moment not just for us, however, but for the entire rich world. They've been watching in fascinated horror as global warming has punished the Aussies for their repeated refusal to take it seriously.

Ostensibly, Morrison has realised we need to change course. "We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better at it," he said when it dawned on him we were holding him responsible for the fires regardless of what the constitution says about them being a state responsibility.

"In the years ahead, we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further," he said. But then he started adding qualifications. "We're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices and without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood."

Really? Sounds like he's promising us all the benefits without any of the costs. Nothing needs to change to make things much better. Which, in this age of cynicism and distrust of our lengthening string of second-rate leaders, makes you fear all that's changed is the marketing spiel.

What we need is a leader great enough to seize our Pearl Harbour moment and turn it into a Port Arthur moment – the moment when a prime minister exercises true leadership and uses the horrible reality of death and destruction to win public support for big changes to stop such things becoming regular events.

John Howard, Morrison's role model and mentor, saw such an opportunity and seized it. He did so not because it offered political gain, but because it was a leader's duty to deliver something great for those he led. He did so knowing it would prompt great resistance from within the Coalition. But with the public behind him and his political opponents unlikely to oppose him, that was a risk he was prepared to take.

Just the same conditions apply to Morrison's decision on whether to turn us from laggards to leaders in the global effort to halt the rise in average temperatures to less than 2 degrees. Has he the courage to stand up to the noisy minority of climate change deniers in the Coalition, who are now so badly out of step with public opinion?

There's a central lesson to be learnt from this appalling summer. The dichotomy Morrison has so far relied on – the environment versus the economy – is false. "We'd love to help the environment, but not if that involves a cost to the economy."

Sorry, since the economy sits within the natural environment, anything that damages the environment also imposes loss – of property, businesses, jobs, wellbeing, lives and health – on the economy and the humans who constitute it.

It follows that, in our obsession with the cost of fighting climate change, we can no longer ignore the far greater cost of not fighting it. The one option that's not available is no change. We can refuse to change, but nature will change things whether we like it or not.

The economy is always changing, as some industries expand and other contract. Jobs are continuously being lost in some fields and created in others. This is the very process by which we've become far more prosperous over the past two centuries.

So the notion that our steaming coal industry can be preserved in aspic is laughable. Its days are numbered. But we don't have to kill it, the rest of the world will do that for us as – like us – they increasingly turn to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. Business can see that; Morrison professes not to.

Second-rate leaders throw in their lot with those who fear losing from change, letting the rest of us suffer while they attempt to resist the irresistible. First-rate leaders seek out ways we can benefit from that change, restoring the luck of the Lucky Country. How? Watch this space.
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Monday, January 20, 2020

RBA should stop pretending there's any more it can usefully do

Every institution – even, as we’ve learnt to our sorrow, the Christian church – is tempted to put its own interests ahead of its duty to the greater good. Now it’s time for the Reserve Bank to examine its own conscience. If it cuts interest rates again in a fortnight’s time, in whose interests will it be acting?

Many of the Reserve’s immediate customers in the financial markets expect it to cut the official interest rate at its meeting early next month and then again a few months later, at which point the rate will be down to its "effective lower bound" – 0.25 per cent – and it will be time for it to move to using purchases of government bonds to lower the risk-free rate of interest more widely in a program of "quantitative easing".

That’s what its market customers expect of it and it will be tempted to comply, showing it’s still at the wheel, in charge of steering the economy, doing all it can to get things moving and keeping itself at the centre of the macro-economic action.

What could be wrong with that? Just that it’s unlikely to do any good, and could do more harm than good. It’s hard to see that yet another tiny interest-rate cut will do anything of consequence to stimulate spending.

Rates are already so exceptionally low it’s clear that it’s not the cost of capital that’s making businesses reluctant to invest in expanding their production capacity. Whatever their reasons for hesitating, cutting rates further won’t change anything.

Moving to households, the record level of household debt does much to discourage them from borrowing to buy goods and services and so boost economic activity. Interest-rate movements mainly affect discretionary spending on household durables (cars, white goods, lounge suites etc), but sales of these are in the doldrums despite already super-low rates. So, again, another cut is unlikely to change that.

In justifying recent rate cuts, the Reserve has relied heavily on the expected consequent fall in our exchange rate, which should stimulate the economy by making our export and import-competing industries more price competitive internationally.

And the reverse is also true: if we leave our rates well above the low levels of the big advanced economies, the dollar will appreciate and make our industries less price competitive. However, that argument’s of little relevance by now, and we shouldn’t be encouraging a beggar-thy-neighbour game of competitive devaluations.

But even if further rate cuts, and quantitative easing after that, will do little to boost demand, surely they couldn’t do any harm? Don’t be too sure of that. They’d hurt those who rely on interest income from financial investments – though bank interest rates could hardly fall any further.

Speaking of banks, the closer interest rates get to the floorboards, the more their profits are squeezed. If you don’t see that as a worry, you should: when lending becomes unprofitable banks become reluctant to lend. Sound good to you?

There may also be some truth in the argument that whereas in normal times news of an interest-rate cut boosts the confidence of consumers and businesses, at times like this they’re a sign the economy isn’t travelling well and new commitments should be delayed.

But here’s the biggest reason further rate cuts would do more harm than good: the clear evidence that, since the cuts began and prudential supervision was relaxed, house prices in Melbourne and Sydney have resumed their upward climb.

This is an appalling development. Getting our households even more heavily indebted is a cheap price to pay for scraping the last bit of monetary stimulus off the bottom of the barrel? Making first-home ownership even more unaffordable for our young people is just something we have to live with?

The one thing we know is that while "monetary policy" has lost its ability to stimulate demand for goods and services, its ability to stimulate demand for assets - such as houses, commercial property and shares - most of it fuelled by rising debt, continues unabated.

When in the 1970s we switched from using the budget to using interest rates to manage demand, we little realised that the serious side-effect of monetary stimulus was rising asset prices and rising debt.

Essentially, Australians buy and sell our houses among ourselves, bidding up the price of that little-changing stock of houses. Then we tell ourselves we’re all getting richer. Why is this anything other than damaging self-delusion? Why should the Reserve Bank be one of its chief promoters?

It’s time for Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe to stop doing more harm than good and turn the management of demand back to the people we elected to run the economy.
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