OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 2011

Talk to Australian Business Economists Annual Forecasting Conference Sydney, December 8, 2010 Just as Glenn Stevens starts each appearance before the House economics committee by reviewing the fate of the forecasts he made at his previous appearance, so I have to start by reviewing the fearless forecasts I made this time last year. Usually Stevens can say his forecasts turned out pretty well, but I can’t. Since I know you guys...

Read more >>

Creating jobs not the be-all and end-all

I reckon I've had only about half a dozen job interviews in my life and only one - with the Financial Review - where I wasn't offered a job. When I was leaving school in Newcastle in the mid-1960s a local chartered accountant needed a youngster to be a junior audit clerk. He approached the school careers adviser, who recommended me. I was pleased to take the job, but left after two years to go full-time at uni. Nearing the end...

Read more >>

REGULATING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Talk to forum on Evidence-Based Regulatory Reform Monash University Law Chambers, December 6, 2010 Some of the most important ideas are deceptively simple. Who, for instance, could dispute that the practice of medicine, the making of government policy or the reform of government regulation should be ‘evidence-based’? I have a mate who’s an academic neurologist and when we’re at our holiday homes and getting our daily exercise...

Read more >>

Gillard indulges the mendicants at her peril

It's just as well Julia Gillard and her purse-string ministers are so committed to "a strong economy" because that's just what they're about to get. And let me tell you: an economy as strong as we're getting requires a strong government - something this lot hasn't been noted for. Contrary to last week's silliness over the national accounts, we have everything going for us. Our terms of trade - export prices relative to import...

Read more >>

Keep your shirt on, life could be worse

Oh! No! The economy was roaring along in June quarter, growing by 1.1 per cent, but now it has almost come to a halt, up just 0.2 per cent in the September quarter. What's more, take out a leap in rural production and we actually went backwards. It made a great story this week - thrills and spills in econoland - but I wouldn't believe it. Why not? Because in real life economies don't soar and dive in the space of six months...

Read more >>

As Labor spouts its values, gap rich poor gap widens

Why do I get the feeling that, after their just-short-of-disastrous showing in the August election, Julia Gillard and her ministers aren't so much engaged in soul-searching as in trying to improve their PR. They're all giving speeches about Labor's reason for existence, and they're all saying much the same thing, as though they were all briefed by the same spin doctor. Their central message is that Labor stands for a "strong...

Read more >>

IS AUSTRALIA THE LAND OF THE FAIR GO?

ACTU Whitlam Lecture, Melbourne, Tuesday, November 30, 2010 In writing and talking about equality and inequality, I always feel myself at a disadvantage. Everyone thinks they know more about it than I think I know. Just about everyone has it firmly fixed in their mind that the gap between rich and poor is growing - the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. This trend, they know, has been running for decades,...

Read more >>

Professed reformers spin lazy line on cost of living

Julia Gillard and her ministers are expressing their undying commitment to the economy and economic reform, but the way they pander to and even incite the punters' irrational whingeing about the cost of living gives the lie to their profession of economic faith. For obvious reasons, the government has been saying a lot lately about Labor's values and vision for Australia. According to Gillard: "A strong economy - and opportunity...

Read more >>

We're all paying a high price for hiding our debt

IT DOESN'T seem to have occurred to Julia Gillard that her resolve to make this the "decade of infrastructure" - with a gold-plated national broadband network as its centrepiece - doesn't fit with her core promise to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 and eliminate government debt ASAP. Indeed, the two policies laugh at each other. Both Gillard and Kevin Rudd succumbed to Costelloism - a brand of fiscal populism holding...

Read more >>

Punters well aware of economic case against more immigration

The Big Australia issue has gone quiet since the election but it hasn't gone away. It can't go away because it's too central to our future and, despite Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott's rare agreement to eschew rapid population growth, the issue remains unresolved. This year Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos, a global market research firm, and Bernard Salt of KPMG, a financial services firm, conducted interviews with business people and...

Read more >>

NBN plan has the signs of a historic stuff-up

I am starting to get a really bad feeling about Labor's plan for a national broadband network. The more it resists subjecting the plan to scrutiny, the more you suspect it has something to hide. I fear Julia Gillard is digging herself in deeper on a characteristically grandiose scheme her swaggering predecessor announced without thought to its daunting implications, when she should be looking for ways to scale the project down...

Read more >>

At your service, our economy's a work in progress

THE structure of our economy is set to change over the 2010s, creating winners and losers and plenty of complaints. So it's worth remembering the economy's structure has been changing continuously since the gold rush. An article by Ellis Connolly and Christine Lewis of the Reserve Bank reminds us that, over the past 80 years or so, the economy has been transformed from one centred on the production of primary products to an...

Read more >>

Others doing more than us to cut emissions

To adapt an old saying, bad news is halfway round the world before good news has got its boot on. The media love bad news because they know their customers find it more interesting. But when the news is mixed, ignoring the good bits can leave you with a false impression of reality. You already know the latest bad news on action to limit climate change: the loss of a Democrat majority in the House of Representatives has obliged...

Read more >>

Canberra's delusion: the budget is the economy

Notice anything strange about the release of the midyear budget update last week? Just about all the talking was done by politicians and political commentators, not economists and economic commentators. Why? Because from an economic perspective the update isn't such a big deal. It is just a six-monthly update. Treasury revises its economic forecasts, but the changes usually aren't big and they're always old news because they're...

Read more >>

How economists forgot much of what they knew

When I started as an economics writer in the mid-1970s, the Keynesian ideas that had guided macro-economic policy through the postwar Golden Age were judged a failure and economics was in crisis. But now, as Professor John Quiggin of the University of Queensland reminds us in his new book, Zombie Economics, the global financial crisis and the Great Recession have revealed the ideas that replaced simple Keynesianism as failures...

Read more >>