Let's stop pretending the old normal is just around the corner

Just as a new chief executive makes sure their first act is to clear out all the stuff-ups left by their predecessor, so a new federal government needs to release its econocrats from the ever-more dubious proposition that nothing in the economy has changed and we’ll soon be back to the old normal.

That’s the old normal of productivity improving by 1.5 per cent a year, the economy growing by 2.75 per cent and wages growing more than 1 per cent faster than the 2.5 per cent inflation rate, with unemployment of 5 per cent and a fat budget surplus rapidly returning the government’s net debt to zero.

That’s the happy fantasy the econocrats have been predicting every year since 2012, the year they helped former treasurer Wayne Swan delude himself he was “delivering” four budget surpluses in a row.

It’s the same fantasy guiding the forecasts in this year’s budget and allowing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to repeat Swan’s prediction.

A new government would do well to start by freeing itself from the purgatory of endlessly under-achieved forecasts. A re-elected government, of course, would find it much harder to free itself from addiction to the happy pills.

A now highly politicised Treasury seems to have had little trouble keeping this dubious faith that nothing fundamental in the economy has changed and that, every year the return to the old normal fails to happen – we’re up to seven and counting – makes this year’s forecast all the more likely to be the lucky winner.

No, it’s the Reserve Bank and its governor, Dr Philip Lowe, that’s had trouble reconciling the she’ll-be-right forecasting methodology with the daily reality of economic indicators that didn’t get the memo. Unlike Treasury, Lowe has to do it in public – and update his forecasts every quarter, not just twice a year.

The Reserve may be independent when it comes to making decisions about interest rates – though, as we saw last week, not still so independent it’s game to risk pricking the political happy bubble by cutting rates during an election campaign – but it has never allowed itself to be independent of Treasury’s forecasts.

Being bureaucrats, the Reserve’s bosses live in fear of ignorant journalists writing stories about Treasury and the Reserve being at loggerheads. So they never allow their forecasts to be more than a quarter of a percentage point at variance with Treasury’s.

Their bureaucratic minds also mean they prefer to initiate rate changes in February, May, August or on Melbourne Cup day, so their move can be justified in the quarterly statement on monetary policy published the following Friday.

All this does much to explain the contortions Lowe put himself through last week. Everything the Reserve said about the immediate outlook for the economy implied it should have begun cutting last week.

It slashed its forecasts for consumer spending, inflation and GDP for the rest of this calendar year, which of itself was enough to justify an immediate cut. Last Tuesday it told us enigmatically it “will be paying close attention to developments in the labour market”, but three days later forecast that unemployment would be unchanged at 5 per cent for the next two years.

What Lowe hasn’t explained is that the only thing in the labour market that would stop him cutting rates in the next few months is if unemployment were to fall. That’s because the one respect in which he’s broken free of the Treasury orthodoxy is his acknowledgement, before a parliamentary committee, that the best estimate of full employment (the “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment”) has dropped from about 5 per cent to about 4.5 per cent. If you’re not heading down to 4.5 per cent, why aren’t you cutting?

Trouble is, if full employment is 4.5 not Treasury’s 5, that means our “potential” growth rate is likely to be below Treasury’s 2.75 per cent (including its assumption of 1.5 per cent annual improvement in productivity). And, if that’s so, then our “output gap” will be less than the 1.25 percentage points that Treasury uses to justify its projection that the economy will grow for five years in a row at 3 per cent, before dropping back to 2.75 per cent a year.

The trick to Treasury’s forecasting is that, though it always cuts its immediate forecasts to accommodate the latest disappointment in the actual data, its mechanical projections assume “reversion to the mean”, so its later forecasts have to rise to meet the start of the we’re-back-to-normal projections. But it’s always the old mean we'll be reverting to, not any new one.

Now get this: measured on a consistent “year-average” basis, the Reserve’s latest “slashed” forecasts differ in no significant way from those Treasury put in this year's budget. When it comes to forecasting, the Reserve is slave to a politicised Treasury.

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Don't trust pollies to tell you the truth about tax

"You don’t grow the economy by taxing it more,” Scott Morrison declared in the ABC’s election debate. Then his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, claimed the Coalition’s $300 billion in tax cuts would make income tax “more progressive” not less. As a prospective major beneficiary of those cuts, I’d love to believe both claims. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to support either.

Meanwhile, higher income-earners should be in no doubt they’ll be paying a lot more tax should Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen come to power and get their plans through the Senate.

Labor plans to reduce the concessional treatment of negative gearing and capital gains, unused franking credits and family trusts, abandon the second and third stages of the $300 billion tax cuts, and increase the top rate of income tax by 2¢ in the dollar for three years.

If the line that “you don’t grow the economy by taxing it more” makes sense to you, you need to think harder. Taken literally, the sensible response to it is, “No one ever said you do”. It’s a non-sequitur – the first part of the sentence doesn’t fit with the last part.

Morrison wants you to think it means that taxes always discourage economic growth. This notion suits many well-off people who’d love to pay less tax, but that doesn’t make it true.

Say by some miracle we lived in a world with no taxes. It’s not clear that if we had no one enforcing laws, the roads were shocking, and only the rich could afford to educate their children or see a doctor, the economy would be much bigger and faster growing.

On the other hand, it would be true that taxes held back the economy’s growth if governments collected a lot of tax and then buried the money in a hole.

In the real world, however, governments spend almost all the money they collect in taxes (if not more). Some of that money may be wasted, but much of it does a lot of good – to the economy and the people who make up the economy.

We all benefit from living in law-abiding country, with decent roads, low-cost education and good healthcare, not to mention the high wages our educations and health enable us to earn. Our businesses also benefit from operating in such a country.

It’s true that some countries have tax systems that collect their taxes in ways that do more to discourage economic activity than other countries do. It’s true, too, that some countries spend their tax dollars more effectively than others.

But what economists have never been able to demonstrate is that those countries with high rates of total taxation – the Scandinavians, for instance – have smaller and slower-growing economies than those countries with low rates of tax.

There would be more truth in Morrison’s line if he changed it to say “you don’t grow the economy by taxing it less” – you just leave some people better off and others worse off.

Which brings us to Frydenberg’s remarkable claim that his $300-billion tax plan – where the first stage goes mainly to middle income-earners, but the two later stages go disproportionately to people earning a lot more than $100,000 a year - will make the income tax scale more “progressive” rather than less.

As I explained in detail in this column a month ago, a progressive tax is one that takes a progressively higher proportion of people’s incomes as incomes rise.

But two economists at the Australian National University’s research school of economics, Associate Professor Chung Tran and Nabeeh Zakariyya, have produced a more sophisticated analysis, using the Suits index (invented by Daniel Suits) to express our income tax scale’s progressivity as a single number, and then see how it has changed over the years.

Unsurprisingly, they find that our income tax scale is and always has been progressive (and will stay progressive if the Coalition’s tax plan comes to pass).

They found that, in 2016, the top 10 per cent of taxpayers accounted for 32 per cent of all the pre-tax income, but 46 per cent of all the income tax paid. That’s progressive. Between them, their marginal tax rate (on the last part of their income) was 41¢ in the dollar, but their average tax rate (on all their income) was just 29¢ in the dollar.

More surprisingly, the authors found that the scale’s degree of progressivity changes from year to year, and tends to move in cycles of greater and lesser progressiveness.

What factors cause these cycles? Government-initiated changes in the scale, obviously, but also changes in the distribution of pre-tax income between income-earners and – a big one – the effects of “bracket creep” as inflation pushes people onto higher tax brackets or otherwise raises their average rate of tax.

Significantly, the authors confirmed Treasury’s contention that bracket creep reduces progressivity - that is, it favours high income-earners (who don't have a higher tax bracket to be pushed onto).

They find that the income tax scale’s progressiveness declined in the Howard government years between 2001 and 2006, but then increased sharply, reaching a peak in 2010 (during the Labor years), but since then has declined slowly (thanks to bracket creep and the absence of tax cuts, as governments gave top priority to reducing the budget deficit).

Even so, the scale was more progressive in 2016 than it was in 2004.

Frydenberg’s claim that his three-stage tax plan would make income tax more progressive seems based on the fact that the top tax rate would be unchanged at 45¢ in the dollar, while some lower rates fell and, according to Treasury’s debatable projections, by 2024 the top 5 per cent of taxpayers’ share of total tax paid would have risen from 32.7 per cent to 32.9 per cent.

Should his plan actually come about, the Suits index will tell us whether it really has made income tax more progressive rather than less. Since people on $200,000 will have their average tax rate cut by 4.5¢ in every dollar of income, I very much doubt it.

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Interest rate cuts are coming, which isn't good news

The Reserve Bank may have decided not to cut interest rates right now, but it’s likely to be only a few months before it does start cutting, and it’s unlikely to stop at one. So, is it just waiting until after the election? I doubt that’s the reason.

The Reserve has moved interest rates twice during election campaigns – raising them in 2007 (much to the surprise of Peter Costello, whose mind was on politics at the time) and cutting them in 2013 – so, had Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe considered an immediate cut was needed, I doubt he would have hesitated to make it.

The Reserve acts independently of the elected government, so it is – and must be seen to be - apolitical. Lowe’s predecessor, Glenn Stevens – who instigated both those previous moves – decided that the only way to be genuinely apolitical was for him to act as soon as he believed the best interests of the economy required him to, regardless of what the politicians were up to at the time.

I doubt his former deputy and understudy, Lowe, would see it any differently.

So, is Lowe’s judgement that a rate cut isn’t needed urgently bad news or good for Scott Morrison – or, conversely, for Bill Shorten?

First point: stupid question. What matters most is whether it’s good or bad news for you and me, and the economy we live in, not the fortunes of the people we hire to run the country for us. The rest is mere political speculation.

The media invariably judge a fall in interest rates to be good news and a rise bad news. But this is far too narrow a perspective. For a start, it assumes all their customers have mortgages and none are saving for a home deposit or for retirement. The retired are absolutely hating the present protracted period of record low interest rates.

For another thing, it assumes that our loans or our deposits are the only things that matter to our economic wellbeing. That the central bank’s movement of interest rates has no implications for, say, our prospects of getting a decent pay rise, or of hanging onto our job.

The fact is that central banks use the manipulation of interest rates to influence the rate at which the economy’s growing. They raise rates when everything’s going swimmingly and, in fact, needs slowing down a bit to keep inflation in check.

They cut interest rates when things aren’t going all that well – when, for instance, low wage increases are causing anaemic growth in consumer spending and this is giving businesses little incentive to expand their operations, or when a rise in unemployment is threatening.

Penny dropped? A cut in interest rates is a portent of tougher times ahead, whereas a rise in rates says the good times are rolling and will keep doing so for a while yet.

So it’s not at all clear that, had he cut rates, Lowe would have been doing Morrison a favour politically and doing Shorten a disservice.

In Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech a month ago – it seems an eternity – he used the phrase “strong growth” 14 times. Turned out Morrison was basing his case for re-election on the claim that the Coalition had returned the economy to strong growth – after the mess those terrible unwashed union people had made, as they always do.

That claim is now not looking so believable. It was in trouble even before the budget, when we learnt in March that the economy had suffered a second successive quarter of weak growth, slashing the rise in real gross domestic product during 2018 to just 2.3 per cent – rather than the 3 per cent the Reserve had been talking about.

This was the first sign that, having left its official interest rate steady at 1.5 per cent for more than two and a half years, the Reserve needed to think about using a cut in rates to help push the economy along.

The next sign came just a fortnight ago, when the release of the consumer price index showed that, while some prices fell and others rose during the March quarter, on balance there was no change in the cost of the typical basket of goods and services bought by households.

This caused the annual rate of price increase to fall from 1.8 per cent to 1.3 per cent – at a time when the Reserve had gone for more than three years assuring us it would soon be back in the Reserve’s target range of between 2 and 3 per cent.

So, quite a blow to the Reserve’s assurances that the economy was getting stronger, and a sign it should be thinking seriously about cutting rates to kick things along. (Prices tend to rise faster the faster the economy is growing so, paradoxically, very low inflation is a worrying sign.)

In which case, why has Lowe hesitated? Because, I suspect, he’s waiting for the third shoe to fall. Employment has been growing faster than you’d expect in a weak economy, so he may be waiting for signs it’s slowing, too.

And he’d want to be confident a cut in interest rates didn’t restart the housing boom in Sydney and Melbourne, which has left too many people with far too much debt.

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Universities: both sides should clean up the mess they've made

Among the many issues needing early attention from the winner of the federal election is universities. Trouble is, neither side seems to have much idea of how to fix the mess both parties spent decades creating, before Julia Gillard brought things to a head with the brainwave of moving to “demand-driven” funding.

Her idea of shifting control over the size of annual federal-funded undergraduate admissions from budget-conscious bureaucrats in Canberra to individual universities ignored the decades of funding repression to which the unis had previously been subjected.

Governments of both persuasions had gone for years trying to get the universities off the budget books by a process of de facto privatisation. Unis were given the power to charge (government-set) tuition fees to local students – HECS – and unrestricted power to charge overseas students – but with commensurate cuts in government grants.

The result has been to make vice chancellors as money-obsessed as any company chief executive, but without the private sector’s simple profit-maximising objective. Universities have lost their way, no longer sure what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

Meanwhile, when Gillard opened the unis’ access to the federal coffers the predictable happened: vice chancellors went crazy, slashing entry requirements and cramming in as many more under-qualified undergrads as they could.

This seems to have been particularly true of second-string and regional unis. Australian Catholic University, Swinburne and Sunshine Coast more than doubled their domestic undergrad enrolments between 2008 and 2017. Another six increased their enrolments by more than half.

Gillard’s move to demand-driven funding was linked to her policy of raising the proportion of school-leavers going on to higher education to 40 per cent. A worthy goal – except that everyone took “higher education” to mean going to uni.

So, at a time when federal and state governments were engaged in their disastrous experiment with using “contestability” to get TAFE off their budgets, it suited both status-conscious parents and money-strapped lesser universities for the unis to cut their entry standards and poach kids who would have been better served getting a technical education.

Returning to the feds’ budget preoccupation, after the unis’ inevitable demand-driven raid on the federal purse came the Finance Department’s inevitable cry of pain: we can’t possibly afford this hugely increased cost.

The accountants’ solution – one that couldn’t have made sense to anyone who understood how un-market-like universities are – came in the Abbott government’s first budget: match the deregulation of uni places with the deregulation of uni fees (and cut uni grants by 20 per cent while you’re at it).

Fortunately, the Senate firmly rejected this bizonomics stupidity. But this left Abbott’s successors bereft of ideas to limit the unis’ cost to the budget. They ended up doing what they could do without parliamentary approval: canning the demand-driven system.

Which brings us to the election campaign. Labor is promising to restore demand-driven funding – but also to instigate an inquiry to find a more sensible division of roles between the two parts of higher education. Hopefully, the latter would undo the damage done by the former.

The Coalition is persisting with its spending cuts. But, because regional universities are claiming to be hard hit by those cuts, it promises special spending to help them (think National Party rent seeking).

But none of this would fix the real problem with the way universities have allowed their funding problems to undermine their commitment to high-quality undergraduate teaching and even high-quality research.

They’ve gone too close to turning undergrad teaching into a money-making sausage machine, where you have to be really dumb not to pass, where you don’t need to attend lectures because it’s all online, where lecturers – who will perish if they don’t get their publications up – limit their students’ access time, and where the lecturer is a casual because the person who should be doing it has brought in a big research grant and been rewarded by being allowed to “buy out” their teaching load.

Universities treat their junior academic staff badly (we get flexibility, you get insecurity) and have become bamboozled by KPIs and other faddish “metrics”. Their worryingly high dependence on fees from overseas students means the sandstone “Group of Eight” unis have become obsessed by lifting their place on the various international rankings of universities.

Why? So they can attract more overseas students and charge them higher fees. While their academics find ways to game their KPIs, their many “pro-vice chancellor (something in brackets)” search for ways to use their academic appointments and research direction to game the international rankings.

I think a much more comprehensive inquiry is needed.

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Only the stupid think the cost of climate change is simple

You know an election campaign has run off the rails when the pollies start hurling the results of economic modelling at each other. Voters find it incomprehensible and cover their ears, and the only people who think it proves something are the pollies themselves and the journalists silly enough to imagine their incessant demands to “show us your modelling” will expose the truth.

The more you know about modelling, the less it impresses you. There’s a place for economic modelling, but it’s in a seminar room, being pulled apart by experts, not in the argy-bargy of politicians seeking election, vested interests seeking more bucks, and journos who think their customers will just love a bit more meaningless conflict.

Thinking people know and accept that the future is unknowable. Unthinking people delude themselves that somewhere out there is an expert with a magic box – or maybe a crystal ball - who can give them a sneak peek at what only God knows in advance.

The only truly honest thing a modeller could tell you (which their need to earn a living invariably stops them doing) is: What on earth makes you think I’d know?

In the public debate, modelling is about misleading people – unknowingly or, more often, knowingly. It’s used like a drunk uses a lamppost: more for support than illumination.

There are two approaches you can take to modelling results. One, believe all results that fit with your prejudices and ignore all those that don’t. Two, be sceptical of them all and don’t accept any results where you haven’t been told which assumptions are the main drivers of those results.

Although Prime Minister Scott Morrison has only an unconvincing policy to achieve the 26 to 28 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, to which Australia has committed itself, the media is pounding Opposition Leader Bill Shorten to reveal the “cost” of his promise to reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.

For reasons I don’t understand, Shorten is displaying a degree of honesty rarely seen in Canberra and claiming he doesn’t know the cost. The media can tell a lie when they see one, and are almost apoplectic in their efforts to extract the truth from him.

To the media, it’s a simple question, so it must have a simple answer and Shorten must know it. If he knows but won’t tell us, this can only be because the cost is absolutely horrendous. His climate change spokesman, Mark Butler, says it’s impossible to know the cost – but that’s obviously another lie.

Which, in a way, it is. It’s not possible to know the cost with the remotest degree of accuracy, but it’s perfectly possible to fudge something up and say it’s the cost.

What cost is that? The cost of whatever suits. Cost to the budget? Cost to the economy? Cost to the economy that ignores any benefit to the economy? Cost to the economy that ignores the cost of not doing anything?

Shorten’s in trouble because - for once – he isn’t playing the game the way the denizens of the House with the Flag on Top expect it to be played. Why won’t the man do the honourable thing and pay some “independent” economic consultancy to do some modelling that proves the cost would be minor?

An old political rule says that, whenever you leave a vacuum, your opponent will be happy to fill it for you. Enter Morrison, waving modelling carried out by Dr Brian Fisher, a former head of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and now a consultant to the mining industry.

Fisher denies being a climate change sceptic and says the government didn’t sponsor his modelling. He’s been modelling the cost of acting against climate change since his time at ABARE in the 1990s and invariably finds it to be surprisingly high (I can remember decades ago writing to explain why his results weren’t as bad they could be made to sound).

His latest modelling finds that Labor’s policy would cause gross national product to be at least $264 billion, and as much as $542 billion, lower than it would otherwise be in 2030. By then the wholesale price of electricity would be up to 67 per cent higher than otherwise. Real wages would be up to 10 per cent lower than otherwise, and employment would be up to 300,000 lower than otherwise.

For what it’s worth, other economists who are experts on climate change have said these estimates of the costs are (to put it politely) far too high.

What’s more important to understand is that econometric models are built on a heap of assumptions – assumptions about how the economy works, and assumptions about what will happen in the future.

Dr Richard Denniss, of the Australia Institute, offers this list of things no one knows, but modellers have to make assumptions about if they want to claim they know what some policy change will cost: how far and how fast the cost of renewable energy and battery storage will fall; how far and how fast the cost of electric cars will fall; how quickly firms that face higher energy prices will adapt by increasing their efficiency; how the introduction of new sources of electricity generation and storage will disrupt the business models of today’s highly profitable electricity retailers; how regulation of energy prices will increase or decrease the monopoly profits of energy and petrol companies; how much the trend to household electricity generation and storage will increase the efficiency of the national grid by reducing problems with seasonal peaks in demand; whether the batteries of electric cars will be a form of free storage for the national grid; and how long it will take for autonomous vehicles to transform car ownership and use.

Still think the cost of Labor’s emissions policy is a simple question with a simple answer - that’s believable?

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THE HEALTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN ECONOMY

May 2019

In Josh Frydenberg’s recent budget speech, he referred to our “strong economy” no less than 14 times. Turns out the Morrison government is using the claim that it has delivered a strong economy as its main argument that it should be re-elected at the federal election on May 18. Unfortunately for Scott Morrison, the release of recent key economic indicators of the health of the economy have caused many economists to abandon their view that the economy is reasonably strong and about to get stronger.

The first upset came in early March, with the national accounts for the December quarter of last year showing a second successive quarter of surprisingly weak growth, which lowered the growth in real GDP over 2018 to just 2.3 per cent. The second data upset came in late April, with the CPI showing no overall change in prices in the March quarter of this year, thus causing the annual rate of inflation to fall to 1.3 per cent – way down from 1.8 per cent the previous quarter and way below the bottom of the Reserve Bank’s inflation target of 2 to 3 per cent on average. This news of weak economic growth and an inflation rate moving further below the target range has greatly increased the pressure on the RBA to add to the monetary stimulus acting on the economy by cutting the overnight cash rate, after having held it steady for more than two and a half years.

To see how disappointing this recent news is, consider this. In Morrison’s own budget this time last year, he forecast that the economy’s growth (real GDP) in the financial year just ending would have accelerated to 3 per cent. In this year’s budget Mr Frydenberg cut this forecast to 2¼ per cent. Last year Morrison forecast an inflation rate of 2¼ per cent in the financial year just ending; now Frydenberg has cut it to 1½ per cent. Morrison forecast wages growth of 2¾ per cent; Frydenberg cut it to 2½ per cent.

The fact is that, for most of the time since the global financial crisis, Treasury and the RBA have been forecasting that the economy would soon return to growing at its “trend” or “potential” rate - which they calculate to be 2¾ per cent a year – and even a bit faster while the economy uses up idle production capacity, know as the “output gap”, before reaching full employment of labour and other resources. Full employment is estimated to be growth of 2¾ per cent and a NAIRU – non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment - of about 5 per cent. This would involve inflation returning to the centre of the RBA’s target range, 2½ per cent, and wage growth increasing to 3½ per cent.

Budget forecasts: Treasury has forecast that this acceleration would begin each year for the past seven years. And each year, when it has failed to happen, Treasury has repeated the forecast of an early return to the “old normal”, just moving it forward a year. Surprisingly, despite the recent evidence of a sharp slowing in the economy in the financial year just ending, in this year Treasury persisted with forecasting that the economy will soon return to the “old normal”. Indeed, it sees the economy speeding up in the coming financial year, 2019-20, returning to potential growth of 2¾ per cent, staying at the NAIRU of 5 per cent, inflation back in the target range at 2¼ per cent and wage growth strengthening to 2¾ per cent, implying real wage growth of about ½ per cent. And things get even better in the following year, 2020-21, with real wage growth increasing to ¾ per cent, then 1 per cent in each of the following years. It would be wonderful to see these forecasts come to pass, but they are increasingly hard to believe.

Why the economy’s weakness hasn’t been evident until now: There are four main reasons why the economy’s continuing weakness hasn’t been evident until now. First, we’ve been preoccupied with the ups and downs of the decade-long resources boom: the rise and then fall in mineral export prices and our terms of trade, and then the rise and fall of mining investment spending.

Second, our rates of growth have compared well with other advanced economies because we have had much higher rates of population growth than they have. Over the 6½ years since mid-2012, real GDP has grown by 17 per cent, whereas GDP per person grew by less than 6 per cent. In other words, most of our growth was explained by a fast-growing population, not by higher productivity and growing prosperity. The economy was bigger, but not a lot better. Measured by GDP per person, our growth has not been a lot faster than the other rich countries.

Third, in 2017, our growth in employment was about twice as fast as usual, and since then it has been faster than usual. Over the past 2¼ years the unemployment rate has fallen from 5.8 per cent to 5 per cent – which is impressive. Even so, it’s now only a fraction lower than it was in mid-2012. Similarly, the under-employment rate has fallen over the past 2¼ years, but is still quite a lot higher than it was in mid-2012.

Fourth, much of what growth we’ve had in the economy, and in employment, has come from the public sector, not the private sector. Of the 2.3 per cent growth in GDP over 2018, increased government consumption and investment spending accounted for more than half. Similarly, most of the growth in employment has come from the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and from increased spending on infrastructure by the states, as well as in health and education. The point here is not that there is something bad about government spending, but just that, when you take it away, you find the private sector economy – the biggest part of the economy - isn’t strong.

The key role of wages: Much of the economy’s weak growth and weak prospects of faster growth can be explained by weak growth in real wages. It’s not surprising that nominal wage growth has been low when consumer price inflation has also been low, but there has been almost no real wage growth for the past five years. In the past, a healthy economy has seen real wages growing by a per cent or more each year, roughly in line with growth in the productivity of labour. An economy with no growth in real wages is an economy in which real economic growth is likely to be weak. This is because wages are the main source of growth in household disposable income, household disposable income is the main source of growth in consumer spending, and consumer spending accounts for about 60 per cent of GDP. What’s more, firms are unlikely to invest much in expanding their business if demand for their products isn’t strong. And it’s firms replacing their equipment with the latest model than does most to increased productivity by spread new technology through the economy. Treasury and the RBA have been forecasting a recovery in real wage growth for five years or more, but it still hasn’t happened. The union movement and some labour economists have argued that the decentralisation of wage fixing has shifted the balance of bargaining power in favour of employers and robbed workers of their ability to ensure their real wages keep rising. Whatever the true cause of weak wage growth, it’s certainly hard to see the economy returning to strong growth until real wages are growing strongly.

Now let’s turn to how the two arms of macroeconomic management – monetary policy and fiscal policy - have been responding to this story of disappointingly weak growth in wages and GDP.

The monetary policy “framework”

Monetary policy - the manipulation of interest rates to influence the strength of demand - is conducted by the RBA independent of the elected government. It is the primary instrument by which the managers of the economy pursue internal balance - low inflation and low unemployment. Monetary policy is conducted in accordance with the inflation target: to hold the inflation rate between 2 and 3 pc, on average, over time. The primary instrument of MP is the overnight cash rate, which the RBA controls via market operations.

Recent developments in monetary policy

Because of the six consecutive years of below-trend growth since 2011-12, the Reserve Bank cut its cash rate from 4.25 pc to 1.5 pc between the end of 2011 and August 2016. For more than 2½ years after that, it left the rate unchanged – a record period of stability. It’s not hard to see why it left the official interest rate so low for so long: the inflation rate has been below its target range; wage growth has been weak, suggesting no likelihood of rising inflation pressure; the economy has yet to accelerate and has plenty of unused production capacity, and the rate of unemployment shows little sign of falling below its estimated NAIRU of 5 pc. For many months, the RBA governor, Dr Philip Lowe, kept saying that, though the next move in the cash rate, when it came, was likely to up, a rise was some way off. Earlier this year, however, he switched to saying that the next move was just as likely to be down as up. And now, with the recent bad results on growth and inflation, he is under pressure to start cutting the cash rate.

Fiscal policy “framework”

Fiscal policy - the manipulation of government spending and taxation in the budget - is conducted according to the Morrison government’s medium-term fiscal strategy: “to achieve budget surpluses, on average, over the course of the economic cycle”. This means the primary role of discretionary fiscal policy is to achieve “fiscal sustainability” - that is, to ensure we don’t build up an unsustainable level of public debt. However, the strategy leaves room for the budget’s automatic stabilisers to be unrestrained in assisting monetary policy in pursuing internal balance. It also leaves room for discretionary fiscal policy to be used to stimulate the economy and thus help monetary policy manage demand, in exceptional circumstances - such as the GFC - provided the stimulus measures are temporary.

Recent developments in fiscal policy

Until recently, 2017-18, the Coalition government (and the Labor government before it) had seen the growth in the economy being repeatedly less than forecast, meaning the government has made slow progress in returning the budget to surplus and halting the rise in its net debt. Even so, it has focused on the medium-term objective of fiscal sustainability, not the secondary objective of helping monetary policy to get the economy growing faster. The long period of policy stimulus has come almost wholly from lower official interest rates.

In the year to June 30, 2018, however, the underlying cash budget deficit proved a lot lower than expected - thanks mainly to an improvement in export commodity prices and higher company tax collections for other reasons. The improvement in export prices continued in bolster company tax collections in the financial year just ending, 2018-19, producing another big fall in the budget deficit. How can the budget be improving rapidly when economic growth has been weak? Because of the unexpected improvement in the terms of trade and thus mining company profits and tax payments.

Since this year’s budget rests on Treasury’s continued assumption that the economy is about to return to the strong growth of old, Mr Frydenberg is forecasting a return to a modest budget surplus of $7 billion (0.4 pc of GDP) in 2019-20, with the surplus continuing to grow in future years.

This forecast improvement in the budget balance means that, when expressed as a proportion of GDP, the federal government’s net debt is now expected to peak at 19 pc in June 2019, and then fall back to zero by June 2030. Again, it will be a great thing if it happens. It also means the budget balance is expect to continue improving despite the budget’s centrepiece, a doubling of last year’s plan for tax cuts in three stages (July 2018, July 2022 and July 2024) over seven years, with a cumulative cost to the budget of a remarkable $300 billion over 10 years. This is possible because of plan’s slow start.

Judged the RBA’s way, by its “fiscal impact” (the expected direction and size of the change in the overall budget balance), the “stance of fiscal policy” adopted in the budget is mildly contractionary. However, judged the Keynesian way (which focuses on the expected direction and size of the change in just the structural or discretionary component of the budget balance) the stance is mildly stimulatory, thanks to the doubled immediate first stage of the tax cuts.

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Endless fights over money don’t improve education results

One of the few things both sides agree on in this election campaign is that we must get education right. A highly educated and well-trained workforce is our best insurance that all the benefits that digital disruption brings don’t come at the cost of many people unable to find decent jobs.

As a rich nation, our workers are highly paid. That’s not bad, it’s good. But it does mean we have to ensure our workers continue being equipped with the knowledge and skills that make their labour valuable - to local employers and to the purchasers of the goods and services we export.

One thing it doesn’t mean is that all our youngsters should go to university. There will be plenty of well-paid, safe, interesting jobs for the less academically inclined, provided they’re equipped with the valuable technical and caring skills provided by a healthy vocational education and training sector.

A top-notch technical education system will also be key to achieving something we’ve long just rabbited on about: lifelong learning. Being able to update your skills for your occupation’s latest digital whiz-bangery, or quickly acquire different skills for a job in a new industry with better prospects than the one that just ejected you.

But while we’re emphasising education’s instrumental importance to maintaining our material standard of living, we should never lose sight of its intrinsic value to our spiritual living standard. Education for its own sake. Because it satisfies humans’ insatiable curiosity about the world – even the universe – we live in.

We need to get education and training right at every level, from childcare (these days renamed ECEC - “early childhood education and care”), preschool, primary and secondary school, vocational education and training, and university.

To me, our greater understanding of the way tiny brains develop combines with common sense to say that, in our efforts to get every level of education up to scratch, we should start at the bottom and work up.

The better-equipped kids are when they progress from one stage to the next, the easier it is for that next stage to ensure they thrive rather than fall behind.

On childcare, the Coalition did a good job of rationalising the feds’ two conflicting childcare subsidies, but Labor is promising a lot more money for childcare, including phasing in much better pay for (mainly female) better-educated childcare workers.

The Coalition has achieved universal preschool for four-year-olds and, in the budget, extended that funding for a further two years. Labor has topped that, promising permanent funding arrangements and extension of the scheme to three-year-olds, as most other rich countries do.

Let’s be frank: because Labor plans to increase, rather than cut, the tax on high income-earners, it has a lot more money to spend on all levels of education (plus a lot of other areas).

It’s certainly promising to spend more on schools. The Coalition’s great achievement has been to introduce its own, better and somewhat cheaper version of businessman David Gonski’s needs-based funding of schools – which it immediately marred by doing a special deal with Catholic schools.

Labor’s promising to return to its earlier Gonski funding levels (but, hopefully, not to its earlier commitment that no rich school would lose a dollar).

It’s often claimed we spend a lot on schools relative to other countries, but the Grattan Institute’s schools expert, Dr Peter Goss, says that, when you allow for our younger population, only the Netherlands and the United States spend less than we do among nine other comparable rich countries.

International testing shows our 15-year-olds’ scores for maths, science and reading are each below the average for those countries. On maths, our score of 524 in 2003 had dropped to 494 by 2015.

For science, our gap between the top and bottom students – a measure of fairness - is wider than for the others, bar Canada, South Korea, Japan and even Britain.

Which demolishes the claim that we’re pouring more money into schools but getting worse results. What’s true is that our spending is below average and our results are also below average – and getting worse.

So, do we need to spend a lot more? No, not a lot more now we’ve gone a long way towards redistributing funding favour of needy (mainly public) schools full of kids with low income, low educated parents.

The feds and, more particularly, the states have more to do to re-align funding between advantaged non-government schools and their own disadvantaged public schools.

Once disadvantaged schools are getting their full whack of needs-based funding, however, we can end the eternal shootfight over money and move to the more important issue of ensuring the money's better spent.

Much can be done to help teachers move to more effective ways of teaching, making schools less like a production line and giving more attention to individuals, many of whom have trouble keeping up, while some are insufficiently challenged.

But, Goss says, this is mainly a job for the state governments, and the feds should avoid trying to backseat drive. The feds would help more by obliging the universities to do a much better job of selecting and preparing future teachers.

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Treasury signs off on budget fantasy forecasts

While we were preparing for the Easter-Anzac super long weekend, the secretary to the Treasury and the secretary of the Finance Department released the PEFO – pre-election economic and fiscal outlook – their official, once-every-three-years licence to tell us anything the government hasn’t told us but should have. And what was that? Not a sausage.

They made trivial updates to the budget figures and solemnly swore that all the rest of it “reflects the best professional judgement of the officers of the Treasury and the Department of Finance”. Wow. Really?

This despite the fact that, taken at face value, this is the most fiscally irresponsible budget since Whitlam. It’s a budget claiming to be able to cut income tax by $300 billion over 10 years and spend $100 billion on infrastructure over 10 years, while still returning to continuous surplus and eliminating the net debt over the same period.

No sensible person could believe all that was likely to come to pass. Far more probable that, should those tax cuts and spending increases actually happen, it wouldn’t be long before the budget was back in deficit and the debt was growing not falling.

We owe it to the Grattan Institute’s Danielle Wood and her team for joining the dots, provided in the bowels of the budget papers, to reveal how the cost of the tax cuts stays small until the last year of the budget’s “forward estimates”, 2022-23, then leaps to a cost of about $35 billion a year, rising to about $45 billion a year in 2029-30.

Never before have we had tax cuts remotely approaching such a cost.

The reason this grandiosity reminds no one of the Whitlam era is that no one takes it at face value. No one believes it could possibly happen. It’s a description of a future fantasyland.

First, it’s the budget of a chronically unpopular government desperately trying to bribe its way back to office, with little chance of succeeding.

Second, its supposed action is many years – and two or three elections – off in the future. Whatever transpires over the next decade, we can be pretty sure it won’t bear much resemblance to the scenario painted in the budget papers.

But if it’s all harmless bulldust, it can hardly reflect Treasury’s “best professional judgement” unless Treasury’s joined the happy fiction business. And the fact remains that, even more than its predecessors, this is a budget calculated to mislead.

What Treasury declines to make sure we realise is that the magic is all achieved by assumption. Convenient assumption.

Just as Wayne Swan’s promised return to permanent surplus – and his later assurance that his hugely expensive disability insurance scheme and Gonski school funding, though carefully hidden beyond the forward estimates, were “fully funded” – were based on overly optimistic assumptions that failed to come to pass, so is Josh Frydenberg’s promised return to permanent surplus and his assurance that his $300 billion in tax cuts and $100 billion in infrastructure spending are fully funded.

The trick has two parts. First, assume (as you did in each of the seven previous budgets) that, within a year or two, the economy’s growth will have returned to the old normal, where it will stay forever.

Second, assume the government will be able to sustain for many years a degree of spending restraint never achieved in the past. Make sure this heroic assumption is turned into a cabinet resolution, so it can be passed off as the seemingly innocuous assumption of “unchanged policy”, not the mere New Year’s resolution it really is.

Swan’s claim (proved by lovely graphs) that his hidden spending plans were fully funded was based on government policy to limit spending growth to 2 per cent real a year on average – a goal he repeatedly claimed to be achieving, but never did.

Frydenberg’s claim (with lovely graphs) that his post-forward-estimates tax cuts and spending increases are fully funded is based on a government policy to limit real spending growth to even less than Swan’s 2 per cent, which will cause total government spending to fall from 24.9 per cent of GDP to an unbelievable 23.6 per cent by 2029-30.

Again, we’ve had to rely on Grattan’s Wood to join the dots the budget papers don’t and tell us Frydenberg’s happy assumptions imply annual spending cuts increasing to about $40 billion a year by the final year. (She has also explained the tricks on which the government’s claim to have limited its real spending growth to 1.9 per cent a year relies.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the economic outlook is so strong the Reserve Bank is deciding whether it needs to start cutting interest rates immediately, or can afford to wait until unemployment starts rising.

And continuing strong growth, we’re asked to believe, is Treasury’s best professional judgement.

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Election competition over infrastructure is too costly

The popular view of infrastructure is that we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so the more we spend the better for the economy. The sad reality is that every year huge amounts of taxpayers’ money are wasted on infrastructure – and much of the damage is begun in election campaigns.

This is not to deny that well-chosen and executed infrastructure projects contribute significantly to improving the productivity of the economy – its ability to produce more goods and services per unit of inputs of economic resources.

It may even be true that we have a backlog of projects we should be getting on with. But that doesn’t mean we’re not wasting a shedload of money – mainly by building the wrong things in the wrong places.

Sadly, in our messy world, shortages of infrastructure can exist side by side with waste and extravagance. The more money we waste, the bigger the shortages.

Why does this happen? Often because good economics gets trumped by expedient politics. Often what’s good economics lacks sex appeal – spending enough each year to ensure roads and rail lines are well maintained, for instance – whereas politicians are irresistibly attracted to projects that are new, flashy and appeal to the unthinking (radio shock jocks, for example) as just what they think we need.

And because political parties mostly want to use the announcement of new spending projects to win voters’ approval in those electorates they might lose or could win.

That’s why election campaigns are when the seeds of later waste are sown. You think of something that will sound nice, pick a price tag that sounds big but not too big, travel to the right town, don hi-vis jacket and hard hat, wait till the media cameras arrive, make the grand promise – and then wait till you’re elected or re-elected to get the bureaucrats to "do the paperwork" – estimate how much it really will cost and work up some sort of "business case" showing the project’s benefits will exceed its costs.

This, of course, is just the opposite of how you’d go about ensuring every dollar spent was well-spent. Someone suggests a project, you put it to the test. What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve? How does it rank in importance against all our other problems?

The particular project you’re examining is probably just one way of solving the nominated problem. What are the other options? You compare the various options by making the best measurement you can of each one’s costs and expected benefits to the community, then pick the option where the benefits most exceed the costs. (There may well be some unquantifiable considerations that also need to be taken into account.)

By this point you ought to have a well-informed estimate of the chosen project’s monetary cost. That estimate should allow for the likelihood that not everything will run according to plan.

According to Hugh Batrouney, then of the Grattan Institute, last year the federal government proposed rail links to the (future) Western Sydney airport and to Tullamarine airport. (Note the symmetry. If Sydney’s getting something, better have something similar for Melbourne.)

At the time of announcement, neither project had a developed business case. But the opposition was quick to support the government’s proposal.

Trouble is, a government study found that Western Sydney won’t need a rail link until 2036 at the earliest. In the case of Melbourne’s rail link, the project’s route hasn’t been resolved, let alone its costs, ticket pricing structure or potential benefits.

And Infrastructure Victoria said upgrading airport bus services should be investigated before spending on a rail link – which, in any case, would be much more expensive and couldn’t be delivered for at least 15 years.

Grattan’s healthcare expert, Dr Stephen Duckett, says that when federal politicians promise to build new hospitals in particular places – as both sides have done in this campaign – they interfere with the state governments’ responsibility to plan where the next hospital development should be, so as to ensure access to public hospitals is adequate throughout the state.

Next, take the plan announced in this year’s budget for a national “commuter car park fund” costing $500 million over 10 years, intended to make it easier for people in the suburbs to drive to their local train station.

A group of transport and urban planning experts from the University of Melbourne has written on The Conversation website that half a bil may sound like a lot, but it probably buys only about 30,000 new parking spaces, serving maybe 45,000 extra commuters. That’s just 4 per cent of the Australians who travel to work by public transport.

And, they note, there’s no guarantee the extra parkers would be people who’d no longer go to work by car. Studies suggest a lot of them would be people who formerly walked, cycled or bussed to a different station (where the parking spots are always taken).

The experts suggest it might be better to spend the $500 million on more frequent bus services to stations, and use the car parks for more valuable purposes.

Marion Terrill, Grattan’s transport infrastructure expert, says Labor’s most important promises aren’t the sexy stuff about electric vehicles, but one to ensure Infrastructure Australia assesses projects before the decision to invest in them, and to make the assessed business cases public. Doesn’t quite fit with some of Labor’s latest project promises, however.

"It would be a significant improvement if whichever party wins government next month were to commit to, and follow through on, careful assessment of transport gaps and problems, consideration of the various feasible solutions, and rigorous evaluation of the preferred approach," she concludes.

"And it’s not enough just to do this; it should be done in public." Amen to that.

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A present-laden kiss from Santa won't make healthcare better

Whenever voters are asked what are their main issues of concern, one worry always comes top: healthcare. That explains why we’re hearing so much about health in this ever-so-exciting election campaign.

Bill Shorten wants to talk about health because it’s one of the issues voters always regard as better handled by Labor than by the Coalition. (Voters habitually favour the Coalition on running the economy and on taxation, which explains why these are Scott Morrison’s favourite topics.)

But this time the Coalition’s also keen to talk about all it’s done – and is promising to do – on health because it blames Labor’s last-minute social media scare campaign – that the Libs had plans to “privatise” Medicare – for its loss of seats in the 2016 election.

The truth is, by international standards Australians have good health and a good healthcare system, which doesn’t cost all that much.

So why is healthcare always our biggest worry? Perhaps because of the well-publicised waiting times for elective surgery in public hospitals. Or because most medical specialists charge fees far higher than the Medicare benefit, with the gap paid out of the patient’s pocket.

Australia’s health system is more reliant on out-of-pocket payments than most other rich countries. Part of this is the ever-rising cost of private health insurance.

This explains why the things politicians say about healthcare during election campaigns invariably involve spending more money. Governments boast that they’re spending record amounts (which is always true because both prices and the population keep rising) and promise to spend a bit more.

This time, Labor claims the Coalition has “cut” healthcare spending – by which it means that the Coalition hasn’t spent as much as the previous Labor government had planned to – and is promising to restore that funding (mainly in the form of the feds picking up a higher share of the states’ spending on public hospitals) and to spend more on reducing the out-of-pocket costs of cancer patients.

Are you detecting a pattern here? Because the health system has long been about as privatised as it could be – private hospitals, private health insurance, subsidised fee-for-service payments to self-employed GPs and specialists, co-payments for pharmaceuticals and for doctors who don’t bulk-bill – governments can never spend enough.

As presently organised, our system is a bottomless pit. Governments could never satisfy the demand that doctors and hospitals could generate if left to their own devices.

When you add federal and state, healthcare is by far the biggest and the fastest growing category of government spending – and thus the biggest reason we need to pay more in taxes each year.

It’s also our fastest growing employer. It’s certain to keep growing rapidly, not only because of the ageing population but also the ever-rising cost of advances in medical technology.

This isn’t bad, it’s good. The richer we get, the more we can afford to spend on top-quality healthcare. But that’s not to say we couldn’t be getting much better value for the dollars we spend.

Because our present badly organised system is driven mainly by doctors’ – particularly specialists’ - desire to protect and increase their incomes, whichever side of politics is in office, federal or state, spends most of its time between elections trying to hold back the growth in health spending.

They do this mainly by crude methods such as allowing backlogs and waiting lists to build up, freezing the level of Medicare rebates, increasing patient co-payments and delaying the approval of new pharmaceuticals.

Then, when an election looms, they approve a raft of new drugs, promise to spend more on a few things chosen to appeal to voters, and to spend $X million shortening surgery queues which, for some mysterious reason, seem to have built up.

That is, at elections both sides play Santa, not Mr Fix-it. Any plan to reform something would be bound to have some brand of specialists howling for your blood, and conning old ladies into monstering their local member.

In consequence, progress in reducing waste and improving the quality of care is slow. Doctors earn their living by fixing people who are sick. There’s little incentive to do what makes more sense: divert more of the spending into encouraging people to avoid getting sick in the first place.

After that comes more emphasis on early detection: better for the patient, better for the taxpayer. And the best way to improve prevention and early detection is to divert more money into “primary care” – by GPs and other health professionals, such as specially trained nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists etc.

GPs need to be shifted from providing acute care – charging a fee every time someone turns up for a consultation – to receiving larger payments from the government for accepting responsibility for helping a particular patient deal with a particular chronic condition, such as diabetes, for a period of time.

The Coalition’s record in making progress towards such a better, more integrated system is, at best, mixed.

The parts of Labor’s policy it doesn’t want to talk about – setting up a federal-state Australian healthcare reform commission – and the specifics of how it would keep its promise to encourage cancer specialists to bulk-bill, hold the promise of systemic improvement. But also the risk that the extra spending did more to help specialists' pockets than patients'.

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If you’re virtuous, don’t be afraid to signal it to the world

I’m troubled by the fashion of accusing others of “virtue signalling”. This world could use more virtue and less vice. And if people want others to see their virtue, well, there are worse sins.

Usually, it’s an accusation hurled at those on the other side of the political fence as a way of impugning their motives. They’re not genuinely virtuous, they just want people to think they are when they’re not.

They want to be seen as better than we are. They want me to feel guilty for not being as good as them, but I’m not buying that. I may be motivated by self-interest in the government policies I advocate, but so are they – they’re just pretending otherwise.

You can rationalise such a response by using the assumption of the neo-classical economic model that economic agents (you and me) are always and only motivated by self-interest. Altruism doesn’t exist. When I help someone, I’m doing so only because it makes me feel good.

In truth, social psychology has found plenty of evidence for the existence of altruism. It’s associated with another truth: homo sapiens’ success as a species is owed as much to co-operation as to competition.

I remember how shocked I was years ago to hear a top Treasury official refer with contempt to the Australian Council of Social Service – the peak body representing welfare organisations, including the Salvos – as “the compassion industry”.

First time I’d heard that word used as a term of derision. It reminded me of a song we sang when I was a Salvo: “Except I am moved with compassion, how dwellest Thy Spirit in me?”.

The Treasury man’s claim was that the ACOSS people didn’t really care about the poor and needy, they’d just found a way to make their living by representing the interests of poor. They were no more than another lobby group with their hand out.

As social animals, humans form themselves into tribes – groups. We have a compulsion to divide the world into good guys and bad guys. Naturally, my group are the goodies but, unfortunately, your group are the baddies.

Each of us sees ourselves as good, but some others as bad. I’m genuinely virtuous, whereas you’re just pretending to be.

In truth, none of us is all good or all bad. All of us are good in some respects and bad in others. And psychologists tell us we’re all often guilty of hypocrisy – applying high standards in judging others’ behaviour while making excuses for our own.

Equally, much of what we do we do for mixed motives. Try this test (one I usually fail): when you’re giving money to charity, how do you answer when asked if you’d like your donation to remain anonymous?

It’s possible some of us do virtuous acts – or make statements in support of virtuous policies – without any genuine interest in the wellbeing of others. It’s possible, but I doubt it’s very common.

What’s much more likely is mixed motives: we’re genuine in our professed concern about others, but equally genuine in our desire to be seen by others as having such a concern. That’s not really hypocritical, just being human.

Because we’ve evolved as group animals, all of us care deeply about what others think of us. We want to be accepted by the other members of the group. And we fear being excluded from the group.

Like teenagers, we’re desperate to fit in. The more we look and act like the others, the more comfortable we feel.

(This points to a further weakness in the neo-classical model: its assumption that each of us is a rugged individualist who makes decisions – about what movie to see or what clothes to buy – totally without reference to what those around us are doing.)

Turns out humans are signalling animals. We’re always using what we do, what we say, the way we dress, to signal our virtues to others – including our conformity to the group’s norms of acceptable behaviour.

The economy abounds with people and businesses sending signals. The first three economists to realise this won the Nobel prize for their genius.

We resort to sending signals because neither we nor others have enough hard information about the people we deal with and who deal with us. The main message we send is: you can trust me to deal with you honestly.

In today’s economy we’re suffering from a loss of trust, caused by a lack of virtuous behaviour, which has damaged reputations. We need economic behaviour to be a lot more virtuous. As that virtue is signalled, others will join in and the group norm of acceptable behaviour will be restored.

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Sidney Kidman: how to make a buck out of a terrible climate

You may not have heard of Sir Sidney Kidman, once known as Australia’s Cattle King. He died in 1935. But when it comes to using “innovation” to get rich, he was tops – certainly, the most amazing. And he’s about to become our patron saint of climate change adaptation.

He chose to farm in the most arid, unpredictable and unforgiving part of Australia, and he made his pile. His company, S. Kidman & Co, exists to this day, and in 2016 was acquired by Hancock Prospecting, owned by Gina Rinehart, with Shanghai CRED as junior partner.

There are two ways to respond to climate change. Plan A is mitigation: do things to stop it happening. Plan B is adaptation: learn to live with a much hotter world where, apart from the rising sea level, extreme weather events are more frequent and bigger.

Since we’re making such a hash of Plan A – not just us, but the world in general – it may not be long before we have no choice but to get on with Plan B. Innovation – finding new ways to do things – will be king and Kidman will be recognised as the forerunner he was.

As any climate-change denier will tell you, there’s nothing new about drought. These days, all our good farmers have learnt that, though you can never tell when, another drought is always coming, so you have to be ready for it.

But Kidman was on quite another level: he found a way to make money out of drought. Dr Leo Dobes, an economist from the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, has written a paper attempting to uncover the secret of what Kidman would never have called his “business model”.

From the turn of the previous century, Kidman, born in modest circumstances, built up a collection of cattle properties in the most marginal country in Australia’s Dead Heart – the area around the Simpson Desert, to the north of Lake Eyre – and in the “corner country” where the borders of the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia and NSW meet.

In this arid core of Australia, rain was very irregular and occurred mainly through thunderstorms after very hot weather. Kidman said his South Australian properties generally got less than 100 to 200 millimetres a year.

Kidman was always buying and selling properties, ending up with properties extending across the whole continent.

There was an underlying rationale to his acquisitions, however. He had several breeding properties in the north, including Newcastle Waters in the NT and Augustus Downs and Fiery Downs in Queensland, which had a tropical climate with a short rainy season.

Further north in the Gulf country, the summer rainfall seasons were more prolonged, and Kidman also used his properties there to source cattle for southern markets. Properties in the Channel country of south-western Queensland, where the grasses where softer, were used to fatten cattle for market.

A second characteristic of his holdings was the concentration of adjoining properties, running from west of the Darling River to the SA border, along the Diamantina and Georgina rivers and Cooper’s Creek in the Channel country, and along the stock route to the west of Lake Eyre via Charlotte Waters to Marree and Farina. This amounted to two major chains of properties.

“Because the holdings were on, or in close proximity to, major stock routes (and associated watercourses), they afforded easy access to rail heads connected to southern markets” in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, Dobes says.

So, what was the business model that allowed Kidman to succeed where so many others failed? You can see signs of a supply-chain model – a vertically integrated business, from properties that bred cattle, to fattening properties and final sale in capital city markets.

Also signs of spatial diversification. Lack of rain or feed on one property could be compensated by moving cattle to a property with sufficient feed.

“Kidman’s drovers were shifting, shifting, shifting all the time. There was no such thing as starving or dying stock on Kidman’s stations. They just shifted them.”

But Dobes sees Kidman’s business model as captured by his creation of three “real options”. In financial markets, buying an “option” gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy (or, in other cases, sell) a parcel of shares at a set price at a specified date in the future. It’s a way of trying to protect yourself from uncertain future developments.

In Kidman’s case, however, the options weren’t financial, they were real – physical. Kidman could easily move his stock to better conditions because his properties were adjacent and because he kept those properties understocked. The opportunity cost of understocking was the price of the option.

Second, because his properties followed stock routes and waterways, Kidman could move his stock towards better conditions – and towards the market – in a way that gave his cattle priority over other people’s herds on the route. Again, understocking was the price of this option.

Third, Kidman’s practice of holding properties near rail heads, plus his maintenance of a network of drovers, camel drivers, Aborigines, dingo trappers and friendly telegraph operators, who provided information about the movement of competing herds being driven to various markets, allowed him to direct his cattle to the city market where prices were likely to be highest.

Kidman’s modern relevance is not just in overcoming a harsh and unpredictable climate, but in coping with unexpected changes – in his case, rabbit infestation, erosion, the rapid spread of cattle ticks in northern Australia and the results of overstocking by earlier pastoralists.

Kidman’s “real options” were innovative ways of coping with, reducing and even profiting from uncertainty – which Dobes concludes is the hallmark of climate change. Australia’s farmers and others can adapt to climate change by finding their own real options.

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The great election diversion: arguments about tax, tax, tax

No one’s more interested in taxation than me, but there’s got to be more to this election campaign than claims about which side is high taxing and which low taxing, and interminable arguments and scare campaigns about franking credits and negative gearing.

Fortunately, the nation’s best and most independent think-tank, the Grattan Institute, has taken a much broader view of the issues to which the winning side should pay most attention in its Commonwealth Orange Book (an allusion to the red book and the blue book that the public service prepares to present to whichever side wins).

To help voters put the election issues into context, however, Grattan starts by comparing our performance on a broad range of indicators with nine comparable countries.

On standard of living – measured by gross national income per person – our $62,800 a year is well behind the United States ($75,900) and less behind the Netherlands ($68,100), Germany ($66,900) and Sweden ($64,900), but ahead of Canada ($57,300), Britain ($54,900), Japan ($54,300), New Zealand ($48,800) and South Korea ($48,400).

So we’re in the middle of the pack of rich countries. We can afford high quality public services (paid for by moderately high taxes) and afford to treat the disadvantaged with consideration.

But, despite all the times Scott Morrison repeats the words “strong economy”, our living standards have stagnated in recent times.

At 73 per cent, our rate of employment – the proportion of the working-age population with jobs – is at the low end of the range (New Zealand is on 77 per cent), but all countries are comfortably above America’s 70 per cent – a sign that all’s not so well in Trump’s supposedly strong economy.

A good check on our present success is our NEET rate – the proportion of people aged 15 to 29 who are not in employment, education or training. At 11 per cent we’re level with New Zealand, and better than Canada, Britain and the US, but worse that Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Could do better. We need to fix the almighty mess we’ve made of vocational education and training.

On income inequality, our gap puts us towards the wrong end of the pack: equal with New Zealand, worse than Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and even Britain, but better than South Korea, Japan and the pinnacle of inequality, the US.

We could greatly reduce inequality simply by paying the $3 billion a year it would cost to raise the dole by $75 a week – a truth Bill Shorten shouldn’t need a protracted inquiry to tell him. That $3 billion, by the way, compares with the estimated annual cost of Morrison’s tax plan, when fully implemented, of $35 billion a year.

We do surprisingly badly on housing, with fewer dwellings per 1000 adults than all the others bar South Korea. And with median housing costs as high as 23 per cent of disposable income, we’re dearer than everywhere except Holland.

Less surprising is how badly the land that used to boast about its cheap power is doing. These days, only German households pay more for electricity than ours do. Despite our ever-growing exports of LNG, our industries pay more for gas than the Canadians, Kiwis and Americans.

And, thanks to the policy dominance of the climate-change deniers, our electricity use generates far more carbon emissions than the others do. A lot more reform of the reforms needed.

Our relatively low funding of schools, and its division on a sectarian basis – the religious get more than the non-religious; some religions get more than others – hasn’t left our kids' performance looking good in international comparisons.

If you ignore the poor deal we give our Indigenous (as we usually do), our health system ranks well. Our life expectancy at birth is bettered only by Japan, and the cost of our healthcare as a proportion of national income is at the lower end (and only a bit more than half what the Yanks pay for their appalling system).

Even so, there’s room for us to get better value for money, and our out-of-pocket healthcare costs are higher than everywhere except Sweden and South Korea.

Which brings us to the quality of our governance. In Australia, trust in government is low and falling. In international comparisons, we’re about middle of the pack on trust.

But Australian cynicism is now at an all-time high – only a quarter of us think “people in government can be trusted to do the right thing” – the lowest since the survey began in 1969.

Grattan says there’s a growing sense that people in government look after their own interests, or those of powerful groups, rather than the public interest.

Many other democracies have stronger rules on political donations and lobbying, designed to keep special-interest influence in check. Most rich countries restrict political donations or party spending in some way. We don’t.

The feds are lagging the states in establishing an effective anti-corruption or integrity commission, in requiring timely disclosure of political donations, publishing ministerial diaries and in imposing a lobbyist register without glaring loopholes.

The failure of both sides to act at the federal level undermines the effectiveness of state measures.

So, turns out we do have issues other than tax we should be focusing on.

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Strong economy? No, but maybe it will be eighth time lucky

Scott Morrison wants the Coalition re-elected because of its superior management of the economy. In Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech he referred to our “strong economy” 14 times. Why? He had to keep saying it because it ain’t true.

But get this: it’s not the government’s fault. It’s happening for reasons far beyond the government’s control. Growth is weak in Australia and throughout the developed world for deep reasons economists don’t yet fully understand.

It’s taken a while to realise this because the econocrats – mainly Treasury, but with the acquiescence of the Reserve Bank - either can’t or won’t accept its truth. They’ve gone for eight budgets in a row forecasting an early return to strong growth.

And for seven years in a row they’ve been way off. But so great is their certainty that nothing fundamental has changed, they’ve fronted up with yet another forecast that this year will be different. This year we'll reach lift-off.

It may not be entirely coincidental that, the longer Treasury dwells in the land of hope-springs-eternal, the more it gives its political masters the budget numbers they crave: ones showing the budget deficit soon returning to surplus and staying in surplus as the net debt falls to zero.

In what follows, I’ll ignore Treasury’s cute distinction between “forecasts” and “projections”. Sorry, guys, you’ve played that card too many times.

It’s a key part of the way you’ve misled the public, your political masters, economists and probably even yourselves, that everything’s going fine and will soon be back to normal. It’s part of the reason the net debt’s been allowed to double under this government – we kept being told it wasn’t happening.

When laughing-stock Wayne Swan began his 2012 budget speech promising four budget surpluses in a row, this was based on Treasury’s forecast that real gross domestic product would grow by 3.25 per cent in 2012-13, and then by 3 per cent in each of the three following years.

The 3.25 per cent turned out to be 2.6 per cent, then another 2.6 per cent, 2.3 per cent and 2.8 per cent.

After such an embarrassing stuff-up, you’d think Treasury might have had a rethink. Not a bit of it. Just two budgets later – this government’s first - it had the economy’s growth accelerating over the forward estimates not to 3 per cent, but 3.5 per cent. The first of these turned out to be 2.3 per cent and the next one, 2.8 per cent.

In the 2016 budget, Treasury took a bit of a pull and reverted to forecasting recoveries to no more than 3 per cent growth.

In this month’s budget, Treasury has us growing by only 2.25 per cent in the year just ending. But not to worry. In the coming year it will strengthen to 2.75 per cent, and be back to 3 per cent in the second last year of the forward estimates, where it will stay in 2022-23.

It’s a similar story with what’s become the key problem component of GDP, wages. In Swan’s ill-fated budget, the wage price index was forecast to grow by 3.75 per cent in the budget year and the year following. Turned out to be 2.9 per cent and 2.5 per cent.

The following year’s budget – Swan’s last – put expected wage growth in 2014-15 at 3.5 per cent. Turned out to be 2.3 per cent. Treasury’s first guess for 2017-18 was 3 per cent. Came in at 2.1 per cent.

Treasury’s response to its repeated over-forecasting is just to push the ETA of the return to strong growth out another year. Nothing fundamental in the economy has changed, nothing’s wrong with the forecasting method, it’s just taking a bit longer than we thought. This time we’ll be right.

But, you may object, if the economy’s remained so weak for so long, how come growth in employment has been strong since early 2017 and unemployment has slowly fallen to 5 per cent?

Because of high levels of immigration – high even by our standards, and unmatched by the other rich countries – and because the under-employment rate was worsening until recently.

Much of the jobs growth has come from federal government spending on rolling out the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and state government spending on infrastructure. After all, public sector consumption and investment spending accounted for more than half the surprisingly weak GDP growth of 2.3 per cent over calendar 2018.

Remember this: a strong, healthy economy is one where demand is always threatening to push inflation above the target zone. Our inflation rate's been below the target for three years.

And this amazing fact: the world real long-term interest rate has been falling for years and is now at zero or below. That’s a sign of strong growth?

It’s time Treasury and the Reserve stopped kidding themselves – and us.

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