You never judge economists by whether they get their forecasts right. They rarely do. But they score points in my book if they're willing to work out why they got them wrong - and make the results public.
This is what Treasury's chief forecaster, Dr David Gruen, did in a speech to the Economic Society in Sydney on Friday.
I don't hold out much hope that such exercises will help produce better forecasts in future. But they should deepen our understanding of how the economy works.
Gruen's examination of Treasury's record in forecasting real gross domestic product over the past 21 years finds there's no upward or downward bias in its errors, but its "mean absolute percentage error" is 0.93 percentage points.
When you remember the trend rate of growth is about 3.25 per cent a year, that's a high degree of error.
Last May Treasury forecast that real gross domestic product would contract by 0.5 per cent in the financial year just ending, the first time it had ever forecast "negative growth". The year isn't over yet, but the revised forecast in this year's budget is positive growth of 2 per cent. And just the first three-quarters of the financial year are showing average growth of 1.9 per cent.
But if you think all that's bad, just remember: the smarties who purport to know better than Treasury are usually worse. Consider these reactions to the forecasts in last year's budget.
Des Moore, the climate-change denying activist: "The Rudd government's budget paints an unbelievable picture of a very mild recession (only a 0.5 per cent fall in GDP next year) followed by a recovery of 2.25 per cent in the election year (2010-11) and an above-trend rate of growth of 4.5 per cent in the following year."
John Roskam, a leading libertarian: "If Prime Minister Kevin Rudd genuinely believes Treasury is conservative when it forecasts economic growth of 4 per cent within two years, then it would be interesting to know his definition of optimistic. Treasury officials are not used to being laughed at on budget night but, as soon as their growth forecasts were revealed, no other reaction was possible."
Of course, we do know that average growth in real GDP in calendar 2009 was 1.3 per cent, and Gruen has revealed Treasury's unpublished forecast of minus 0.9 per cent. This was worse than the mean of minus 0.6 per cent for 17 private sector forecasts gathered by Consensus Economics, but right on the median.
After allowing for imports and inventories, the largest contribution to growth came from consumer spending (1.4 percentage points), followed by public sector spending (0.9 points), business investment and exports (0.4 points each), with housing investment making a negative contribution of 0.3 points.
(If you're wondering how all that adds up to just 1.3 per cent, it does so with the help of a negative contribution of 1.5 points from the "statistical discrepancy". Don't groan - the national accounts are like that; it's just one of the complications forecasters face.)
It's clear most of that surprisingly strong performance was due to old-fashioned Keynesian fiscal stimulus. Consumer spending was greatly bolstered by the cash splash, while the jump in public sector spending speaks for itself. The growth in business investment was explained by the draw-forward effect of the temporary tax break.
According to Treasury's estimates, the fiscal stimulus contributed about 2 percentage points to the overall growth of 1.3 per cent last year, meaning that, without it, GDP would have contracted by 0.7 per cent.
So much for the claim the mining sector was "a key factor in keeping Australia out of recession".
If you decompose exports' contribution of 0.4 percentage points, rural commodities contributed more (0.3 points) than mineral commodities (0.2 points), with manufactures making a negative contribution.
Treasury did allow for the effect of the fiscal stimulus in its forecast, but it's pretty clear it (and everyone else) didn't allow enough.
Gruen believes it took insufficient account of the "favourable feedback loop that expansionary macro-economic policy - both monetary and fiscal - appears to have generated".
"Macro-economic policy appears to have been large enough and quick enough to convince consumers and businesses that the domestic slowdown would be relatively mild," Gruen says.
"This, in turn, led consumers and businesses to continue to spend, and led businesses to cut workers' hours rather than laying them off which, in turn, helped the economic slowdown to be relatively mild."
The turnaround in business and consumer sentiment began earlier and was a lot stronger in Australia than in other developed economies. But that's another problem for the forecasters: swings in the collective mood are probably the biggest factor driving the business cycle, but how do you predict them?
It's true, of course, that continuing demand from China played a part in keeping us afloat. Gruen notes that the Consensus forecast for "non-Japan Asia turned out to be significantly too pessimistic".
But why? Partly because the forecasters made insufficient allowance for the Asians' lack of impairment in their financial systems, but also because they underestimated the speed and size of the fiscal and monetary stimulus, particularly in Korea and China.
As well as underrating the power of Keynesian policies - which are likely to be more potent in the young and dynamic emerging economies - too many forecasters failed to see how much success the Chinese would have in switching from external demand to domestic demand, particularly spending on infrastructure.
An economy as big as China has plenty of scope to "decouple" from the developed countries - a point worth remembering when you're tempted by the latest fear, that Europe's problems will wipe us out.
Just about everything happening in the economic world at present is premised on the early return of the resources boom. If so, it won't come a moment too soon for the growth fiends: this week's national accounts show the economy losing momentum in the March quarter.
The imminent resumption of the boom explains why the Reserve Bank has been so keen to get interest rates back to normal levels, why the government is expecting to have the budget back in surplus in three years and, indeed, why it thinks now's a good time to reform the mining industry's royalty payments.
But the boom ain't back yet. To the contrary, the accounts show the economy growing by 1.1 per cent in the December quarter, then slowing to 0.5 per cent in the latest quarter. Those figures probably exaggerate the extent of the slowing - it's a mistake to take quarter-to-quarter changes in the accounts too literally.
Even so, what stands out is the economy's continuing dependence on the rapidly withdrawing fiscal stimulus. So if you think the stimulus was unnecessary or all a terrible waste or that the government should be winding it back much faster than it is, think again.
By far the greatest single source of growth during the quarter was government spending, which contributed 0.9 percentage points to the increase in gross domestic product. Within this, real capital works spending by the federal government grew by 15 per cent and that by the states by almost 17 per cent.
Much of that would be stimulus-related spending on public infrastructure but a fair bit would be the school-building program. Sections of the press have worked overtime to give an exaggerated impression of this program's wastefulness.
I don't doubt there has been some waste and that's regrettable. But the fearless campaigners never acknowledge (and probably don't understand) the macro-economic imperative to get the money spent as quickly as possible so as to limit the rise in unemployment and stop the economy dropping into a downward spiral.
It's all very well banging on about the waste of taxpayers' money but unemployment is also a waste. It's a waste of the time idle workers could have contributed to the nation's production.
Though the principal loss is borne by the jobless workers (who gives a stuff about them?), there's a cost to all of us - plus, of course, a cost to the budget in unemployment benefits and tax revenue forgone.
When workers are jobless for long periods they suffer a lasting loss of skills, confidence and motivation, which is also a loss to the community. And when high unemployment scares consumers into cutting their spending and causing yet more unemployment, otherwise-sound businesses go bankrupt and are broken up, destroying capital at a direct cost to the businesses' owners and an indirect cost to all of us.
So the next time you read another allegation of wastefulness (with no mention of the great majority of successful projects), think of all the costs and waste that would have occurred had the money not been spent. (It remains an inconvenient truth that even wasteful spending stimulates activity and helps avoid unemployment.)
Back to the national accounts. The only other significant positive contribution to growth in the quarter came from the lacklustre rise of 0.6 per cent in consumer spending. The $900 cheques are a distant memory.
But against these positive contributions are two main negatives. Business investment spending subtracted 0.5 percentage points from real GDP, with non-dwelling construction down 2.5 per cent and spending on machinery and equipment down 6 per cent (after being up 10 per cent the previous quarter).
Ah. More evidence of the fiscal stimulus - or rather, the absence of it. Business spending on plant was way up in the December quarter because that was the last quarter of the special tax break. It was way down in the March quarter because many businesses had brought their spending forward to take advantage of the special offer.
The other negative contribution was external. The volume of exports fell by 0.5 per cent (mainly due to a fall in coal exports caused by cyclones in Queensland) while the volume of imports increased by 2 per cent. Together, these subtracted 0.5 percentage points from GDP.
It's clear the fiscal stimulus is having conflicting effects on the economy. The programs that have wound up are subtracting from growth while those still going are adding to it. According to Treasury, the net effect is a subtraction from growth in the quarter of 0.1 percentage points.
Just think how much weaker the quarter's growth would have been had the government yielded to the opposition's calls for the stimulus spending to be cut off earlier than planned.
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that the accounts showed no sign of a returning resources boom. The terms of trade - the ratio of export prices to import prices - improved by 4 per cent, their third successive quarterly advance.
Clearly, the prices we're getting for our mineral exports are rising and this was also evident in the $2.2 billion turnaround in the trade balance for the month of April.
Whereas real GDP grew by only 0.5 per cent in the March quarter, the improvement in the terms of trade meant real gross domestic income grew by 1.3 per cent. Over the past three quarters, real GDI grew by 3.5 per cent, as against growth in real GDP of 1.9 per cent. This is an early indicator of stronger consumer spending on the way.
And although business investment spending was weak in the March quarter, we know from surveys there's huge spending in the pipeline, particularly mining and natural gas projects.
Last quarter the economy was betwixt and between but, never fear, the boom is returning (the big miners' callous brinkmanship over taxation notwithstanding).
Talk about a two-track economy. Have you noticed how the government and others have been focused on the return of the resources boom, with all the tax bonanzas and challenges that could bring, while the rest of the world has been worrying itself sick about the debt problems in Europe, sending our sharemarket and the Aussie dollar tumbling?
Surely the two don't fit. Are we living in fantasyland? Is reality about to hit us on the head? Or could it be that Europe's problems don't have all that much to do with us and before long the global financial markets will stop panicking and our share prices and currency will recover?
Standard product warning: no one knows what the future holds and economists aren't good at predicting it. But my guess is the end of our world isn't nigh.
Although the Greek government was in over its head even before the global financial crisis reached its peak in late 2008 (and was fudging its figures to hide the truth), most of the other European governments now have big budget deficits and huge levels of debt because of their efforts to rescue their banks and their heavy spending to stimulate their economies.
Those national governments with rocky banks (including the United States) have, in effect, transferred their banks' debt on to their own books. So what started as excessive private debt is now excessive public debt.
I don't criticise them for this. Had they not rescued their banks the outcome would have been a lot worse. No, the real problem is that, unlike us, their affairs weren't in order before the crisis. They'd been running budget deficits even in the boom years and had high levels of debt even before they were obliged to borrow so heavily.
The particularly acute problems in Greece served to draw the attention of the world financial markets to problems in other countries - Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland. Even the Brits have huge debt levels.
As often happens, the markets flipped from inattention to panic. When they're in that sort of mood, all the news is catastrophic. The Chinese had jammed on the brakes to burst a property bubble, putting an end to the global recovery. The Australians had nationalised their mining industry (something like that, anyway; not sure of the fine detail).
Whenever the players in world financial markets are gripped by panic their tendency is to sell whatever shares they can wherever they can and buy US Treasury bills. Even when it's the US economy that's at the heart of the problem, they still do it.
The result is a fall in sharemarkets around the world and a rise in the value of the US dollar at the expense of most other currencies. If you remember, this is what happened after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Our dollar went from US98 in July 2008 to US63 in November. It stayed there until March, then eventually climbed back to US92.
The likelihood is that, as the present panic subsides, our share prices will recover and our dollar will go back up (as it has already begun to). But this return of the staggers is a reminder that a lot of the underlying problems exposed by the global financial crisis are still with us, and will be for a long time.
So perhaps the recovery of sharemarkets in the months following the crisis was a bit too optimistic and this time it won't be as strong.
Certainly, the Europeans won't easily dispense with their debt problems. And the more they feel pressured by the markets to turn around their budget balances by slashing government spending and raising taxes the more they'll slow the recovery in their economies.
The Europeans' problems are compounded by the existence of the euro currency arrangement, and their efforts to hold it together may end up extracting a high price in terms of economic growth. All the troubled member-countries would be better off being able to set their own interest rates and allow their own currency to fall against those of their stronger European trading partners, but
they can't.
The Greeks are so deeply in hock their best solution would be to default on their debt and start again, but that isn't possible. Even leaving the euro would be terribly messy.
So Europe isn't likely to show much growth for the rest of the decade. But this won't hold Australia back as much as it would have in the old days. Our fortunes are now much more aligned with those of China, India and the rest of developing Asia. Are they likely to be adversely affected by Europe's troubles? My guess is, a bit but not a lot.
China's efforts to deal with its property bubble are quite circumscribed, so I don't expect its growth to suffer too much. If so, our authorities' expectations of a return of the resources boom aren't likely to be too far astray.
The thing about financial markets is they make judgments in haste and repent at leisure. If it's right that the prospects for our economy haven't been greatly impaired by the problems of the Europeans and the fine-tuning of the Chinese, eventually our strong position relative to the other developed economies will again be reflected in our higher share prices and exchange rate.
As ever, the ups and downs of the sharemarket will prove an unreliable guide to the prospects for the economy (even though the innocent souls who write headlines sometimes seem to imagine the sharemarket is the economy).
Similarly, the headline-writers' assumption that a fall in our dollar is an unmitigated evil says more about their innocence of economics than their grip on reality.
On this I'm with our farmers, manufacturers, tourist operators and education industry in hoping the dollar's return to the 90s takes as long as possible. There's more to life than overseas holidays.
Look at America and Europe and it's clear Australia has benefited hugely - in a material sense, at any rate - from the painful micro-economic reforms of the 1980s and '90s.
Look at our performance in the noughties, however, and it's clear the momentum of reform has dissipated. You see that in the business community's unrelenting white-anting of Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme, which ended in a bipartisan rejection of the use of "economic instruments" (putting a price on carbon) to combat climate change.
You see it now in the mining industry's bitter resistance to Rudd's latest attempt at major micro-economic reform, the replacement of inefficient mineral royalties with the far more efficient super profits tax.
The big miners - particularly BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto - are doing all they can to break the back of this measure, if not kill it. The newer and smaller miners, which would benefit most, seem cowed into silence.
The big boys' first success has been the opposition's - the Liberal Party opposition's - decision to again set its face against an economic-rationalist reform, one almost all economists endorse as good policy.
Professor Ross Garnaut believes the decision the nation takes on the reform of mineral royalties will either "confirm the descent of Australian political culture into a North Atlantic malaise, or represent a revival of the capacity of the Australian polity to take positions in the national interest, independently of sectional pressures".
Just so. The big miners are doing what all sectional interests attempt to do in these circumstances, persuade you and me that their problem (the government wanting to take a bigger bite out of their profits) is actually our problem (the miners will take their money elsewhere and leave us to rot).
To this end they're using a host of high-sounding, but actually unconvincing, arguments, the first of which is that the planned change in the royalty arrangements has greatly increased Australia's "sovereign risk" in the eyes of miners.
This is over the top. The sovereign risks faced by foreign investors in many countries - mainly developing countries - constitute things like having your company expropriated by the government, a breakdown in the rule of law, or the government defaulting on its debt.
Are BHP and Rio seriously putting us in that company? Turns out their definition of sovereign risk is merely "do you trust the government not to change the rules?" And what rule would that be? The price at which we're prepared to sell them our non-renewable resources.
The contract price of iron ore has increased by a factor of more than six since 2004. The contract price of hard coking coal has more than quadrupled. Do you reckon we're going to be the only country putting up the price it charges?
Far more likely that a lot of countries follow our example - which may well be what's adding extra vehemence to the big miners' fightback.
And name one country that's prepared to give foreign investors a guarantee it won't at some stage decide to change a tax or other law affecting those investors' businesses. If that's your definition of sovereign risk then it's a risk you face in every country - and many of them would be a lot rougher about it than us.
What's more, if that's sovereign risk, the only answer to it is national governments promising to give up their sovereignty. This is silly stuff.
It's curious that BHP and Rio, which purport to be so offended when anyone calls them foreigners rather than Australian, keep on about sovereign risk. Sovereign risk is the perspective of an outsider, not a local. A company with no loyalties, prepared to go wherever in the world it can get the best deal.
Every Australian business, big and small - and every individual, for that matter - faces the continuous risk that one of our nine governments will "change the rules" in ways we consider contrary to our interests.
We don't like it but, for the most part, we accept it. One of the rules that doesn't change is that democratically elected governments retain the right to change the rules. How else could you run a country?
Allied with the sovereign risk argument is the claim the resources tax would be "retrospective". This, too, is an abasement of the term. A true retrospective change involves subsequently declaring an act that was legal at the time it was undertaken illegal. That's what John Howard did with his outlawing of the bottom-of-the-harbour tax scheme.
Similarly, it would be reasonable to say a decision to change the tax on income earned (or minerals mined) before the announcement of the tax change was retrospective. But these guys are claiming a decision to increase the price of the minerals we sell them in the future - of which we're giving them more than two years' notice - is retrospective.
Huh? Apparently, any change to a mining project that's already established is a retrospective change. Had we known you were going to do this we might never have dug the mine. Yeah sure. Nor did you know the world price of the mineral was going to quadruple or sextuple in six years.
This is silly stuff. If that's your definition of retrospective, then every tax change (or other change) affecting every existing Australian business (and every person already born) is retrospective and thus improper.
As Professor John Freebairn of Melbourne University has said, "the idea that government cannot take actions that create losers ... would have stood in the path of tariff reform and most of the micro-economic reform of the past 20 years".
And if we let the big miners' pleading dissuade us from going ahead with this reform we'll be going the same way as the morally corrupt US Congress and the effete Europeans.
In the Rudd government's battle to make the mining companies pay a more reasonable price for their use of the nation's non-renewable resources, any number of dubious arguments are being thrown around.
One is the furious debate over how much company tax the miners pay. Another is the claim it was the mining industry that saved Australia from recession. The first is a red herring; the second is the opposite of the truth.
As you may have seen from the Minerals Council's full-page ads, the government has produced figures from a range of sources showing the mining industry's effective rate of tax is somewhere between 13 per cent and 27 per cent of its profits.
But the industry has produced figures from a different source that say its effective rate of tax is 41 per cent.
What are we to make of this? The figures differ because they're from different years and come from different sources using differing definitions of "tax" and "profits". If you've never before seen the same animal measured in different ways, welcome to the complexity of the real world.
The point to note is that most of these figures add together two things under the heading of "tax": the company tax the miners pay plus the royalties and other resource charges they pay.
One small problem: how much company tax the miners pay is little more than a debating point. The real issue is how much they're paying in royalties.
All companies have to pay tax on their taxable income at the rate of 30 per cent. If the amount of company tax they pay comes to a smaller percentage of their published accounting profit - as it almost always does - the explanation is that the taxman is giving them more concessional tax deductions than they use when preparing their published accounts. (It shouldn't surprise you that many companies aim to minimise their taxable income while maximising their accounting profit.)
The miners' "effective" company tax rate will usually be a lot lower than 30 per cent - and a lot lower than paid by many other industries - because mining is so capital-intensive and because the government gives them generous rates of depreciation on their equipment and structures.
So there are good reasons for miners' effective rates of company tax to be low. Is this relevant to the debate about the resource super-profits tax? Not really - unless your purpose is to bamboozle people who aren't accountants.
What is relevant is to understand that when you add company tax to royalties you're adding apples to oranges. Why? Because, although royalty payments for the use of minerals are labelled as taxes, they're not really taxes.
A tax is a payment you make to government for which you get nothing specific in return. Mineral royalties are payments miners make to government for which they get the right to take the Crown's minerals out of the ground and sell them to their customers.
Often, royalties are set at the rate of
$X per tonne. The more tonnes you take, the more you pay. So royalties are cost of production.
The rationale for the misleadingly named resource super-profits tax is that it will replace the present mineral royalties charged by state governments, which are both unfair and inefficient. They're unfair because the owners of the minerals - you and me - are getting a price for them that's now much lower than they're worth.
They're inefficient because they make no distinction between mines with high extraction costs and those with low costs, meaning they discourage mining activity that would otherwise occur.
The beauty of the new resource tax is that it charges miners for the minerals they use on the basis of the profit they're making. When world commodity prices are high the charge will be high; when world prices are low the charge will be low. And mines with high extraction costs will pay less than those with low costs. This will do much less to discourage mining.
So in demonstrating the case for a new way of charging for our minerals, it is relevant to look at how royalties have changed relative to profits since the start of the resources boom.
Figures prepared by Treasury show that over the five years to 2003-04, royalty payments averaged 32 per cent of profits. By 2008-09, however, this had slipped to 14 per cent. Using the source preferred by the Minerals Council, its figures imply the miners' royalty payments in 2007-08 were 13.5 per cent of profits - little different.
Clearly, as world prices rose the increase in royalty payments fell far short of the increase in profits. The miners received a windfall, but this wasn't shared with the owners of the resources now so much more valuable.
In BHP Billiton's full-page ad it claims the strength of our resources sector "was a key factor in keeping Australia out of recession". It offered no figures in support of this claim, so let's look at a few.
The mining industry accounts for less than 7 per cent of gross domestic product and, because it is so capital-intensive, only 1.6 per cent of our total employment. So for such a small part of the economy to have saved us its performance would need to have been miraculous.
In fact, mining contracted more than most. After peaking in the December quarter of 2008, its new capital expenditure fell in each quarter of 2009, taking the total fall over the year to almost 13 per cent.
Over the year to last September, employment in the mining industry fell by 5.6 per cent. Employment in the related heavy and civil engineering construction industry fell by 7.6 per cent. Over the same period, total employment in Australia fell by only 0.3 per cent.
In the first six months of 2009, the mining industry shed more than 27,000 workers. Had all industries behaved the same way (and assuming no fall in the rate of participation in the labour force) the unemployment rate would have increased from 4.6 per cent to 19 per cent in just six months.
This huge volatility in the mining industry - its vulnerability to swings in world commodity prices - demonstrates why, taken overall, the industry would be much better off under the more flexible royalty arrangements offered by the resource super-profits tax.
Right now, however, the tax would take a big bite out of the profits of the established mining giants, particularly BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. That's why we're hearing so much nonsense from them.
Economics and Business Educators annual conference, Bankstown, Friday, May 28, 2010
This talk has been billed as an update on fiscal and monetary policies, but now I’ve seen the budget I want to focus in on just one development, the most interesting aspect of the budget, the Rudd government’s tax reform package - its mini reform package. This year the budget was announced in stages and the government’s response to the report of the Henry tax review was unveiled a bit more than a week before the budget - though some elements of the response were announced in the budget itself. Either way, it’s now clear that the tax package was main measure in the budget.
Contents of the package
The package consists of one big new tax, the resource super-profits tax, which will cover the cost of various tax cuts and increased tax concessions. The resource tax effectively replaces the states’ various royalty charges for the use of minerals owned by the Crown. Although the states will continue to charge these royalties, miners will have their payments refunded by the feds. The resource tax is expected to raise a net $9 billion in its first full year of operation.
Proceeds from the resource tax will finance a range of tax reductions:
• Company tax rate phased down from 30 pc to 28 pc
• Small business receives company tax rate cut earlier than other companies, plus instant write-off of new fixed assets worth less than $5000
• The present tax deduction for resource exploration costs will be turned into a ‘refundable tax offset’ at the prevailing company tax rate, making it more valuable to explorers and much more expensive to the government
• The concessional treatment of superannuation is made more concessional in several ways, including: the 15 pc contributions tax for people earning up to $37,000 a year is effectively eliminated and the higher cap on contributions by people over 50 will be continued permanently for those with inadequate super. The package will also cover the cost to revenue of the decision to slowly phase up the compulsory contribution rate for employees from 9 pc to 12 pc between 2013 and 2019. (The cost to revenue arises because wages that formerly would have been taxed at the employee’s marginal rate will now be taxed at the 15 pc rate of the contributions tax. The legal incidence of the increased contributions falls on the employer, but economists believe it is shifted to the employee by means of wage rises that are lower than otherwise.)
• Tax on interest income will be subject to a 50 pc discount (similar to the tax on capital gains) up to a limit of $1000 interest income.
• As a step towards simplifying tax returns, rather than itemising their work-related expenses (and tax agent’s fees), people may opt to claim a standard deduction of $500, to be raised to $1000.
As well as these tax measures, the government announced that part of the proceeds from the resource tax will be contributed to a ‘resource state infrastructure fund’ and distributed to the states, particularly the resource-rich states, to finance resource-related infrastructure. This measure, combined with the resource exploration rebate, is supposed to account for ‘approximately one third’ of the proceeds of the resource tax. In the first full year, however, they’re expected to make up less than half that.
Timing: the resource tax isn’t due to begin for more than two years - July 2012 - and so all the other parts of the package are begun or phased in from that date.
The Henry tax review
The tax package was produced as the government’s response to the Henry review panel’s comprehensive review of the Australian tax and transfer system, federal and state. It’s the first comprehensive review since the Asprey report of 1975. Just as the Asprey report set the direction for tax reform over the following 25 years, so Ken Henry’s goal was to lay down a blueprint to guide further reform over coming decades, whether by this government or its successors. Henry set out proposals to:
• concentrate federal and state revenue-raising on four broad-based taxes: personal income, business income, rents on natural resources and land, and private consumption. Other taxes should be retained only where they serve social purposes or internalise negative externalities (eg gambling, tobacco and alcohol taxes, petrol taxes, pollution taxes). State taxes on insurance, conveyancing and other stamp duties and payroll tax should be replaced by a comprehensive 1 pc land tax and a ’broad-based cash flow tax’ (a simplified GST-type tax). (The objection to payroll tax is not that it’s a tax on labour - so is the GST - but that its high threshold means only larger businesses are taxed.)
• change the mix of taxation to reduce reliance on taxing mobile resources (eg business income) and increase reliance on taxing immobile resources (eg land and resources, and consumption). The company tax rate should be reduced from 30 pc to 25 pc. State royalty charges on minerals should be replaced by a resource rent tax levied at 40 pc.
• introduce a new two-step income tax scale with a tax-free threshold of $25,000 (but with the low-income tax offset and other offsets abolished), a 35 pc rate to $180,000 (but the 1.5 pc Medicare levy abolished) and (the present) 45 pc rate above that.
• regularise the widely disparate rates of tax on income from savings by allowing a 40 pc discount on income from interest, rent and capital gains, but also on deductions for interest expense of rental properties.
• improve the targeting of cash transfer payments.
• reform the taxation of superannuation by abolishing the 15 pc tax on contributions. People’s contributions should be taxed at their marginal rate, but they should receive a tax offset designed to ensure low income earners pay no net tax on contributions, middle income earners pay no more than 15 pc and only high income earners pay more than 15 pc. This would greatly improve the present inequitable distribution of the super tax concession. The tax on fund earnings should be halved to 7.5 pc. These two measures would lead eventually to greater super payouts, particularly for low and middle earners, making a rise in the compulsory contribution rate unnecessary.
• improve the taxing of roads by introducing congestion pricing that varies by time of day, using the proceeds to replace the tax element of motor vehicle registrations and possibly fuel taxes. Heavy vehicles should pay changes reflecting the damage they do to roads.
• reduce the complexity of the tax system, including by using an optional standard deduction for work-related expenses to simplify the completion of tax returns and save on tax agents’ fees.
The package as tax reform
The Rudd government’s response to the Henry tax review was surprisingly limited. Of the review’s 138 recommendations, the government accepted and acted upon just a couple, explicitly rejected 19 politically controversial proposals and failed to comment on the rest. In other words, it cherry-picked the report, selecting just a few things it thought would bring short-term electoral benefit.
The report contained many politically difficult recommendations but one that was particularly attractive: a proposal to introduce a whole new source of revenue by using a federal resource rent tax to replace the states’ mineral royalty charges. Here the government had some highly respected economists urging it to introduce a lucrative new tax on an unpopular, mainly foreign-owned industry and assuring it the tax would do nothing to discourage mining or hurt the economy.
It could use the new tax to pay for various politically attractive ‘reforms’, to be introduced after it was re-elected. The resource rent tax it announced was in line with Henry’s recommendations, except for a spin-doctor-inspired name change to the ‘resource super-profits tax’. The tax is being opposed by the Opposition and bitterly resisted by the big mining companies, which have won a fair bit of sympathy from wider business community. This resistance has caused many voters to wonder whether the tax would be bad for the economy, but almost all the criticisms are unjustified. Precisely so as to ensure the tax doesn’t do the bad things it is being accused of, it is hugely complex, meaning that many of its critics simply don’t understand how it would work.
When you look at the other supposed reforms, however, you find they bear little resemblance to the Henry report’s recommendations:
• It did propose a cut in the company tax rate, but to 25 pc not 28 pc.
• It did propose the instant write-off of assets, but for those costing less than $10,000 not $5000.
• On superannuation, the report proposed that the cost of increasing the concession on contributions by lower income earners be covered by reducing the concession to higher income earners. The government did the nice bit but not the nasty bit. The government did nothing about halving the tax on fund earnings as recommended. The report specifically avoided recommending an increase in the rate of compulsory contributions, but we got on anyway.
• The report recommended a thorough overhaul of the tax on savings, with the 50 pc discount on capital gains cut to 40 pc and the 40 pc discount extended to interest income and the interest expense deductions on rental property. The government introduced a 50 pc discount for interest income, but with a cap of $1000 in interest income. It made no changes to the capital gains discount or to negative gearing.
• The introduction of a standard deduction for work-related expenses was in line with the report’s proposals (though it may have been more generous that the report had in mind) and the report said nothing about introducing a new infrastructure fund.
The economic rationale for the resource super-profits tax
The present state government royalties - which aren’t so much taxes as charges for the use of mineral resources belonging to the community - are quite inefficient because they are based either on quantity (a price per tonne) or on a certain percentage of the market price. This means they take no account of the cost of mining the mineral, which varies from site to site and may increase as the exploitation of a particular site moves from the easily extracted to the hard-to-extract. Thus the present royalties can have the effect of making a prospective site uneconomic and discouraging the full exploitation of a site. This inflexibility limits the ability of state governments to raise the rate of the royalty when world commodity prices are high. (They may also be inhibited by perceived competition between the states or unduly close relations with the mining companies.)
The beauty of the super-profits tax (and the existing petroleum resource rent tax) is that, because they are based on taking a share of super-normal profits, they don’t discourage the exploitation of marginal sites, nor encourage the under-exploitation of existing sites. They are highly flexible, taking higher royalties when world commodity prices are high, but automatically reducing the take when world prices fall. There will be times when world prices fall to the point where some sites are paying no royalty-equivalent (the resource tax) and there will be some sites with high production costs that never have to pay royalties.
Super-normal profits are profits received in excess of those needed to keep the capital employed within the business rather than leaving in search of more profitable opportunities. So super-normal profit represents ‘economic rent’ - any amount you receive in excess of the amount needed to keep you doing what you’re doing, your opportunity cost. Accountants and economists calculate profit differently. Accountants take revenue, subtract operating costs and regard the remainder as profit. But economists also subtract normal profit - the minimum acceptable rate of return on the capital invested in the business - which they regard as an additional cost, the cost of capital. The appropriate rate of return must be ‘risk-adjusted’ ie the higher the risk of the business operating at a loss, the higher the rate of return above the risk-free rate of return, usually taken to be the long-term government bond rate.
(This is what’s so silly about the mistaken claim that the resource tax regards any profit in excess of the bond rate as super profit. The risk is taken into account not by adding a margin to the bond rate [as occurs with the petroleum resource rent tax] but directly, by having the government, in effect, bear 40 pc of the cost of the project, including losses.)
Most taxes on an economic activity have the effect of discouraging that activity. This is clear in the case of the existing royalty charges. But resource rent taxes (including the resource super-profits tax) have been carefully designed to have minimal effect on the taxed activity. Because the return on capital remains above its opportunity cost, activity should not be discouraged, meaning there should not be any adverse effect on employment or economic growth. Indeed, because of the more favourable treatment of marginal projects, there should be more employment and growth.
Economic theory says a resource rent tax should not add to the prices being charged by the taxed firms because it does nothing to add to their costs (as opposed to the effect on their after-tax profits) and because the firm is already charging as much as the market will bear. In practice, it may not be charging as much as it could. So a better argument is that our mining companies are price-takers on the international market, with Australian producers’ share of the world market not big enough to have much effect on the world price.
The fact that resource rent taxes have been explicitly designed not to do all the bad things the vested interests accuse them of doing explains the strong support for such taxes from economists. The resource rent tax is actually the proud invention of Australian economists, available to be copied by other countries.
The package as short-term macro management
The tax package is roughly revenue neutral over the next four financial years. It can be thought of as detachable - should the resource tax not be passed by the Senate, none of the measures it finances would go ahead, thus leaving the budget little affected.
This means it’s wrong to imagine the resource tax would play a significant part in returning the budget to surplus. The budget is projected to reach (negligible) surplus in 2012-13 for three reasons:
• the effect on the budget’s automatic stabilisers of the economy’s expected return to strong growth
• the always-planned completion of the government’s temporary stimulus measures
• the government’s adherence to its ‘deficit exit strategy’ of allowing the level of tax receipts to recover naturally as the economy improves (ie avoid further tax cuts) and holding the real growth in spending to 2 pc a year until a surplus of 1 pc of GDP has been achieved.
The fact that the government now expects the return to surplus to occur three years’ earlier than it expected in last year’s budget is explained by the much milder recession than it expected and the much stronger forecasts for the next four years. Various factors caused the recession to be so mild, including the V-shaped recovery in China and the rest of developing Asia, and the consequent bounce-back in coal and iron ore prices.
In view of the government’s commitment to limiting the real growth in its spending to 2 pc, it’s worth noting that virtually all the things on which it intends to ‘spend’ the proceeds from the resource tax are tax cuts and tax concessions. That is, the package has been structured so as to add little to the government’s difficultly in meeting its 2 pc target. The qualification to this is the plan to put about $700 million a year into the new state infrastructure fund. My guess is that contributions to the fund have been designed to be the ‘swing instrument’ - that is, to be reduced or even eliminated should collections from the resource tax fall short of projections.
The package as long-term macro management
Because the resource tax is designed to be heavily influenced by the ups and down in world commodity prices, receipts from it are likely to be highly variable over the years. By contrast, the cost to revenue of the tax cuts and concessions it finances is likely to be far less variable. For an accountant-type, as Peter Costello appeared to be, this would be a worry. The tax package will make the budget balance much more cyclical. For an economist, however, this is a virtue: by introducing the resource tax the government has added a new and powerful automatic stabiliser to its budgetary armoury.
Because Australia is such a major producer of mineral commodities, the cycle in world commodity prices is likely to align pretty closely with our business cycle. Whenever we’re in a resources boom, close to full capacity and with the Reserve Bank worried about inflation pressure, the resource tax will take more revenue from the boom sector and send it to the budget. Provided this extra revenue isn’t spent or used to repeatedly cut income tax (as it was in John Howard’s day) it will act as a drag on the economy, reducing inflation pressure and hence the need for higher interest rates. Whenever we’re in a resources bust, the economy has turned down and unemployment is rising, resource tax collections will collapse, the budget will go more quickly and more deeply into deficit and this will be the automatic stabilisers working to help prop up the private sector and put a floor under the downturn.
The tax package can be seen as an attempt to improve the economic managers’ ability to manage the economy during resources booms: to chop the top off them and make them less inflationary, but also to ensure we have more to show from them when they’ve passed. The contributions to the state infrastructure fund are a way of requiring the miners to contribute more towards their own additional infrastructure requirements.
More significantly, the linking of the resource tax with an increase in compulsory superannuation contributions should ensure at least some of the income from the boom is saved rather than spent. Empirical evidence suggests the introduction of compulsory super has done more to increase national saving than conventional analysis led us to expect. (The practical weakness in the argument is that the super increase is being phased in so slowly - the first tiny increase takes place in July 2013 and the last in July 2019 - the boom could be long past its peak by then.)
Ceteris paribus, an increase in national saving will cause our current account deficit and foreign liabilities to be lower than otherwise - always remembering that the resumed resources boom is expected to cause the CAD to be high for a protracted period. The small cut in company tax may make Australia more attractive as a destination for foreign investment, particularly equity investment. Combined with the higher national saving and potential for interest rates to be less high than otherwise (less weight on monetary policy), it’s possible to see this leading to a lower exchange rate than otherwise.
When it comes to matters economic, the cultural cringe is alive and well. Australians lack confidence in ourselves and our own inventiveness. We see our country's rightful place as a follower of international trends, never a leader of them. We seek the approval of foreigners and fear their disapprobation.
One of the favourite Australian laments is the story about some wonderful new invention that local bankers or businessmen lacked the either the wit or the courage to take up, thus forcing the inventor to take his idea abroad for development and losing for Australia all the profits that could have flowed.
We've heard such stories so many times most of us hold this view of Australia as an article of faith. A related belief - so deeply held it's impervious to contrary evidence - is that we suffer a terrible Brain Drain as our brightest young scientists and professionals move abroad in search of the opportunities we deny them.
These narratives may seem to contradict my case: we know full well how valuable our inventions and young people are, how happy the rest of the world is to take them off our hands. At another level, however, they reveal our cringe: trust us Aussies to keep stuffing up.
They also reveal our protectionist predilections: good things should be kept at home, which is the only way they can benefit us. To let them leave is to lose.
There was a time when Australia was happy to do things its own way for its own reasons. What the rest of the world thought we neither knew nor cared. But some of the things we pioneered were copied by others and when we learnt of it we were proud.
Australia (and our Tasman cousins) led the world in electoral reform. In 1856 we began introducing the secret ballot. When the rest of the world began copying us, it became known as the "Australian ballot".
The Kiwis pioneered votes for women in 1893, South Australia followed in 1894. Again, the rest of the world followed.
Our use of compulsory voting hasn't caught on elsewhere, but why should we care? We don't. But as the Brits consider abandoning their first-past-the-post voting system, some are saying they should switch to "the Australian system" of preferential voting.
But all those intellectual inventions were a long time ago. It's more recently that we seem to have acquired our self-doubt, our suspicion that if we're leading the world on something we're sticking our neck out and have probably got it wrong. Our desire to be a trend follower, never a trend setter.
You see that in a common attitude to the plan for an emissions trading scheme. Why should we be the first? (We wouldn't have been, but let it pass.) What about the big boys? What are they doing? Wouldn't it be safer to wait until everyone else has moved?
Admittedly, this is not a case where what the rest of the world does doesn't matter. Only concerted international action will succeed in lowering global emissions. Even so, a self-confident nation would have seen the advantages of being among the first to take the plunge. The sooner we make a start, the lower the ultimate cost of making the transition to a low-carbon world.
And since Australia has a lot to lose from climate change, why don't we try to break the stand-off, set the others a good example and press them to join us? Aren't the stakes high enough to justify taking a bit of a risk?
All these were Kevin Rudd's arguments until his failure of leadership. Now he has succumbed to the national timidity and joined the Poor Little Australia party, waiting for the world to determine our fate.
In their fight to avoid paying more tax, the big mining companies are seeking to play on our self-doubts. No other country has such a resource tax, they claim, and nowhere else are they required to pay so much. If Australia persists with this weird tax they'll cancel their projects and take their money elsewhere.
Oh dear, don't desert us. Please!
Know what their problem is? Australia, being one of the world's leading mining nations, is a world leader in designing taxes that increase the public's take without discouraging mining activity or otherwise damaging the economy.
The resource super-profits tax is a state-of-the-art tax, designed by our leading economists not to do all the bad things it's being accused of. It's a close relative of an earlier Australian invention, the resource rent tax, developed by Professor Ross Garnaut and others at the Australian National University.
The big international mining companies are fighting it partly because they fear that, once its success has been demonstrated, it will be copied by other countries. And they're fighting it by trying to press our cringe button: if no one else is doing it, it must be a dumb thing to do.
The miners are right to fear the tax will be adopted by other countries because that's just what's happened to that other great invention of Australian economists, the "income-contingent loan" (known to you as HECS, the higher education contribution scheme). This one was invented by Professor Bruce Chapman, also of the ANU.
We cringers think of Australia as a small country that carries no weight in the world. But the world's big companies see us as a potential setter of dangerous precedents. Whenever we decide to do something novel that could impinge on their profits, they quietly assist their local colleagues in trying to dissuade us.
The world's tobacco companies are still trying to prevent us preceding with our path-breaking move to plain cigarette packaging. When the Reserve Bank moved to end the banks' ban on shopkeepers charging a fee to people paying by credit card, the two international card companies were most agitated.
Turns out the world has more faith in Australian innovations than we do.
Kevin Rudd has his back to the wall. He's no fighter, but he has little option but to stand and fight for his bitterly resisted resource super profits tax. With luck the experience will help turn him into the more substantial figure we need to lead us.
All Rudd's instincts - and those of the Hollow Men on whose counsel he relies - must be to ditch or greatly water down a tax he now discovers has proved hugely unpopular with the miners and which an economically uncomprehending business community doesn't like the sound of.
For a man who's always searching for a soft cop - those "reforms" that are riding high in the opinion polls, such as health care and, formerly, action on climate change - this must have come as a great shock to him.
But Rudd has no choice but to stand and fight. Having instantly shredded his credibility with his cowardly decision to cut and run from his emissions trading scheme when its popularity slipped, he simply can't afford another blow to his reputation.
If that's not enough, there's this: almost all the nice things he's promising to do if he's re-elected - cut company tax, help small business, further subsidise superannuation and the rest - hang off the resource tax. No tax, no goodies.
Normally, a prime minister has room for tweaks to placate the vested interests, but this time Rudd has none. His credibility is too low.
And the precedent of weakness he set with all his cave-ins to miners and other rent-seekers over the emissions trading scheme means giving the miners something this time would be more likely to further incite their greed than calm them.
Rudd is a weak man fallen among thieves. He may be from Queensland, but his moral compass now comes courtesy of Sussex Street. I'm sure he remains convinced of his own uprightness, but clinging to office comes first.
Actually, for a bunch that puts political expediency above all, Rudd's cynical advisers have made a succession of bad calls. They imagined they could give in to the rent-seekers on emissions trading without being seen as an easy mark on every subsequent business issue.
They quailed at the thought of defending "a great big new tax" at a double-dissolution election, and deluded themselves that if they ditched the emissions scheme no one but a few greenies would care.
They commissioned the Henry tax review without thinking through the implications of having it lob just before an election. Then they imagined they could turn it into a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Introduce a big new tax on a group for which no one had much sympathy - the big, largely foreign-owned mining companies - then use it to pay for a raft of supposed reforms, carefully chosen for their vote-catching abilities, without adversely affecting the return to surplus.
And this lucrative tax came with the economic rationalists' Good Policy seal of approval, co-signed by Dr Ken Henry and Professor Ross Garnaut. Economic imprimaturs don't come from any higher authority.
One small problem: the resource tax is so pure - so carefully designed to ensure it doesn't do all the bad things it's being accused of - that it's impossible for anyone who's not a paid-up economist to understand.
Worse, its most prominent feature, the allowance rate set at the long-term bond rate, makes every ignorant Fin Review reader (and most of the business commentariat) imagine they can see the glaring flaw Henry and Garnaut missed. Yeah, sure.
We must assume that, unlike all the rest, the miners themselves have studied the complex design of the tax and disabused themselves of this beginner's error. But are they going to dispel or to exploit the business punters' illiteracy? One guess.
Did Rudd's whatever-it-takes political smarties see that one coming? I bet they didn't. Nor did they foresee the way the miners, aided by a hostile state government, would use the tax to heighten the West Australian electorate's resentful delusion that their state's propping up the rest of the economy Back East.
Did it occur to the political experts that all Tony Abbott had to do to solve the Liberals' acute lack of election funding was to oppose the tax then pass the hat round the miners? I doubt it.
Did it occur to the spin doctors that getting the business community and even the wider electorate to accept the wisdom and fairness of this tax would require an enormous effort by expert wordsmiths to formulate and feed ministers with simple ways of explaining the otherwise incomprehensible, rather than relying on their usual tricks of emotive slogans and manipulating the news cycle?
I doubt it. You can see that from the way some smarty decided to rename the Henry report's resource rent tax as the resource super profits tax. The half-baked notion was to heighten the great unwashed's resentment of foreign mining giants.
What it actually did was heighten the resentment of the miners and the sympathy of the wider business community by rubbing in the notion that this was an additional tax on company profits, levied at 40 per cent. That's a false perception, but it acted as red rag to a bull.
Had the perception managers understood the economics, they would have realised the measure was more a complex-calculated price for the use of natural resources owned by the Australian people than a tax, and renamed it something like the "reasonable royalty charge".
Rudd has been badly served by his spin doctors and advisers. They've led him astray and dropped him in it. If he's got any sense he'll switch to giving the electorate what it's shown it wants: a leader who is honest, straight-talking and principled.
Remember the two-speed economy? It's not back. No, with the return of the resources boom we're going back to the three-speed economy.
That's according to an enlightening speech this week from the secretary to the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry.
Assuming the continuing global financial crisis doesn't reassert itself to the point of knocking China and India off their present growth paths - a reasonable assumption - the big non-environmental issue facing our economy over the next few years or even decades is the profound implications of Australia's return to riding on the back of a coal train. Expect to hear a lot more about it.
As we saw during the resources boom that ran for five years before being (briefly, as we now know) interrupted by the global recession in 2008-09, when the global demand for commodities such as coal and iron ore runs way ahead of their supply, this has big effects on our economy.
The leap in the prices the world is prepared to pay for our exports of those commodities greatly increases the nation's real income. The spending of that income (including the part that ends up in the government's coffers because of higher company tax collections) gives a great boost to demand and employment.
As well, we get a huge increase in mining and related construction activity as the high prices they are receiving prompt the miners to greatly expand their production capacity.
At the same time, the improvement in our terms of trade - the prices we receive for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports - usually leads to a significant appreciation in our exchange rate.
And if all this happens at a time when the economy has little spare capacity and unemployment is low, the Reserve Bank soon starts to worry about rising wages and inflation pressure and begins trying to slow demand by jacking up interest rates.
That's where we were before the global financial crisis hit and it looks like where we will soon be returning.
If you look at how this affects the economy geographically, you see a two-speed economy. Queensland and Western Australia are in the fast lane, all the rest of the country is in the slow lane.
It's only when you divide the economy up by industry rather than by state that you see there are actually three lanes.
In the fast lane are mining and mining-related sectors (the mining services industry and even the heavy construction industry). These industries grow fast because the rise in the prices they're getting far outweighs the adverse effect on them of the higher exchange rate.
In the slow lane are the other trade-exposed sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing, inbound tourism and inbound education. These export or import-competing industries suffer because their prices haven't increased but the higher exchange rate has reduced their price competitiveness, either by reducing the number of Aussie dollars they receive for exports or by reducing the Aussie-dollar cost of the imports they compete against.
In the middle lane are the rest of our industries, which Henry calls the "non-traded sectors". Most of the non-traded sector is filled by service industries, but it includes goods industries selling stuff that cannot be exported or imported. It accounts for about three-quarters of the economy.
These industries will grow at a rate somewhere between the other two lanes.
Just how fast they grow depends on the relative strengths of the "negative supply shock" - arising because workers and capital are being competed away by the expanding resources sector - and the "positive demand shock" - arising from the nation's better terms of trade and higher real income, part of which raises demand for the non-traded sector's products.
Because these conflicting shocks cause demand and supply in the non-traded sector to be out of balance - with demand stronger and supply weaker - the sector's prices will rise to restore the balance.
This means Australia's inflation rate is likely to rise above the average of our trading partners' inflation rates. And this will cause the rise in the nominal exchange rate (the one we see) to become also a rise in our real exchange rate (which happens when our inflation rate exceeds the average - even without a nominal appreciation).
Fine. But before we start a long debate about the wider implications of a resurgent resources boom the threshold question is: how long will it last? Is it temporary or lasting? No one knows, of course, but Henry says there are three considerations.
The first is the global supply response to the increased demand for resources. "Sustained periods of strong prices and strengthened long-run price expectations can be expected to generate even stronger mining exploration and investment responses over time," Henry says.
"They can also drive a reassessment of the size of global mineral reserves that are recoverable at a commercially viable rate. And technological improvements will continue to place downward pressure on extraction costs."
So some of the short-run increase in prices is likely to be temporary. (The budget forecasts are based on an assumption that terms of trade deteriorate over time by 20 per cent.)
Second, there seems to be a long-term decline in commodity prices. In the last half of the 20th century, non-fuel commodity prices fell on average by 1.6 per cent a year relative to consumer prices.
But Henry argues that particular commodities can buck the general trend over protracted periods. For instance, the real world price of copper roughly doubled between 1930 and 1970.
And you can argue that the prices of non-renewable resources will be forced upwards over time as reserves are depleted and the cost of extraction rises as producers are pushed towards more marginal deposits.
Third, the rapid industrialisation of countries such as China and India still has a long way to run. The likelihood is that they will catch up with the developed countries, just as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore did before them.
Research says an emerging economy's demand for metals grows strongly until its income per person reaches about $20,000 a year.
Putting these three considerations together, Henry concludes we have at least reasonable grounds for believing that strong world demand for Australian commodities, and favourable terms of trade, will be "sustained for some time".
In the cautious way econocrats speak, "sustained for some time" means quite a few years. That's why we need to have a long think about the implications.
The most thought-provoking comment I've seen on the budget came from Senator Christine Milne of the Greens. ''Every Australian knows,'' she said, ''that if you have two credit cards, it is very bad management to pay off your debt on one of them by racking it up on the other.'' The budget ''pulled down the national economic debt, but it continued the process of racking up our ecological debt''.
Sadly, it's true. The budget formally records Kevin Rudd's failure of leadership with his cowardly and illogical decision to shelve his emissions trading scheme.
It shows he took steps to avoid being accused of using the abandonment of the scheme to hasten the budget's return to surplus by using the net cash saving involved - $653 million - to increase spending on renewable energy.
The reversal did make it possible for the Government to meet its commitment to limit the real growth in its spending to 2 per cent a year.
And it did mean it was abandoning a ''great big new tax on everything'' in favour of a great big new tax on the mining companies, with the proceeds to be used to buy votes with a range of tax cuts and concessions - surely a net political gain.
Even so, if the government wants to insist it was motivated more by lack of political courage than by budgetary expediency, I accept its protestation.
No, that's not the point. It's that the budget continues our practice of worrying intensely about what we're doing to the economy while ignoring what we're doing to the environment. We just took a decision to take our chances on global warming - to do nothing to prepare for global action on climate change and nothing to set an example others might follow - but nowhere does that show up as a cost or liability.
It's not in the budget, nor in gross domestic product. It's invisible. We carefully measure and hugely publicise any increase in government debt or setback in economic growth, but what our actions and inactions are doing to the environment is largely out of sight.
When we run down our non-renewable resources (as we're hoping to do at a much faster rate with the return of the resources boom), nowhere does this show up as a cost or reduction of our assets. When we continue to deplete renewable resources at a rate much faster than they can renew themselves, nowhere does this show up as any kind of negative.
When we continue pumping our waste back into the environment - including greenhouse gases, but also other air and water pollution, garbage and human waste - at a faster rate than it can absorb, nowhere is this recorded as a cost.
GDP, our great de facto measure of progress, counts the short-term benefits from all this exploitation, but ignores its long-term costs. So Milne is right: we have been paying off our economic credit card by racking up debt on our environmental credit card.
But as the still-unfolding global financial crisis reminds us, you can get away with racking up debt only for so long. And with the environment the day of reckoning has already started to dawn. Lift your head from the economic statistics and you see rising average temperatures, the clearing of native forests, the destruction of habitat, the decline in fish stocks, the damage we've done to the Murray-Darling and other river systems and the degrading of our soil.
So far we've managed to keep the economy separate from the environment, but we won't get away with that much longer. Why not? Because, in the words of a former US senator, ''the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment''.
The economy exists within the natural environment and is dependent on it. Logically, you could have the natural world without an economy - that is, without human activity - but you couldn't have an economy without a natural world.
We can go for a period running our economy at the expense of the environment - plundering its natural resources on one hand, pumping out our waste on the other - but eventually we start to get feedback. The despoiled and depleted ecosystem begins to malfunction, with serious consequences for the continued functioning of our economy.
We get a lot more extreme (and thus expensive) weather events, a rising sea level forces us to move back from the coast, we start running out of native forests and some mineral resources and fossil fuels (making energy and fertiliser a lot dearer), we see the destruction of international tourist attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef,
we have to move agriculture north to where the rain is, but the elimination of fish stocks and degradation of soil makes food production a lot harder and more expensive the world over.
How did we get into the mindset that allowed us to take the environment for granted? Well, mainly it's because economic activity is simply more visible than the environment. And because, until relatively recently, we could plunder the natural world with impunity.
But also because we're wedded to a way of thinking about (and measuring) the economy that, because it has changed little in the past 150 years, simply ignores the environment. Because at the time global economic activity was so small relative to the huge natural world, it made sense for the early economists to treat the environment as a ''free good'' - something so plentiful it comes without cost.
But with the human population having more than trebled since 1927 and the global standard of living also having risen considerably, it's no longer sensible to treat the environment as an ''externality''.
We need a new economic model - and a new way of measuring progress - that recognises the centrality of the environment to our wellbeing and keeps recording and reminding us when we charge things up on our environmental credit card, as Rudd has just done.
