This budget couldabeen a lot better than it is

This is the lick-and-a-promise budget. The budget that proves it is possible to be half pregnant. Which makes it the couldabeen budget. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg had the makings of a champion of budgets, but their courage failed them.

It’s not a bad budget. Most of the things it does are good things to do. Its goal of driving unemployment much lower is exactly right. Its approach of increasing rather than cutting government spending is correct, as is its strategy of fixing the economy to fix the budget.

But having fixed on the right strategy Morrison, reluctant to be seen as Labor lite, has failed in its execution. Economists call this “product differentiation”; others just call it marketing.

Some are calling this a big-spending budget. It isn’t. Frydenberg has kept his promise that it would be no “spendathon”. As a pre-election vote-buying budget it hardly rates. Its “new and additional tax cut” for middle-income earners of up to $1080 a year turns out to be not a tax cut but the absence of a tax increase.

Politically, this budget had to offer a convincing response to the report of the royal commission on aged care. Reports have suggested fixing the broken system would take extra spending of about $10 billion a year.

Had he accepted that challenge, Morrison would have put himself head and shoulders above his Liberal and Labor predecessors. He settled for spending an extra $3.5 billion a year. Major patch-up at best. The scandals will continue.

Politically, Morrison had to make this a women-friendly budget, to prove he valued women’s contribution to the economy and remove impediments to their economic security. Making childcare free – as it was, briefly, during the lockdown – would have been a big help to young families, as well as greatly increasing employment. It would have backed his fine words with deeds.

That would have cost about $2 billion a year. Morrison settled for $600 million a year, limiting the new assistance to about one childcare-using family in four by excluding the great majority, who have only one child in care.

Frydenberg has said that significant investments in energy, infrastructure, skills, the digital economy and lower taxes are all aimed at driving unemployment down.

But this talk of “investments” in mainly male-dominated industries is just what led female economists to be so critical of last year’s macho budget. In any case, energy and infrastructure yield few new jobs for each billion spent.

That’s why women-friendly and job-creating both pointed to a budget that focused on growing the “care economy” – aged care, childcare, disability care.

It’s labour-intensive, employs mainly women and provides services that women care about more than men. And it’s largely funded and regulated by … the federal government. Opportunity fumbled.

If you can’t get too excited by the expectation that the economy will grow by a positively roaring 4.25 per cent in the coming financial year, and a much more sedate 2.5 per cent the following year, I don’t blame you.

For one thing, budget forecasts don’t always come to pass. For another, Frydenberg’s claim that more budgetary stimulus is needed because of continuing uncertainty over the pandemic is disingenuous.

The truth is, at this stage the economy is still running on the stored heat of last year’s massive budgetary stimulus, much of which has still to be spent. The purpose of public-sector stimulus is to get the private sector – households and businesses – up to ignition point, so it keeps going under its own steam.

That hasn’t happened yet. So the purpose of the further stimulus in this year’s budget is to keep the kick-starting going until the private sector’s engine gets going.

Much of this depends on a return to decent pay rises – which is, as yet, beyond the budget’s “forecast horizon”. We haven’t had a decent pay rise since before the election of the Coalition government.

We had been used to our standard of living getting a bit better each year. That hasn’t happened for years. A Liberal Prime Minister who can’t lift our standard of living should be peddling a lot harder than he is in this budget.

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Years of neglect won't make it easy to get wages up

In Tuesday night’s budget, it will be important to note its assumptions about when our international borders will be back to functioning normally. Not because they’re sure to be right, but because our borders will have a big impact on Scott Morrison’s new strategy of getting unemployment down to get wages – and thus living standards – up.

As the Commonwealth Bank’s Gareth Aird has reminded us, fancy calculations about how low unemployment has to fall before labour shortages force employers to bid up wages, rest on the (usually reasonable) assumption that our borders will be working the way they always have.

If our borders are temporarily closed to immigration and overseas students, however, the point where skill shortages emerge may arrive a lot earlier than the fancy calculations suggest. What’s more, it’s become clearer that the day where our border conditions return to normal may be a lot further into the future than we’d first hoped.

It will be interesting to search the budget papers for signs that these complications don’t come as news to the economic managers, but have been built into the new strategy’s design.

The point is that over the decades of what we used optimistically to call “micro-economic reform”, our employers have become used to the idea that finding enough skilled labour – or even unskilled people willing to do the crappy, badly paid jobs that most Australians aren’t, fruit-picking for instance – isn’t something you have to worry much about.

Whenever you look like running out of the workers you need, you just bring someone in on a temporary visa. If they turn out okay, you help them move to a permanent visa. Our immigration program used to be about recruiting factory fodder for the manufacturers, now it’s about people on many classes of temporary visas allowing employers instant access to skilled workers trained by someone else at some other country’s taxpayers’ expense.

The trouble with this is that it’s come at the expense of our technical education system and our young people. Our business people no longer need to worry about whether they’ll have enough skilled workers a few years down the track, so no longer put enough money and effort into training apprentices, trainees and other technical workers.

I see it as further evidence for my theory that part of the reason both productivity improvement and wages have been weak for some years is our businesses’ preference for improving their profits by cutting costs – particularly wage costs – rather than improving their efficiency.

One implication of this emphasis on employers buying skilled (or cheap) labour off the shelf, so to speak, is that the longer the economy recovers behind closed borders, and the more the government tries to use labour shortages to get some decent wage growth, the more pressure employers and their lobby groups will put on the government to open the temporary-visa floodgates.

The more the government gives in to its business mates – who are used to getting their way – the more it will sabotage its strategy for getting wages, consumer spending and the voters’ standard of living going up not sideways.

But Dr Mike Keating, a former top econocrat, argues there’s a different weakness in the new strategy: it continues the economic managers’ earlier error of analysing the wages problem in purely cyclical terms.

For seven years they told us not to worry about weak wage growth because the recovery from the global financial crisis was just taking longer than usual. Wrong. Now they’re saying the problem is too much slack in the labour market, so we must stimulate harder to reduce the rate of labour underutilisation (unemployment plus under-employment) and, once we have, healthy wage growth will return as sure as demand and supply go together.

This thinking fails to acknowledge the likelihood that the problem is more structural than cyclical. It’s not just weak demand that’s the problem, it’s a change in the structure of the labour force, particularly as skill-biased technological change has increased employers’ demand for high-skilled labour and dramatically reduced demand for semi-skilled labour, while not having as much effect on demand for services-performing less-skilled labour.

Even so, the notion that much unemployment is the result of “structural mismatch” rather than weak demand is hardly new. That is, many of the unemployed lack the particular skills employers are looking for. So it’s wrong to assume that unemployment falls in lock-step with rising demand.

We’ve been marvelling at the recent rapid increase in job vacancies, which has reduced the number of unemployed per vacancy to 2.75, well below its decade average of 3.9. Many have taken this as indicating the strength of the recovery and a sign that unemployment will continue its rapid fall.

But Keating, a labour economist, says it indicates “a substantial and increasing degree of structural mismatch in the labour market”. (It could also be a sign that our employers’ dependence on importing the skilled labour they need is already making itself felt.)

“If this mismatch continues through the economic recovery, the wage increase in some jobs will most likely exceed the increase in other jobs. Consequently, pursuit of the target rate of unemployment may well result in an increase in wage inequality, which in turn may not produce the increase in demand that economic recovery requires,” Keating says.

I think the econocrats need to remember that, in the old days, the tendency for wage rises caused by skill shortages in some occupations – or some parts of the country – to spread to all other workers was caused by the operation of the old centralised wage-fixing system. The move to enterprise bargaining was intended to stop that happening. And it has.

These days, the labour market’s only equalising tendency comes from the existence of the more amorphous “wage norms” (“other bosses are giving pay rises of X per cent, so I’ll do the same”).

Keating says the best way to remove structural impediments in the labour market is to ensure the necessary development of education and training so that people have the particular skills needed to meet the requirements for the jobs that are available.

But that, of course, is just what we haven’t been doing.

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Our closed borders have turbo-charged the economy's recovery

The economy’s rebound from the lockdowns of last year has been truly remarkable – far better than anyone dared to hope. Even so, it’s not quite as miraculous as it looks.

As Tuesday’s budget leads us to focus on the outlook for the economy in the coming financial year, it’s important to remember that the coronacession hasn’t been like a normal recession. And the recovery from it won’t be like a normal recovery either.

The coronacession is unique for several reasons. The first is that the blow to economic activity – real gross domestic product - was much greater than we’ve experienced in any recession since World War II and almost wholly contained within a single quarter.

The reason for that is simple: it happened because our federal and state governments decided that the best way to stop the spread of the virus was to lock down the economy for a few weeks. But because this was a government-ordered recession, the governments were in no doubt about their obligation to counter the cost to workers and businesses with monetary assistance.

So the second respect in which this recession was different was the speed with which governments provided their “fiscal stimulus” and the unprecedented amount of it: for the feds alone, $250 billion, equivalent to more than 12 per cent of GDP.

But there’s a less-recognised third factor adding to the coronacession’s uniqueness: this time the government ordered the closing of our international borders. Virtually no one entering Australia and no one going out.

The independent economist Saul Eslake points out that “an important but under-appreciated reason for the so-far surprisingly rapid decline in unemployment, from its lower-than-expected peak of 7.5 per cent last July, is the absence of any immigration: which means that the civilian working-age population is now growing at (on average over the past two quarters) only 8,300 per month, compared with an average of 27,700 per month over the three years to March 2020,” he says.

This means that, with an unchanged rate of people choosing to participate in the labour force by either holding a job or seeking one, a rate that’s already at a record high, employment needs only to grow at about a third of its pre-pandemic rate in order to hold the rate of unemployment steady.

So any growth in employment in excess of that brings unemployment tumbling down.

Get it? It’s not just that the bounce back in jobs growth has been much quicker and stronger than we expected. It’s also that, thanks to the absence of immigration, this has reduced the unemployment rate much more than it usually does.

To put it another way, Eslake says, if the population of working age continues growing over the remainder of this year at the much-slower rate at which it’s been growing over the past six months, employment has to grow by an average of just 17,000 a month to push the unemployment rate down to just below 5 per cent by the end of this year (assuming the rate of labour-force participation stays the same).

By contrast, if the working-age population was continuing to grow at its pre-pandemic rate, employment growth would need to average 29,000 a month to get us down to 5 per cent unemployment by the end of this year.

Now, it’s true that as well as adding to the supply of labour, immigration also adds to the demand for labour. So its absence is also working to slow the growth in employment. But this has been more than countered by two factors.

The obvious one is the governments’ massive fiscal stimulus. But Eslake reminds us of the less-obvious factor: our closed borders have prevented Australians from doing what they usually do a lot of: going on (often expensive) overseas trips.

He estimates that this spending usually amounts to roughly $55 billion a year. But we’re spending a fair bit of this “saving” on domestic tourism – or on our homes.

Of course, we need to remember that, as well as stopping us from touring abroad, the closed borders are also stopping foreigners from touring here. But, in normal times, we spend more on overseas tourism than foreigners spend here. (In the strange language of econospeak, we are “net importers of tourism services”.)

Eslake estimates that our ban on foreign tourists (and international students) is costing us more than $22 billion – about 1.25 per cent of GDP – a year in export income. Clearly, however, our economy is well ahead on this (temporary) deal.

Another economist who’s been thinking harder than the rest of us about the consequences of our closed borders is Gareth Aird, of the Commonwealth Bank.

The decision by Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg to “continuing to prioritise job creation” and so drive the unemployment rate down much further, has led to much discussion of the NAIRU – the “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment” – the lowest level unemployment can fall to before wages and prices take off.

The econocrats believe that little-understood changes in the structure of the advanced economies may have lowered our NAIRU to 4.5 per cent or even less. But Aird reminds us that, for as long as our international borders remain closed, the NAIRU is likely to be higher than that.

“If firms are not able to recruit from abroad then, as the labour market tightens, skill shortages will manifest themselves faster than otherwise and this will allow some workers to push for higher pay,” he says.

“There is a lot of uncertainty around when the international borders will reopen, what that means for net overseas migration and how that will impact on wage outcomes.”

But “in industries with skill shortages, bargaining power between the employee and employer should move more favourably in the direction of the employee and higher wages should be forthcoming,” he concludes.

Higher wages is what the government’s hoping for, of course. Interesting times lie ahead.

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Politics and economics have aligned to permit a ripper budget

Sometimes I think the smartest thing a nation can do to improve its economic fortunes is elect a leader who’s lucky. The miracle-working Scott Morrison, for instance.

This may be a controversial idea in these days of heightened political tribalism, when one tribe is tempted to hope the other tribe really stuffs up the economy and so gets thrown out. What does a wrecked economy matter if your tribe’s back in power?

Morrison was not only lucky to win the 2019 election, there’s been as much luck as good management in his success in suppressing the virus and the way the economy’s bounced back from the coronacession. (Of course, it may be blasphemous of me to attribute his success to luck if, in truth, he’s getting preferential treatment from above.)

Anyway, it’s “providential” – as my sainted mother preferred to say – that the politics and the economics are almost perfectly aligned for Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget next week.

Politically, Morrison must make an adequate response to the royal commission’s expensive proposals for fixing our aged care disaster. And must make recompense for last October’s all-macho budget by making the economic security of women a preoccupation of this one.

Economically, he must lock in the stimulus-driven rebound from the recession by “continuing to prioritise job creation” and driving the rate of unemployment down towards 4.5 per cent or less.

What’s providential is that both aged care and childcare are “industries” largely reliant on federal government funding and regulation, as well as having predominantly female customers and employing huge numbers of women.

The Australia Institute’s Matt Grudnoff has calculated that, if the government were to spend about $3 billion in each of five industries, this would directly create 22,000 additional jobs in universities, 23,000 jobs in the creative arts, 27,000 jobs in healthcare, 38,000 in aged care and 52,000 in childcare.

If ever there was an issue of particular importance to women, it’s aged care. Women outnumber men two to one among those in aged care institutions. Daughters take more responsibility than sons for the wellbeing of their elderly parents. And those working in aged care are mainly women.

The royal commission concluded the government needed to spend a further $10 billion a year to rectify aged care’s serious faults, though the money would need to be accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure most of it didn’t end up in the coffers of for-profit providers and big charities syphoning off taxpayers’ funds for other purposes.

With that proviso, most of the new money would end up in the hands of a bigger, better-qualified and better-paid female workforce. The Grattan Institute’s Dr Stephen Duckett estimates that at least 70,000 more jobs would be created.

If you ask the women’s movement – and female economists – to nominate a single measure that would do most to improve the economic welfare of women they nominate the prohibitive cost of childcare.

They’re right. And right to argue the issue is as much about improving the efficiency of our economy as about giving women a fair deal.

Going back even before the days when most girls left school at year 9 and women gave up their jobs when they married, the institutions of our labour market were designed to accommodate the needs of men, not women.

These days, girls are better educated than boys, but we still have a long way to go to renovate our arrangements to give women equal opportunity to exploit their training in the paid workforce – to the benefit of both themselves and their families, and the rest of us.

Wasting the talent of half the population ain’t smart. The key is to eliminate the disadvantage suffered by the sex that does the child-bearing and (still) most of the child-minding. And the key to that is to transfer the cost of childcare from the family to the whole community via the government’s budget.

This government is sticking to the legislated third stage of its tax cuts which, from July 2024, and at a cost of about $17 billion a year, will deliver huge savings to high income-earners, most of whom are old and male (like me).

We’re assured – mainly by rich old men – that this tax relief will do wonders to induce them to work harder and longer. But, as the tax economist Professor Patricia Apps has been arguing for decades, there’s little empirical evidence to support this oft-repeated claim.

Rather, the evidence says that the people whose willingness to work is most affected by tax rates and means-tested benefits are “secondary earners” – most of whom are married women.

There is much evidence that it’s the high cost of childcare that does most to discourage the mothers of young children from returning to paid work, or from progressing from part-time to full-time work.

If the huge cost of the looming tax cuts helps discourage Morrison from spending as much as he should to fix aged care and the work-discouraging cost of childcare, we’ll know his conversion to Male Champion of Change has some way to go.

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Now we're trying Plan C to end wage stagnation

Be clear on this: Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg are dead right to make getting the rate of unemployment down to 4.5 per cent or lower their chief objective, with the further goal of inducing some decent growth in wages. But this approach to economic recovery is very different to our econocrats’ former and more conventional advice.

That the econocrats have changed their tune so markedly is an admission that the way the economy works has changed – in ways they don’t understand, for reasons they don’t understand.

What’s changed most is the behaviour of wages. As Treasury puts it in a new research paper, “structural factors may have altered the wage and price-setting dynamics in advanced economies. These include increased competition in goods markets, increases in services being provided internationally, advances in technology and changes in the supply of labour and labour market regulation”.

That’s an econocrat’s way of saying: who knows what’s going on.

Giving priority to getting unemployment down is always a worthy objective, not only because it greatly improves the lives of those who need to support themselves, but also because households now have more money to spend, making the economy grow faster.

A side-benefit is that it improves the budget balance (more people paying tax, fewer needing to be paid the dole). And promising jobs, jobs, jobs always goes down well with voters.

This time, however, the economic managers have an ulterior motive. They’ve concluded that the only way to get wages growing again is to get unemployment down so far that employers are having trouble finding the workers they need and are forced to compete with other employers by bidding up the wages they’re prepared to pay.

This conclusion may be right – it’s certainly worth trying – but it’s a quite depressing one to come to. And one quite foreign to what the econocrats have been telling us about wages for as long as I’ve been in journalism. It’s a sign of how desperate they’ve become to escape the bog that wages have fallen into.

It’s a tacit acceptance of an obvious point many economists (and I) have been making for ages, but the government and its advisers haven’t been prepared to acknowledge: since consumer spending accounts for well over half of gross domestic product, and growth in wages is the chief source of growth in household incomes, without real growth in wages economic recovery simply isn’t sustainable.

What the econocrats are now saying is that there’s little hope of getting wages growing a percent-or-more faster than annual inflation until you put employers on the rack and generate widespread shortages of labour. To mangle a few metaphors, you’ve got to be right on the tightrope edge of re-igniting a wage-price spiral.

Let your attention wander for a moment and you tip over into a “wage explosion” of the sort we experienced under the Whitlam government and the Fraser government, whose efforts to stop the explosion ended up causing the recessions of the mid-1970s and the early 1980s.

Now, if you find it hard to believe such a disaster is very likely, I do too. As, I’m sure, do the econocrats. But that just means we’re unlikely to get much bidding up of wages, and so are unlikely to get much of an improvement in wage growth if that’s the only way an improvement can come.

Another way of putting this is that the NAIRU (the “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment”) – the lowest unemployment can fall before we get accelerating wages and prices – is unlikely to be nearly as high as Treasury’s latest estimate of 4.5 to 5 per cent.

You need a PhD to know enough maths and stats to be able to run these models, but that doesn’t stop them being cartoon caricatures of the real world. The more so when, by Treasury’s own admission, the world has stopped working the way all the historical figures the model relies on say it does.

The truth is it’s never possible to know where the NAIRU lies until you’ve gone through it and wage growth becomes excessive. That’s a risk the economic managers haven’t been willing to take for decades – which explains why the idea of making restoring full employment the top objective of policy is unfamiliar to anyone who can’t remember as far back as the McMahon government.

But, as Professor Ross Garnaut has reminded us, before the pandemic the Yanks got unemployment down to 3.5 per cent without any sign of labour shortages. If they can, why couldn’t we?

There is, however, an important qualification to the belief that our NAIRU is well south of 4.5 per cent. Shortages of labour are a lot more likely for as long as our borders remain closed.

To see how much what we’re now being told is the path to healthy wage growth differs from what we’ve been told in the past, remember this. Over the 15 years to the end of 2012, wages – as measured by the wage price index – rose by 70 per cent, well ahead of the 53 per cent rise in consumer prices.

Over the eight years to last December, however, wages rose by 19 per cent, not much more than the 15 per cent rise in consumer prices. That’s what the fuss is about: since 2012, wages have barely risen faster than prices.

But in each of the six budgets up to the one in 2019, the econocrats told us the same story: don’t worry. The problem was cyclical. Wage growth may be weak again this year, but the economy was just a bit slow to recover from the global financial crisis and, in a year or two’s time, annual growth would be back to the 3 per cent or so we were used to.

“Just wait a little longer” was Plan A for getting wage growth back to a healthy rate. It didn’t work. As this solution started to wear thin, the rhetoric shifted to Plan B: well, of course, any real growth in wages must come from improvement in the productivity of labour, and it’s been pretty slow of late. So, if you want higher wages, think of something to get productivity up.

Plan B didn’t prove much. It’s not clear that what little productivity improvement we have been getting has flowed through to wages. And, in any case, you can make a good argument that the relationship also flows the other way: that the weak growth in wages is actually helping keep productivity improvement low by holding back consumer spending and thus any motivation for businesses to invest in bigger and better equipment and structures.

So now we’re onto Plan C: let’s engineer labour shortages and see if that works.

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FISCAL POLICY v MONETARY POLICY IN OUR WEAK ECONOMY

 Last year, after the arrival of the pandemic and the coronacession as governments locked down the economy to stop the spread of the virus, we witnessed a rare economic event: a changing of the guard in the main policy instrument used to stabilise demand as the economy moved through the business cycle. Monetary policy stepped back and fiscal policy stepped forward. Governments always turn to fiscal policy when recessions arrive, but this change also has deeper, more structural causes, as we shall see. But first, a quick history of the relationship between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

For the first 30 years following World War II, the main policy instrument used was fiscal policy, with monetary policy playing a subsidiary, supporting role. That changed in the late 1970s when the advanced economies acquired a serious problem with high and rising inflation, and “stagflation” destroyed confidence in the simple (Phillips curve) trade-off between inflation and unemployment and the Keynesian approach to managing the macro economy. The conventional wisdom became that monetary policy, conducted by an independent central bank, should be the main instrument used for stabilising demand, with fiscal policy playing the subsidiary role.

Fiscal policy resumes its pre-eminence

But roughly 30 years later, the coronacession has a seen a reversion to fiscal policy playing the dominant role in short-term stabilisation, leaving monetary policy as a back-up. On the face of it, this was because the need for stimulus was so great and because, with interest rates already so low, monetary policy was left with little room to move. In the recession of the early 1990s, for instance, the official interest rate was cut by more than 10 percentage points. In the response to the global financial crisis of 2008-09, the rate was cut by more than 4 percentage points. In the response to the coronacession, the RBA has been able to cut by less than 1 percentage point before taking the cash rate virtually to zero, at 0.1 per cent. Since March last year the RBA has also resorted to “quantitative easing” – buying second-hard government bonds from the banks and paying for them merely by crediting amounts to the banks’ exchange-settlement accounts with the RBA. But how much this does to stimulate demand for goods and services (as opposed to demand for assets such has houses and shares) is open to doubt. By contrast, the federal budget has provided a total of $250 billion in direct stimulus over serval years, equivalent to 13 per cent of nominal GDP in 2019-20. (This compares with stimulus in response to the GFC of 6 per cent of GDP in 2008-09.)

Secular stagnation diminished the effectiveness of monetary policy

However, behind these immediate reasons for fiscal policy resuming the leading role are deeper, structural factors. As Treasury Secretary Dr Steven Kennedy has observed, there has been “a fundamental shift in the macroeconomic underpinnings of the global and domestic economies, the cause of which is still not fully understood”. This is a reference to the “secular stagnation” or “low-growth trap” into which the developed economics – including Australia – have fallen in the years since the GFC. Your modern, independent central bank – and the policy mix that gave top billing to monetary policy – was designed to cope with the problem of high and rising inflation. But, as former Reserve governor Ian Macfarlane has explained, inflation in the advanced economies has been falling for the past 30 years and is now below central bank targets. Low inflation means low nominal interest rates, of course. And, as Treasury’s Kennedy has reminded us, the global real interest rate, similar to the “neutral” interest rate – the real official rate that’s neither expansionary nor contractionary – has been falling steadily for the past 40 years. This has been due to structural developments that drive up savings relative to the willingness of households and firms to borrow and invest, he says. This “is likely due to some combination of population ageing, the productivity slowdown and lower preferences for risk among investors,” he says.

All this says that fiscal policy’s return to primacy over monetary policy is not just a temporary development, but the culmination of structural forces building up over decades, suggesting this will be a lasting change. It may be many years before inflation returns as a problem.

Fiscal policy and monetary policy: pros and cons

In considering the choice between using fiscal policy or monetary policy to manage demand, economists have identified three “lags” or delays involved in the process of the economic managers using either instrument to bring about change. First is the “decision lag”: how long it takes to decide what should be done. Second is the “implementation lag”: how long it takes before the decision can be put into effect. Third is the “impact lag”: how long it takes for the decision to work its way through the economy and have its full effect on the behaviour of households and businesses.

Monetary policy’s great advantage is that it can be changed so quickly and easily, by a decision of the RBA board (this covers the decision lag and implementation lag), whereas fiscal policy changes involve possibly protracted development of measures and consideration by cabinet (the decision lag), and then often delays before the measures can be put into effect (the implementation lag). But, once implemented, monetary policy changes probably take longer to have their full effect on the economy (the impact lag) than do fiscal policy changes.

And fiscal policy measures – whether on the tax or spending sides of the budget - can be targeted to fixing particular problems, whereas monetary policy is a “blunt instrument” or one-trick pony: it uses interest rates to encourage or discourage borrowing and spending. Fiscal policy includes the budget’s automatic stabilisers (to which, Kennedy has argued, the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme and the temporary JobSeeker supplement, being open-ended, were temporary additions).

Economists at the IMF and elsewhere argue that fiscal policy multipliers are higher than earlier believed. This is partly because leakages to imports are less significant when all major governments are stimulating simultaneously in response to the same global shock (such as the GFC or a pandemic). But it’s also because the effect of fiscal stimulus isn’t reduced by the “monetary policy reaction function” – the decisions of independent central banks to raise interest rates because they fear the fiscal stimulus will add to inflation pressure.

Finally, monetary policy’s comparative advantage relative to fiscal policy is controlling inflation, not stimulating demand when the economy is again caught in a liquidity trap (secular stagnation). The same applies when the economic managers need to hold the economy together during a lockdown, then boost it back to life when the lockdown ends).

Now let’s turn to the basic facts you need to know about the two arms of macroeconomic management and how they are now being used to help the economy recover from the coronacession.

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. Until now it has been 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 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 had yet to accelerate and had plenty of unused production capacity, and the rate of unemployment shows little sign of falling below its estimated NAIRU of 5 pc, which the RBA revised down to 4.5 pc before the arrival of the pandemic.

But with the economy showing particular weakness in in the second half of 2018, it cut the cash rate three times in 2019, lowering it to 0.75 pc. Then, the advent of the virus led it to cut rates twice in one month, March 2020, lowering the rate to 0.25 pc. As we’ve seen, and despite its previously expressed reservations, it also joined the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks in engaging in quantitative easing. It announced its intention to buy sufficient second-hand government bonds to ensure the “yield” (interest rate) on three-year bonds was no higher than the cash rate. And, to ensure the banks keep lending to small business during the recession, it announced it was prepared to lend to them at the same rate as the cash rate.

By last November, however, the RBA had cut the cash rate to 0.1 pc, along with the target for three-year government bonds. It announced the further measure of spending $100 billion buying second-hand bonds with maturities of 5 to 10 years. Note that all the QE measures are intended to lower the interest rates paid by governments and private firms on longer-term borrowing. Note, too, that the RBA’s extensive purchases of second-hand bonds are equivalent to it funding about half the government’s budget deficit by “printing money”.

Fiscal policy “framework”

Until the arrival of the pandemic, fiscal policy - the manipulation of government spending and taxation in the budget – had been conducted according to the Morrison government’s medium-term fiscal strategy: “to achieve budget surpluses, on average, over the course of the economic cycle”. Since the coronacession, however, the government has adopted a two-phase strategy. Phase one, the economic recovery plan, involves huge fiscal stimulus to promote employment, growth and business and consumer confidence. It will remain in place until the unemployment rate is comfortably below 6 per cent. Phase two will involve a return to the long-standing medium-term fiscal objective. “Future adjustments in the fiscal stance will focus, in the first instance, on ensuring the economic recovery is strong, and over the medium term on stabilising and then reducing gross and net debt as a share of GDP,” the government says.

Recent developments in fiscal policy

At the time of its election in 2013, the Coalition government expressed great concern about the high budget deficit and mounting public debt it inherited, resolving to quickly get on top of both. But it turned out to lack enthusiasm for either cutting government spending or increasing taxes. And the years of below-trend growth caused by secular stagnation meant the debt kept growing and the budget didn’t return to balance until 2018-19. Mr Frydenberg was expecting the budget to return to surplus in 2019-20, but this was overturned by the pandemic, which caused the budget’s automatic stabilisers to go into reverse and return the budget to a large deficit. The government’s massive fiscal stimulus has added further to the deficit and public debt.

The economy’s rebound from the coronacession

The initial lockdown in the economy caused real GDP to contract by more than 7 pc in the March and June quarters of last year. The unemployment rate peaked at 7.5 pc in July, and the under-employment rate peaked at 11.4 pc in September. But, to everyone’s surprise, GDP rebounded strongly in the following two quarters, to end 2020 just 1 pc below where it was in December 2019. By March this year, total employment had rebounded to be a fraction higher than it was a year earlier. The unemployment rate was down to 5.6 pc (compared with 5.1 pc before the virus struck) and the under-employment rate down to 7.9 pc (compared with 8.6 pc). This rebound is positively amazing. It’s explained by four main factors.

First, the coronacession can’t be compared with an ordinary recession. Whereas ordinary recessions are caused by weak demand by households and firms, the corona recession was caused by a government-ordered temporary cut in supply, as federal and state governments sought to suppress the virus by closed our borders, ordered many industries to cease trading and people to leave their homes as little as possible. This meant that, as the lockdown was lifted, people and businesses were able to resume (almost) normal activity. The JobKeeper program was designed to keep workers attached to their employers until the lockdown ended. The JobSeeker supplement was intended to help anyone who did lose their job keep spending. The two programs were highly effective.

Second, the rebound strategy has been hugely effective in restoring employment to roughly where it was before the lockdown. However, the rate of unemployment has fallen by more than would normally happen in response to such a rise in employment. This is because the closing of our border to immigrants has caused the size of the labour force to grow by about half the rate it normally does, thus making it easier for increased employment to lead to reduced unemployment.

Third, when you remember the massive amount of fiscal stimulus the government has applied, it shouldn’t be so surprising that the economy has grown so strongly. What this proves is that fiscal stimulus works.

Finally, some people have concluded that the economy is now “roaring back” and will growing strongly in coming years – by implication, more strongly than it was before the virus arrived. If so, the pandemic will have somehow snapped the rich countries out of the secular stagnation that gripped it. I find this hard to believe. There’s been little change in the structural factors that have caught us in a low-growth trap. Business investment spending, productivity improvement and real wage growth remain low. What’s true, however, is that the economy has yet to feel the benefit of all the fiscal stimulus the government has committed to. About 40 pc of the total $250 billion stimulus has yet to be spent. And the outsized 12 pc household saving rate tells us much of money already spend by the government is still being held by household for future spending. It’s what happens after this stimulus has waned that we should be worrying about.

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New economic rule: the budget's the only game in town

There’s a trick for governments trying to manage their economy. Once in a while – maybe every 30 or 40 years – the rules of the economic game change. What used to be the right thing to do becomes wrong, and now the right thing is something we’ve long believed was not the way to go.

Trouble is, the game change is never announced by thunder and lightning flashes from on high that everybody sees. Those paying close attention soon get the message, but many people – even many economists – don’t.

Some people have invested their careers – and their egos – in the old way of doing things and resist any talk of change. They stick to their ideology when it’s time for pragmatism and re-examination of old ideas to see if they still work.

These rare times of change are dangerous for governments. Those that don’t get the message in time stuff up and get thrown out.

Our last government to badly misread the economy’s changed circumstances was Gough Whitlam’s. And we know what happened to it. But that was more than 40 years ago, and now the sharp-eyed can see the rules have changed again.

If Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg can’t see it, the economy’s recovery will peter out and, sooner or later, they’ll be out.

Fortunately, it seems from Frydenberg’s speech on Thursday that they and their Treasury advisers do get it, and are acting accordingly.

For about 30 years after World War II, Australia – and all the developed economies - enjoyed a Golden Age of strong economic growth, full employment, low inflation and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.

The economy pretty much managed itself, leaving governments free to focus on other issues. After 23 years in opposition, Whitlam’s Labor came to power with a long list of economic and social reforms to be made.

It got on with “the Program” – involving massively increased government spending – not realising that inflation had got away, that “stagflation” meant rates of unemployment of less than 2 per cent would never be seen again, and that governments now had to spend most of their time worrying about the economy and making sure their “reforms” didn’t make things worse.

In the years after WWII, the rich economies’ focus was on keeping demand for goods and services growing strongly so the workforce could stay fully employed. It was decided that, of the two main “instruments” available for managing the economy, “fiscal policy” – using the budget to change government spending and taxation – was better.

The other instrument, “monetary policy” – moving interest rates up or down to discourage or encourage borrowing and spending – should play a subsidiary role by keeping rates perpetually low.

But by the late 1970s, the rich economies realised that high inflation – caused by the demand for goods and services running ahead of the economy’s ability to supply them – was the key problem, and the best instrument to control inflation was monetary policy. This would leave fiscal policy free to be used to keep budget deficits down and limit the build-up in government debt.

That’s been the conventional “assignment of instruments” for the many decades since then, the one everyone’s used to and many have come to view as the God-ordained way for the economy to be managed. It fits well with the populist fearmongering about “debt and deficit” that Tony Abbott & Co used to help get the Coalition back to power in 2013.

Trouble is, over the decades, inflation in the prices of goods and services has pretty much gone away. But weak growth in the advanced economies since the global financial crisis means unemployment has remained high – well above anything that could be called full employment.

It’s clear the basic problem we face has switched from excess demand relative to supply to insufficient demand relative to supply. Low inflation means low nominal interest rates, but when rates are already low, cutting them a bit further doesn’t do much to encourage businesses to borrow for expansion or households to borrow more for consumer spending (as opposed to bidding up the price of houses).

That’s been true for some years, but now the coronacession has pushed the official interest rate almost to zero, while “quantitative easing” only seems to push up the prices of houses and other assets.

Get it? With monetary policy having lost its potency, fiscal policy becomes the only game in town. The only policy instrument capable of being used to stimulate growth and keep our economy and everyone else’s recovering and unemployment falling.

But as well as being the only lever left, it’s also the one better suited to boosting demand and taking up idle supply capacity. When the problem is the private sector’s reluctance to expand, and the wages households use to increase their consumer spending have stopped rising, the only way to keep the economy moving until the private sector revives is spending by the public sector.

Frydenberg’s speech makes it clear he gets this and, rather than use the budget to get the deficit down, he’ll focus on continuing to use it to foster growth. In time, this will “repair the budget by repairing the economy”.

I think most voters will happily go along with this policy switch.

But there are still many economists and others who don’t get the need to change tack and will oppose it. Particularly those with a vested interest in active monetary policy – money-market people and economists specialising in monetary economics.

But also, amazingly, Labor’s Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, who’s calling for an inquiry – a royal commission? - into the Reserve Bank’s alleged mishandling of monetary policy.

He seems to think monetary policy’s steady loss of potency in Australia (and all the rich countries) over a decade or more can be explained by the Reserve Bank governor’s repeated failure to meet his KPIs for inflation.

Sack the governor, change the procedures, problem goes away. Really, Jim?

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Morrison's budget task: stop the economy's roar turning to a meow

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg look like they’re sitting pretty as they finalise what may be their last budget before the federal election due by the first half of next year. Look deeper, however, and you see they face a serious risk of the economy’s recovery losing momentum over the coming financial year. But, equally, they have a chance to show themselves as the best economic managers since John Howard’s days.

So far, the strength of the economy’s rebound from the “coronacession” has exceeded all expectations. Judged by the quantity of the nation’s production of goods and services, the economy contracted hugely during the three months to June last year. As our borders were closed, many industries were ordered to stop trading and you and I were told to leave home as little as possible.

But with the lifting of the lockdown in the second half of the year, the economy took off. It rebounded so strongly in the next two quarters that, by the end of December, our production – real gross domestic product – was just 1 per cent below what it had been a year earlier, before the arrival of the coronavirus.

The rebound in jobs is even more remarkable. The number of people in jobs fell by almost 650,000 in April and May, and that’s not counting the many hundreds of thousands of workers who kept their jobs thanks only to the JobKeeper scheme.

But as soon as the lockdown was eased, employment took off. By last month, it was actually a fraction higher than it had been in March 2020. We’d been warned the rate of unemployment would reach 10 per cent, but in fact it peaked at 7.5 per cent in July and is now down to 5.6 per cent. Before this year’s out, it’s likely to have fallen to the 5.1 per cent it was before the pandemic.

The confidence of both businesses and consumers is now higher than it has been for ages. Same for the number of job vacancies. Share prices are riding high (not that I set much store by that).

Little wonder the financial press has proclaimed the economy to be “roaring”. Hardly a bad place to be when preparing another budget. What could possibly go wrong?

Just this. The main reason the economy has rebounded so strongly is the unprecedented sums the government spent on JobKeeper, the JobSeeker supplement, HomeBuilder and countless other programs with gimmicky names. Spending totalling a quarter of a trillion dollars.

What it proves is that “fiscal stimulus” works a treat. Trouble is, all those programs were designed to be temporary and the biggest of them have already been wound up. So, though not all the stimulus has yet been spent, it’s clear the stimulus is waning.

And this at a time when there’s no other major force likely to drive the economy onwards and upwards. Business investment spending is way below normal. Growth in the wage income of consumers has been weak for six years or more and, for many workers at present, frozen.

Because all the stimulus programs are stopping, the government’s update last December estimated that the budget deficit for the next financial year will be $90 billion less than the deficit for the year soon ending.

This may sound good, but it means that, whereas last year the government put far more money into the economy than it took out in taxes and charges, in the coming year it expects the budget’s contribution to growth to fall by $90 billion – the equivalent of about 4 per cent of GDP.

So that’s the big risk we face: that before long the economy’s roar will turn to no more than a loud meow.

Now to Morrison and Frydenberg’s chance of greatness. Their temptation is to get unemployment back to the pre-pandemic rate of 5 per cent and call it quits. That’s certainly what previous governments would have done.

But let me ask you a question: do you regard an unemployment rate of 5 per cent as equal to full employment? Is that where everyone who wants a job has got one?

Hardly. And, as Professor Ross Garnaut has argued in his latest book, Reset, there’s evidence that we can get unemployment much lower – say, 3.5 per cent or less – before we’d have any problem with soaring wage and price inflation.

The good news is that the answers to the Morrison government’s risk of economic failure and its chance of economic greatness are the same: keep the budgetary stimulus coming for as long as it takes the private sector to revive and take up the slack.

That means finding new spending programs to take the place of JobKeeper and the rest. And here Morrison’s political and economic needs are a good fit. Making an adequate response to the report of the aged care royal commission will take big bucks.

And he needs to make this a hugely women-centred budget in marked contrast to last year’s. Obvious answer: do what the women’s movement has long been demanding and make childcare free.

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My love letter to The Sydney Morning Herald

It’s not something any hard-bitten journalist should admit, but I’m in love with The Sydney Morning Herald. Have been since, at the age of 26, I quit chartered accounting in disillusionment and stumbled into a cadetship at the Herald. I quickly realised I’d found the only place I wanted to be.

After four years they gave me the title of economics editor and sat me in an armchair with a licence to air my opinions about anything economic. It’s probably the only job I’m capable of doing with any competence. I’ve been so fulfilled by my work that, in 47 years, I’ve never wanted another job on the paper and, certainly, never wanted to move to another paper.

I suspect that by now I’m actually addicted to column-writing and to staying one of the Herald‘s roosters rather than one of its many feather-dusters. When my designated retirement date arrived, I had no desire to hang up my boots and luxuriate on the Herald’s more-than-generous super scheme. And, apart from Jessica Irvine, detected no desire by my colleagues to wave me off.

But I promise you (and Jessica) this: I’ll be out of here the moment I find I’ve worn out my welcome with our readers or my bosses, or realise I’m starting to lose my marbles. That I’m still keen to learn more about the economy and to work rather than play, I credit mainly to three gym sessions a week with my physio trainer, Martin Doyle. Exercise is good for mental as well as physical fitness.

I did feel I should at least stay on to do my bit in helping the Herald make the seemingly improbable “transition” – what a fashionable word that’s become – from “legacy asset” to successful digital “masthead”. Fortunately – and touch wood – we’ve passed that test now we’ve switched from chasing clicks to seeking digital subscriptions.

The thought of the Herald ceasing to be appalled me. As Australia’s oldest metropolitan daily newspaper, for 190 years it’s been one of the pillars on which Sydney rests. I get an enormous kick from being a tiny part of that grand history – for, I realise to my amazement, almost a quarter of its existence. It tickles me that, in the days when governors of NSW and Anglican archbishops of Sydney were recruited from England, so were editors of the Herald.

I’m proud of the many big names to have worked for the Herald at some point in their career. Banjo Paterson was our correspondent covering the Boer War. C.E.W. Bean was a Herald writer before becoming the federal government’s official war correspondent in World War I. Angus Maude, one of our last English-export editors, became Maggie Thatcher’s Paymaster General. I remember Thatcher’s daughter Carol working for a few months in our newsroom.

The playwright and speech writer Bob Ellis’ Herald career lasted 11 days. Columnist and poet Clive James lasted longer before he went off to England to make his name. I remember author Geraldine Brooks cutting a swathe through our feature writers’ room before she went off to New York to make her name. The others wrote one feature a week; she wrote one a day.

Together with her journalist husband George Johnston, Charmian Clift was a celebrity in 1960s Sydney before the word had been invented. This was explained by the years they’d spent living on a Greek island, where (we’ve learnt only recently) they were friendly with some Canadian singer named Leonard and his girlfriend Marianne. Charmian wrote a highly popular weekly column in the Herald, before ending her life.

William Stanley Jevons, a celebrated English neo-classical economist and polymath of the 19th century, discoverer of the Jevons paradox, spent part of his early career working at the Sydney Mint. He didn’t work for the Herald, but he did write letters to the editor. Hearing that made me proud to work where I did.

The Herald has changed greatly over the years I’ve been here and, leaving aside the many journalists we lost as we made our painful adjustment to the digital revolution, mainly for the better. Some years ago, someone got the idea of honouring our longest-serving journos by presenting them with a framed copy of our front page from the day they joined the paper. I was shocked by how dreary mine was. We were busy sticking to traditional standards as the world around us was changing without us noticing.

These days we cover a wider range of subjects – crime and lifestyle interests – all in a livelier, brighter, cleaner, more cleverly written way. I like to think I’ve been part of our move to a less formal, more relaxed and conversational writing style. The old-timers would be appalled to see us saying “kids” rather than “children”.

The Herald is far from perfect – no “first draft of history” ever is – but I value being at the more careful, intellectually respectable and, dare I say, gentlepersonly end of the news media. I feel privileged to write for such a well-educated audience.

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Wealth and happiness don't give meaning to our lives

Easter Monday’s a good a time to reflect on what we’re doing with our lives and why we’re doing it. I’ve been banging on about all things economic for more than 40 years, but if I’ve left you with the impression economics and economic growth is the be-all and end-all, let me apologise for misleading you.

The more I’ve learnt about economics, the more aware I’ve become of its limitations. Economics is the study of production and consumption, getting and spending. But as someone connected with Easter – not the Easter Bunny – once said, there’s more to life than bread alone.

Unfortunately, the conventional way of thinking about the economy has pretty much taken for granted the natural environment in which our economic activity occurs, and the use of natural resources and ecosystem services on which that activity depends.

We’re learning the hard way that this insouciance can’t continue. We’re damaging our environment in ways that can’t continue. I keep writing about the need for economic growth because, as the economy is presently organised, it’s pretty much the only way to provide sufficient jobs for our growing population.

But that just means we need to redefine economic growth to mean getting better, not bigger (and probably should do more to limit world population growth).

Conventional economics focuses on the material aspects of life: producing and consuming goods and services; buying and selling property. There’s no denying the inescapable importance of the material in our lives – “bread” – but conventional economics encourages our obsession with material accumulation at the expense of other important dimensions of our lives.

Some aspects of economic activity can damage our physical health – smoking, drinking, burning dirty fossil fuels, even eating fast foods – but we need to become more aware of the way the fast pace and competitive pressures of modern life also threaten our mental health. Too many people – particularly the young – suffer chronic stress, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Too much emphasis on material success can also come at the expense of the social aspect of our lives – our relationships with family, friends and neighbours – which, when we’re thinking straight, we realise give us far more satisfaction than any new car or pay rise. Economists often advocate policies that will increase the efficiency of our use of resources without giving a moment’s thought to their effect on family life.

Nor should we allow our pursuit of material affluence to come at the expense of the moral and spiritual aspects of lives. I’ve just read social commentator Hugh Mackay’s book, Beyond Belief, which has done so much to clarify my thinking about Christianity, religion and spirituality that I’m sorry I didn’t get to it earlier.

Yet another thing that mars conventional economic thinking is its emphasis on the individual as opposed to the community, it’s effective sanctification of self-interest as the economy’s only relevant driving force, and its obsession with competition and neglect of the benefits of co-operation.

Mackay says that, if you ignore the doctrines and dogmas of the church – all the things you’re required to believe in – and focus on the teachings of Jesus, the first thing to strike you is that none of it was about the pursuit of personal happiness.

“The satisfactions offered or implied are all, at best, by-products of the good life,” he says. “The emphasis is on serving others and responding to their needs in the spirit of loving-kindness, the strong implication being that the pursuit of self-serving goals, like wealth or status, will be counterproductive.”

Jesus’ teachings “were all about how best to live: the consistent emphasis was on loving action, not belief. According to Jesus, the life of virtue – the life of goodness – is powered by faith in something greater than ourselves (love, actually), not by dogma.”

Mackay says we should “avoid the deadly trap of regarding faith as a pathway to personal happiness. The idea that you are entitled to happiness, or that the pursuit of personal happiness is a suitable goal for your life, is seriously misguided.

“If we know anything, we know that’s a fruitless, pointless quest – doomed to disappoint – because . . . our deepest satisfactions come from a sense of meaning in our lives, not from experiencing any particular emotional state like happiness or contentment.”

The self-absorbed mind’s entire focus is individualistic. It’s “the polar opposite of the moral mind. Its orientation is towards the self, not others; its currency is competition, not cooperation; it’s all about getting, not giving. Its goal is the feel-good achievement of personal gratification, however that might be achieved and regardless of any impact it might have on the wellbeing of ‘losers’.”

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Cutting workers' pay and conditions worsens productivity

It’s a long weekend, so let’s relax and think more laterally than usual. I’ve been pondering one of the great mysteries puzzling the rich world’s economists: why has there been so little improvement in the productivity of our businesses over the past decade or two?

I’m wondering if a big part of the explanation is that business people have been finding easier ways to make a bigger buck.

Economists worry about productivity – producing more output of goods and services from a given quantity of inputs of labour, physical capital and raw materials – because it’s the secret sauce that’s made market capitalism so hugely successful over the past 200 years. That’s made us many times more well-off materially than we were back then.

The key driver of productivity improvement is technological advance: mainly bigger and better machines, but also better roads, railways and other infrastructure, as well as more efficiently organised farms, mines, factories, offices and shops. Not to mention increased investment in “human capital”: better educated and trained - and thus more highly skilled - workers.

You’d expect the digital revolution that’s working its way round the economy – disrupting industry after industry while creating new or improved products that meet customers’ needs much better – to be causing a marked improvement in productivity, but it’s not showing up in the figures.

So, why has productivity – most simply measured as gross domestic product per hour worked – been improving much more slowly in the past decade or two than in earlier times, not just in our economy but in all the advanced economies? Why is our material standard of living improving only very slowly – if at all?

As I say, that’s something economists are still debating. But I’ve been thinking much of the explanation may lie in the changed way our business people are going about their business.

If you listen to the business lobby groups, productivity isn’t improving because of successive governments’ failure to “reform” the economy. Nonsense. A moment’s thought reveals that the efficiency with which inputs are turned into outputs is determined primarily by the collective actions of each of the nation’s businesses.

Firms improve their productivity as part of their efforts to increase their profits. But their ultimate goal is higher profits, not necessarily being more productive. And, since improving productivity can often be quite hard, I’ve been wondering if productivity isn’t improving much because firms have found easier ways of increasing their profits.

Such as? Just by cutting costs. Particularly the cost of labour. One way to cut labour costs is to install better labour-saving machines. Doing so does improve the productivity of the workers who remain – and will show up in the productivity figures.

But if you find ways to limit the increase in – or even cut – your workers’ hourly wage rate, this does nothing to improve your productivity, but does increase your profits. Many employers have moved from fixing their wage rates by “collective bargaining” – which involves workers pressing for higher wages by having their union threaten to go on strike – to “individual contracts”, which often involve no bargaining at all.

Or you could cut your labour “on-costs” (including sick leave, annual leave, workers compensation insurance and superannuation contributions) by changing your workers from employees into (supposedly) independent contractors.

This, of course, is a big part of the motive for the rise of the “gig economy”. And there must surely be cost savings associated with the use of labour-hire firms.

Businesses have become a lot more conscious of the costly risks involved in running a business. They’ve sought better ways of “managing” those risks – which, in practice, has often involved shifting risks from the firm to its workers. For instance, moving to independent contractors shifts to workers the costs associated with the risks of them getting sick, being injured on the job, or even not having saved enough for retirement.

The move to firms carrying much lower inventories of raw materials and spare parts – “just-in-time” inventory management – means that the risk of interruptions to a firm’s supply chain can cause workers to be stood down on no pay until the problem’s fixed.

Yet another way firms have been saving on labour costs is by spending less on training their own workers and then, when they’re short of skilled workers, bringing them in from overseas on temporary work visas.

The trick is, these cost-saving measures don’t just fail to improve the productivity of labour, they can actually worsen it. Textbook economics sees firms continually comparing the cost of employing workers to perform tasks with the cost of using a machine to do it.

When wage costs are rising strongly, firms are more inclined to invest in labour-saving equipment. When wage costs are low or falling, however, firms become more inclined to avoid investing in machines and just hire more workers – even to perform quite menial tasks.

Before the pandemic, economists were continually surprised to see employment growing at a faster rate than the fairly weak growth in production (real GDP) would imply. That’s good news for employment but – as a matter of simple arithmetic - bad news for labour productivity: GDP per hour worked.

But it’s worse than that. For technological advances to improve our living standards, you don’t just need people inventing new and better machines, you need businesses across the economy regularly buying and using the latest, whiz-bang models to produce whatever it is they do.

That’s just what hasn’t been happening. As Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe noted recently, business investment in plant and structures has averaged just 9 per cent of GDP since 2010, compared with 12 per cent over the previous three decades.

Sometimes I think that, while businesses’ modern obsession with finding any and every means to minimise their wage costs no doubt fattens their profits in the short term, one day we’ll realise it’s been hugely destructive of our living standards.

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Why journalists have a trust problem

As journalists know – but probably try not to think about – polling shows that, as an occupation, journalists don’t rank highly. We’re well down the list, held in roughly the same esteem as politicians, real estate agents and people selling used cars. Similarly, with the notable exception of the ABC, the “mainstream media” news outlets we work for are not highly regarded by the audiences we serve. If there was ever a time when we were highly trusted, we are less so today. If there was a time when journalists had great credibility with their audience, we’re less so today.

A joke I saw on the net. Patient: Doctor, when do you think covid 19 will be over?

Doctor: I don’t know, I’m not a journalist.

I find our low credibility worrying. It worries me that the work we do – the work that’s so important to the lives of our audience and so important to the good functioning of democracy – isn’t greatly trusted by our readers, listeners and viewers. The news we bring isn’t necessarily believed.

Journalism has always been competitive – both between news outlets and within the same outlet – but I think it’s become more so in recent decades. We’ve had to compete harder for eyeballs, partly because of the rise of online-only news outlets, but mainly because of the almost infinite proliferation of ways people can spend their leisure time other than reading, listening to, or watching the news. The online world has allowed our audience to be much more choosy about the news it wants and doesn’t want. Facebook has allowed people who can’t stand our politicians to redefine news as being “what my family and friends have been doing lately”. Turns out we don’t decide what’s newsworthy – what news is – our customers do.

Journalists – particularly those who manage to last in this business – like competition. They enjoy it for its own sake – because most of us convince ourselves we’re doing pretty well in the comp. As an economics writer I’ve thought a lot about competition. It can be a good thing, keeping everyone on their toes and trying harder to be better than before and better than their competitors. But, as with most things, there can be forms of competition that make things worse rather than better. Journalism is far from the only profession where competition can make us too inward-looking. The social commentator Hugh Mackay has observed that the key to successful competition is to focus on the customer, not your competitors. Do the best job of satisfying the needs of the customer, and you’ll win the comp.

This is why my motto as a journo - my compass guiding me in how to do my job - has long been: Serve the reader. I suspect much of the reason our profession is less trusted is that we’re too focused on our competitors at the expense of our audience. We focus on the comp because we enjoy competing. The besetting sin of journalists is to write to impress other journos. The temptation facing editors is to edit to impress other editors.

When you focus on the audience, you realise that, though it’s undoubtedly true that people find bad news much more interesting that good news, if competition leads us to fill page after page, bulletin after bulletin, with more and more news about how utterly rotten the world is – my news is much badder than yours – you can make the audience so depressed they stopped wanting to know your news. Focus on the audience, and you realise you should be including a fair bit of good, heart-warming, uplifting, human-interest, entertaining, odd and funny news in the mix.

One of the things we tell ourselves on Walkley award nights is how the role of good journalism is to hold the powerful to account. True. But I fear that the intense competition between journalists – particularly those in federal and state parliamentary press galleries – makes us sitting ducks for governments of either colour whose goal is to manipulate the media for their own nefarious purposes.

The power of governments and their media minders comes from their near monopoly over political news. A lot of their news they put out in press releases, but a lot they don’t. A lot of the background information we need they give out verbally – giving more and better to those journos who haven’t incurred their displeasure by running too much criticism. Journos want exclusives? Fine. Some stories you leak to particular journalists or particular outlets. But on condition the story’s given much prominence and run uncritically. The nicer you are to a government, the better the stories it gives you. Some stories, particularly snippets from the next day’s speeches, are given first to the morning newspapers, with TV and radio always getting the second bite. This is a technique for ensuring the media focus on the parts of a speech we want them to focus on. TV and radio will take more interest in the speech story now they’ve seen how seriously the mastheads took it.

Press releases are given to gallery journalists hours before they’re put up on websites and thus become available to people outside the parliament. Why? Because you want your stories covered by those journos you know and can discipline, not journos beyond your control. But also because you know the gallery journalists don’t want people back at head office pinching their stories, so you oblige. Politicians, their staffers and gallery journalists are part of a club, where the struggle between the members is subject to a host of unwritten rules of behaviour everyone knows and conforms to. Rules designed make life more comfortable for everyone, including gallery journalists’ FOMO.

The media managers have learnt how to turn journalists’ weaknesses to their own advantage. Journalists are obsessively concerned with deciding what’s new and what’s not new. This is why the manipulators save up embarrassing reports and put them out on a day when some big happening has turned everyone’s attention elsewhere. Or they put embarrassing news out late on a Friday afternoon when the media are wrapping up early ahead of the weekend. The manipulators know that, by Monday, journos will be far less interested because by then they think the story is “old”. When the manipulators are trying to play down some embarrassing scoop, they play on journalists’ reluctance to write follow-up stories, which we regard as an admission that we were beaten by a rival. The reason these tricks work is because we focus on what our competitors will think about our story – “It was old!” - not on our duty to the audience. We should ask: Do people need to be told about this story? It may be old to me and my mates, but would it still be news to my audience?

Another journalistic weakness is our short attention span. The media manipulators exploit this when they want to draw the public’s attention away from some embarrassment. They do their “hey, look over there” trick and it usually works. The media has been diverted by something that’s new, but not of great significance. The powerful have tricked us into ceasing to hold them to account.

I think a big part of the reason we’ve lost credibility with our audience is that competitive pressure keeps tempting us to run stories we ourselves don’t actually believe, just because, if they were true, they’d be a great yarn. And, in any case, “I didn’t say it, he did – so if it’s not true, blame him”. A common example is when some business lobby group is campaigning against some tax change and pays some “independent expert” to come up with modelling purporting to show that the tax change would destroy 50,000 jobs. In other words, we knowingly mislead our audience for the sake of a good story – and then we wonder why they’ve stopped trusting us. We do this even though we accept no obligation to run every story we’re sent and, indeed, choose not to run loads of stories we judge to be mere self-promotion or lacking in credibility.

The media go along with media-management by governments when they attend the annual budget lockup, the sole purpose of which these days is to keep journalists locked up until so late in the evening they have no chance to consult independent experts before publication. By contrast, issuing a major government report without a lockup – without giving the media time to read it before your press conference (as with the aged care royal commission’s recent report) – is another media manipulation technique. In election campaigns, the media allow their senior reporters to be shipped around the country on campaign planes and buses, given policy announcements just minutes before the press conference, and kept out of touch with anyone outside the politician’s bubble.

Editors fully understand the way this ties up their reporters, but rarely decline to participate. Why? Because they fear that doing so would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors. This is another example of the way politicians and other powerful interest groups can take advantage of our competitive instincts to stop us performing the role we keep telling the public we do perform. Economists call this situation where we know we’re doing things we shouldn’t, but don’t want to be the first to stop doing them, a “collective action problem”. Solving such problems isn’t easy, but being more honest with ourselves about the lack of excellence in much of the reporting we do would at least be a start.

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