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.

Read more >>

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.

Read more >>

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.

Read more >>

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.

Read more >>

We must stop making excuses and push now for full employment

In his new book, Reset, outlining a plan to get the economy back to top performance, Professor Ross Garnaut makes the radical proposal to keep stimulating the economy until we reach full employment within four years. Excellent idea. But what is full employment? Short answer: economists don’t know.

In principle, every economist believes achieving full employment is the supreme goal of economic policy, because it would mean using every opportunity to get everyone working who wants to work and so achieve the maximum possible rate of improvement in our material living standards.

In practice, however, we haven’t achieved full employment consistently since the early 1970s – a failure that few economists seem to lose sleep over. It’s like St Augustine’s prayer: Lord make me pure – but not yet.

The economists’ ambivalence starts with the truth that, contrary to what you’d expect, full employment can’t mean an unemployment rate of zero. That’s because, at any point in time, there’ll always be some people moving between jobs.

In the days when we did achieve full employment, from the end of World War II until the early ’70s, its practical definition was an unemployment rate of less than 2 per cent.

But then economists realised that the full employment we wanted had to be lasting – “sustainable”. And if you had the economy running red hot with everyone in jobs and using the shortage of labour to demand big pay rises, this would push up the prices businesses had to charge and inflation would take off. The managers of the economy would then have to jam on the brakes, and before long we’d be back to having lots of unemployed workers.

This was when economists decided that sustainable full employment meant achieving the NAIRU – the “non-accelerating-inflation” rate of unemployment. This was the lowest point to which the unemployment rate could fall before wages and inflation began accelerating.

This makes sense as a concept. So the economic managers decided they could use fiscal policy (increases in government spending or cuts in taxes) and monetary policy (cuts in interest rates) to push the economy towards full employment, but they should stop pushing as soon as the actual unemployment rate fell down close to the NAIRU.

Trouble is, the NAIRU is “unobservable” – you can’t see it and measure it. So economists are always doing calculations to estimate its level. But every economist’s estimate is different, and their estimates keep rising and falling over time for unexplained reasons.

In the 1980s, people thought the NAIRU was about 7 per cent. In the late ’90s, when someone suggested we could get unemployment down to 5 per cent, many economists laughed. But it happened.

For a long time, our econocrats had it stuck at “about 5 per cent”. But the rich economies have been stuck in a low-growth trap, with surprisingly weak growth in wages and prices, even as unemployment edged down. This suggests the NAIRU may now be lower than our calculations suggest.

Garnaut recounts in his book US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell saying that, in 2012, the Fed thought America’s NAIRU was 5.5 per cent. In 2020, they thought it had fallen to 4.1 per cent. But this seems still too high because, before the virus struck, the actual unemployment rate had fallen to 3.5 per cent without much inflation.

In Australia, in 2019 the Reserve lowered its estimate to a number that “begins with 4 not 5”, or “about 4.5 per cent”. With wage growth “subdued” for the past seven years, and consumer prices growing by less than 2 per cent a year for six years, this downward correction is hardly surprising. Indeed, Garnaut thinks the true figure could be 3.5 per cent or less.

But Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy said last October he thought the coronacession, like all recessions, had probably increased the NAIRU - to about 5 per cent.

Now get this. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said he won’t start trying to reduce the budget deficit – apply the fiscal brakes – until unemployment is “comfortably below 6 per cent”.

Really? That would be well above any realistic estimate of the NAIRU. So the Morrison government is saying it will stop using the budget to reach full employment well before it’s in sight, making reducing government debt its top priority. We’d love to get everyone possible back to work but, unfortunately, we can’t afford it.

So we’re prepared to let continuing unemployment erode the skills of those who go for months or even years without a job because the cost of helping them is just too high. Those likely to be most “scarred” by this will be young people leaving education in search of their first proper job.

But we’ll blight their early working lives in ways that will harm them – and the economy they’ll be making a diminished contribution to - for years to come. That’s okay, however, because we’ll be doing it – so we tell ourselves – to ensure we don’t leave the next generation with a lot of government debt.

Yeah sure. In truth, we’ll be doing it because, so long as I and my kids have jobs, we’ve learnt to live with a lot of other people not having them. We believe in full employment, but we’re happy to continue living without it.

This complacency is what Garnaut says must change. He’s right. He’s right too in saying that with the rise in wages and prices so weak for so long, we should stop trying to guess where the NAIRU is. “We can find out what it is by increasing the demand for labour until wages in the labour market are rising at a rate that threatens to take inflation above the Reserve Bank [2 to 3 per cent] range for an extended period,” he says.

And here’s something else to remember: the Reserve has begun warning that we won’t get back to meaningful real wage growth until we get back to full employment.

Read more >>

Deeper causes of America's troubles are economic and social

The older I get the more I prefer movies where nothing much happens. I’m increasingly impatient with car chases, gunfights and sword fights. I like movies that look at people’s lives and the way their relationships develop. Truth be told, I prefer escapist movies, but make an exception for those that help me better understand the difficulties encountered by people living in circumstances very different to mine. They may not be much fun, but they are character-building.

I put Frances McDormand’s memorable Nomadland in that category. If you want to understand how the richest, smartest, most “advanced” civilisation in the world could be tearing itself apart before our very eyes, Nomadland is an easy place to start.

McDormand plays an older woman who, having recently lost her husband, finds the global financial crisis and its Great Recession have caused her to lose her job, her home and even the small company town she’s lived in for years.

She fits out a second-hand campervan and takes off on the roads of middle America in search of somewhere to earn a bit of money and somewhere to camp for a few weeks that doesn’t cost too much.

It’s a solitary life, but slowly she makes casual friendships with a whole tribe of other older nomads moving around in search of unskilled casual work. The climax comes when her van breaks down and she must return to suburbia to beg her sister for a loan so she can keep on the move.

It’s a fictionalised version of a non-fiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In the hands of the film’s director, it becomes a story of human resilience, how McDormand’s character and the other nomads learn to adapt and survive. According to the reviews, the movie glosses over the book’s criticism of the poor treatment and payment of people working at a huge Amazon warehouse.

For a harder-nosed expose of life on the margins of America’s mighty economy, I recommend the recent work of the Nobel prize-winning Scottish American economist, Sir Angus Deaton. With his wife Anne Case, another distinguished economics professor from Princeton University, Deaton has obliged Americans to acknowledge an epidemic that’s been blighting their society for two decades, the ever-rising “deaths of despair” among working-class white men.

These are deaths by suicide, alcohol-related liver disease and accidental drug overdose. Much of the problem is the opioid crisis, in which increased prescription of opioid medications – which the pharmaceutical companies had assured doctors were not addictive – led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids and many fatal overdoses.

Deaton and Case found that these deaths of despair had risen from about 65,000 a year in 1995 to 158,000 in 2018 and 164,000 in 2019. This increase is almost entirely confined to Americans – particularly white males – without a university degree.

While overall death rates have fallen for those with full degrees, they’ve risen for less-educated Americans. Amazingly, life expectancy at birth for all Americans fell between 2014 and 2017 – the first three-year drop since the Spanish flu pandemic. It rose a fraction in 2018, as the authorities finally responded to the opioid crisis.

Deaton and Case have found that, after allowing for inflation, the wages of US men without college degrees have fallen for 50 years, while college graduates’ earnings premium over those without a degree has risen by an “astonishing” 80 per cent.

With the decline in employment in manufacturing caused by globalisation and, more particularly, automation, less-educated Americans have become increasingly less likely to have jobs. The share of prime-age men in the labour force has trended downwards for decades.

Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump won more votes in the Electoral College partly because most Republicans held their nose and voted for him, but mainly because three or four smaller midwest “rust bucket” states – still suffering from the loss of less-skilled jobs in the Great Recession – switched from the Democrats to the man who promised to give the establishment a big kick up the bum. (Instead, he gave it big tax cuts and more deregulation.)

So Trump is more a symptom than a cause of America’s long-running economic and social decay. Which doesn’t change the likelihood that his woeful mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic will add to the economic and social causes of deaths of despair.

Deaton and Case say the pandemic has exposed and accelerated the long-term trends that will render the US economy even more unequal and dysfunctional than it already was, further undermining the lives and livelihoods of less-educated people in the years ahead.

In the pandemic, many educated professionals have been able to work from home – protecting themselves and their salaries – while many of those who work in services and retail have lost their jobs or face a higher risk of infection doing them.

“When the final tallies are in, there is little doubt that the overall losses in life and money will divide along the same educational fault line,” they conclude.

Read more >>

Evil Lord Keynes flies to rescue of disbelieving Liberals

When we entered lockdown in March this year, many people (including me) pooh-poohed Scott Morrison’s assurance that the economy would “snap back” once the lockdown was lifted. Turned out he was more right than wrong. Question is, why?

Two reasons. But first let’s recap the facts. About 85 per cent of the jobs lost in April and May had been recovered by November, with more likely this month. It’s a similar story when you look at the rebound in total hours worked per month (thereby taking account of underemployment).

In consequence, the rate of unemployment is expected to peak at 7.5 per cent – way lower than the plateaus of 10 per cent after the recession of the early 1980s and 11 per cent after the recession of the early 1990s. And the new peak is expected in the next three months.

At this stage, the unemployment rate is expected to be back down to where it was before the recession in four years. If you think that’s a terribly long time, it is. But it’s a lot better than the six years it took in the ’80s, and the 10 years in the ’90s.

We’ve spent most of this year telling ourselves we’re in the worst recession since World War II. Turns out that’s true only in the recession’s depth. Never before has real gross domestic product contracted by anything like as much as 7 per cent – and in just one quarter, to boot.

But one lesson we’ve learnt this year is that, with recessions, what matters most is not depth, but duration. Normally, of course, the greater depth would add to the duration. But this is anything but a normal recession. And, in this case, it’s the other way round: the greater depth has been associated with shorter duration.

Of course, the expectation that this recession will take just four years to get unemployment back to where it was is just a forecast. It may well be wrong. But what we do have in the can is that, just six months after 870,000 people lost their jobs, 85 per cent of them were back in work. Amazing.

So why has the economy snapped back in a way few thought possible? First, because this debt-and-deficit obsessed government, which would never even utter the swearword “Keynes” - whom the Brits raised to the peerage for his troubles - swallowed its misconceptions and responded to the lockdown with massive fiscal (budgetary) stimulus.

The multi-year direct fiscal stimulus of $257 billion (plus more in the budget update) is equivalent to 13 per cent of GDP in 2019-20. This compares with $72 billion fiscal stimulus (6 per cent of GDP) applied in response to the global financial crisis – most of which the Liberals bitterly opposed.

Some see Morrison’s about-face on the question of fiscal stimulus as a sign of his barefaced pragmatism and lack of commitment to principle. Not quite. A better “learning” from this development is that conservative parties can afford the luxury of smaller-government-motivated opposition to using budgets (rather than interest rates) to revive economies only while in opposition, never when in government.

At the heart of Morrison’s massive stimulus were two new, hugely influential, hugely expensive and hugely Keynesian temporary “automatic budgetary stabilisers” - the JobKeeper wage subsidy and the supplement to JobSeeker unemployment benefits.

But the second reason the rebound is stronger than expected is that, while acknowledging the coronacession’s uniqueness, economists (and I) have been too prone to using past, more conventional recessions as the “anchor” for their predictions about how the coronacession will proceed.

We’ve forgotten that, whereas our past recessions were caused by the overuse of high interest rates to slowly kill off a boom in demand over a year or more, the coronacession is a supply shock – where the government suddenly orders businesses (from overseas airlines to the local caff) to cease trading immediately and until further notice, and orders all households to leave their homes as little as possible.

It’s this unprecedented supply-side element that means economists should never have used past ordinary demand-side recessions as their anchor for predicting the coronacession’s length and severity.

Whereas normal recessions are economies doing what comes naturally after the authorities hit the brakes too hard, the coronacession is an unnatural act, something that happened instantly after the flick of a government switch.

Morrison believed that, as soon as the government decided to flick the switch back to on, the economy would snap back to where it was. Thanks to his massive fiscal stimulus and other measures – which were specifically designed to stop the economy from unwinding while it was in limbo – his expectation was 85 per cent right.

But there’s a further “learning” to be had from all this. In a normal recession, a recovery is just a recovery. Once it’s started, we can expect it to continue until the job’s done, unless the government does something silly.

But this coronacession is one of a kind. What we’ve had so far is not the start of a normal recovery, but a rebound following the flick of the lockdown switch back to “on”. It has a bit further to run, with the leap in the household saving rate showing that a fair bit of the lockdown’s stimulus is yet to be spent.

Sometime next year, however, the stimulus will stop stimulating demand. Only then will we know whether the rebound has turned into a normal recovery. With wage growth still so weak, I’m not confident it will.

Read more >>

Year of wonders: Coronacession not as bad as feared

This year has been one steep learning curve for the nation’s medicos, economists and politicians. And you can bet there’ll be more “learnings” to learn in 2021.

Just as the epidemiologists learnt that the virus they assumed in their initial worst-case modelling of the effects of the pandemic wasn’t the virus we got, economists have learnt as they continually revised down their dire forecasts of the economic damage the pandemic and its lockdown would cause.

It reminds me of the “anchor and adjust” heuristic – mental shortcut – that behavioural economists have borrowed from the psychologists. Not only do humans not know what the future holds, they’re surprisingly bad at estimating the size of things.

They frequently estimate the absolute size of something by thinking of something else of known size – the anchor – and then asking themselves by how much the unknown thing is likely to be bigger or smaller than that known thing.

(Trick is, we often fail to ensure the anchor we use for comparison is relevant to the unknown thing. Experiments have shown that psychologists can influence the answers subjects give to a question such as “how many African countries are members of the United Nations?” by first putting some completely unrelated number into the subjects’ minds.)

The econocrats have been furiously anchoring-and-adjusting the likely depth and length of the coronacession all year.

Their initial forecasts of the size of the contraction in gross domestic product and rise in unemployment – which were anchored on the epidemiologists’ original modelling results – soon proved way too high. (Treasury’s first estimate of the cost of the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme was way too high for the same reason.)

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison started assuring us the economy would “snap back” once the lockdown was over, many people (including me) expressed scepticism.

An economy couldn’t simply “hibernate” the way bears can. Businesses would collapse, some jobs would be lost permanently, and business and consumer confidence would take a lasting hit. There’d be some kind of bounce-back, but it would be way smaller and slower than Morrison was implying.

Wrong. The first reason we overestimated the hit from the pandemic was our much-greater-than-expected success in suppressing the virus. Early expectations were for total hours worked to fall by 20 per cent and the rate of unemployment to rise to 10 per cent.

Morrison’s impressive handling of the pandemic – being so quick to close Australia’s borders, acting on the medicos’ advice, setting up the national cabinet, conjuring up personal protective equipment, and encouraging the states to build up their testing and tracing capability – gets much of the credit for this part of our overestimation.

But the main reason things haven’t turned out as badly as feared is that the economy has rebounded much more in line with Morrison’s assurance than with the doubters’ fears. Victoria’s second wave made this harder for some to see, but last week’s labour force figures for November make it very clear.

Total employment fell by 870,000 between March and May, but by November it had increased by 730,000, an 84 per cent recovery. Victoria accounted for most of the jobs growth in November and now has pretty much caught up with the other states – the more remarkable because its lockdown was so much longer and painful.

Admittedly, more than all the missing 140,000 jobs are full-time, suggesting that some formerly full-time jobs may have become part-time.

By the time of the delayed budget 10 weeks ago, the forecast peak in the unemployment rate had been cut to 8 per cent, but in last week’s budget update it was cut to 7.5 per cent by the first quarter of next year.

If this is achieved it will show that the coronacession isn’t nearly as severe as the recession of the early 1990s – in which unemployment reached a plateau rather than a peak of 11 per cent – or the recession of the early 1980s, with its plateau of 10 per cent.

Similarly, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg now expects the unemployment rate to return to its pre-pandemic level (of 5 per cent or so) in about four years, in contrast to the six years it took following the 1980s recession and the 10 years it took following the ‘90s recession.

Question is, why has the rebound been so much stronger than even the government’s forecasts predicted? Two reasons – but I’ll save them for next Monday.

Read more >>

Job insecurity is about shifting risks, not being flexible

One thing we’ve learnt from the pandemic is that, for those who rely on evidence rather than anecdotes, what we believe to be The Truth keeps changing as we learn more. Take the way the medicos changed their tune on mask-wearing as more evidence came in.

It’s the same with the truth about job insecurity. The unions have gone for years claiming that work has become less secure, and in recent years the rise of the “gig economy” – where people get bits of paid work via a digital platform such as Uber or Deliveroo – means many people have found that claim a lot easier to believe.

But the training of economists says you should base conclusions about the economy on statistical evidence, not anecdotes or even personal experience. And the trouble is, a quick look at the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ figures for the labour force shows little sign of growing job insecurity.

The bureau doesn’t measure insecurity as such. Nor, since there’s no legal definition yet, does it even measure casual employment directly. But, since casual workers aren’t paid annual and sick leave, the bureau’s figures for those workers who say they aren’t eligible for paid leave are taken to be a measure of casual employment.

By this measure, although casual employment grew strongly to about a quarter of all workers in the 20 years to the turn of the century, that’s hardly changed in the 20 years since then. So where is all the growing insecurity?

Of course, since the big companies running the gig platforms on the internet have gone to great lengths to ensure the people getting work from them aren’t classed as their employees, they aren’t included among the casual employees.

No, they’d be counted as “self-employed”. But the figures show no great change in the proportion of workers who are self-employed over the past 20 years.

So where’s all this growing job insecurity we hear about? Short answer: buried much deeper in the figures.

Before we get to that, one thing we can say with confidence, however, is that though the gig economy is highly visible and gets much publicity in the media, it isn’t all that big relative to a labour force of more than 13 million people.

And, contrary to what some young people who spend too much time on their phones imagine, it’s highly unlikely that most work is in the process of moving to some internet platform. No, the issue of insecure employment is much bigger and wider than what happens to the gig economy.

One labour market expert who’s been working to explain why job insecurity is real despite its seeming absence from the stats is Professor David Peetz, of Griffith University.

In a piece he wrote for my second-favourite website, the universities’ The Conversation, in 2018, Peetz argued that the real causes of job insecurity aren’t the type of contract people are on – casual or permanent – but the way businesses are being structured these days.

These new organisational structures are designed to minimise costs, transfer risk from corporations to employees, and shift power away from employees, Peetz says.

Another part of his explanation is that the statisticians’ nationwide totals conceal changes in some industries but not others. (Other academics, from Curtin University, have used their own index of precarious employment to show that insecure employment is above average in the accommodation and food services, agriculture, and arts and recreation industries, but below average in the utilities, financial services, and public administration industries.)

Peetz says that “large corporations want to minimise their costs and risks, avoid accountability when things go wrong, and ensure products have the features they want.”

One instance of changing organisational arrangements is the dramatic increase in franchised businesses – where what looks like the local branch of some national chain is actually owned by a local small business person.

“The franchisee bears responsibility for scandals such as underpaying workers,” he says.

“Other corporations call in labour hire companies to take on responsibility for their workers. This cuts costs and transfers risk down the chain – which means jobs are more insecure.

“Most people working for franchises, spin-off companies, subsidiaries and labour hire firms are still employees. It’s more efficient for capital to control workers through the employment relationship than to pay them piece rates as contractors. That would run the risk of worker desertion or of shortcuts affecting quality.” (One powerful reason most of us won’t end up in the gig economy.)

In research published this month, Peetz drills into previously unpublished statistics from the bureau on casual workers to discover more of the elusive truth about “precarity” (my nomination for ugliest new word of the year).

He found that about a third of workers classed as “casual” because of their lack of leave entitlements worked full-time hours. More than half had the same working hours from week to week. More than half could not choose the days on which they worked.

Almost 60 per cent had been with their employer for more than a year, and about 80 per cent expected to be with the same employer in a year’s time.

Does any of that fit your mental image of what it means to be a casual worker? Get this: Peetz found that as few as 6 per cent of those we class as “casuals” work varying hours or are on standby, have been with their employer for a short time, and expect to be there for a short time.

Note that employers can usually dispense with the services of casual employees without giving them any notice, nor any redundancy payout.

“Overall,” Peetz concludes, “what I’ve found suggests the ‘casual’ employment relationship is not about doing work for which employers need flexibility. It’s not about workers doing things that need doing at varying times for short periods.

“The flexibility is really in employers’ ability to hire and fire, thereby increasing their power. For many casual employees there’s no real flexibility, only permanent insecurity.”

Read more >>

Mistreating workers isn’t a smart path to prosperity

Sometimes I think that, when it comes to industrial relations, we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. We used to be pushed around – and frequently inconvenienced – by overly powerful unions, but now the employers are on top and want it all their own way.

We’ve gone from often inflexible and unreasonable unions to “workplace flexibility” that’s all about making life easier – and more hugely remunerated – for bosses, while making work unpleasant and unrewarding – emotionally and monetarily – for far too many of our workers.

I guess what it proves is that when one side or the other acquires too much power, the temptation to abuse it is irresistible.

The push to “reform” Australia’s highly centralised wage fixing began with the Hawke-Keating government and its accord with the union movement. It was taken a lot further – and became a lot more overtly anti-union – under the Howard government.

At the time, many of these “reforms” seemed sensible. What we didn’t realise then was the way globalisation (“Why don’t I move my factory to Asia where wages are lower?”) and the digital revolution (“Why employ a worker when you can farm stuff out to some unknown slave on the internet?”) would undercut the unions without any help from reforming legislators.

The result is, unions are now a shadow of their former selves, clinging to their role in industry super funds to keep themselves relevant. The proportion of workers who belong to unions has gone from half to 15 per cent and falling.

On the other hand, one unintended consequence of the now-ended era of neoliberalism has been to convince our manager class they have a divine right to be given whatever they think necessary to their greater success.

Which brings us to the latest batch of “reforms” being proposed by Scott Morrison and his Attorney-General, the misleadingly advertised Christian Porter, of Robodebt fame. With Parliament now off on Christmas holidays, the much-debated bill has gone to a parliamentary committee, and won’t resurface until March.

If you listen to some people, the proposed reforms are nothing more than an employers’ wish list. Fortunately, they’re not that bad. With one notable exception, the changes are the product of Porter’s extensive joint discussions with the unions and employer groups.

No Liberal government is capable of doing other than making changes that lean in favour of the employers, but the measures are the result of those discussions – so no surprise to the unions – and include some wins for the union side.

The big, undiscussed surprise is the plan to suspend – temporarily, of course; take my word for it – the requirement that enterprise agreements leave workers “better off overall” despite any reduction in particular benefits.

The unions aren’t buying that one. But, in any case, Porter has already signalled his willingness to drop it. This is no WorkChoices 2.0. The Libs are still smarting over the real WorkChoices’ role in the Howard government’s defeat in 2007. Whatever else he may be, Morrison is no crazy brave when it comes to pushing through controversial economic reforms.

No, the other changes are more modest and less objectionable. One is to include in the legislation the first-ever (weak) definition of what it means to be a “casual”. Another is a sunset provision to kill off enterprise agreements that are decades old and out of date.

Truth is, the changes we need to our labour laws are much more sweeping. Although you need to dig deep into the official statistics to find evidence, the unions and labour economists are right to say we have a growing problem with precarious employment, of which the “gig economy” is just the tip.

Outfits such as Uber are a strange combination of highly beneficial innovation (a more efficient way of bringing riders and drivers together) and an arrogant attempt to sidestep the labour laws that give much-needed protection to employees (and the taxman).

Then there’s the proliferation of franchising and labour hire companies. And the epidemic of wage theft – prompted by business people’s belief that, whatever some law may say, as God’s gift to the economy they are protected from prosecution.

I think we’re getting muddled between means and ends. The business proposition is: if only you’ll let me give my workers a hard time, my business will be more successful and everyone will benefit. If only you’ll accept an insecure job with hours that change from one week to the next according to my needs, the economy will be much better off.

But if you take the workers and their dependents out of the economy, you don’t have much left. People rightly crave job security. Make their working lives a misery and a pay rise is poor consolation. (And right now, of course, we can’t afford the pay rise either.)

We’re getting the cart before the horse, turning the people who are supposed to be the chief beneficiaries of a good economy into the people who, we’re told, must suffer to bring the good economy about. That’s what needs reform.

Read more >>

It may be a terrible recession, but it could have been worse

In economics, everything is relative. Relative to you, the coronacession is likely to be the worst economic disaster you’ll experience in your lifetime. Relative to Australia, it is – as the media (including yours truly) keep telling us – the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But, as a report published this week by the Lowy Institute reminds us, there’s another side of the story. Relative to what we were expecting initially, the recession isn’t as bad as feared. And relative to many other developed economies, we’ve got off lightly.

The report is by Dr John Edwards, a former member of the Reserve Bank board. Perhaps in reaction to his former career as a journalist, Edwards has a penchant for highlighting the aspects of an economic story his former colleagues have tended to gloss over. Which means he finds the not-so-bad bits – and so is always worth hearing from.

How badly a country is suffering economically is largely a function of how well it responded to the pandemic. Those that followed the medicos' injunction to "go early, go hard" have done better than those that procrastinated. Fortunately, and thanks in large part to Scott Morrison’s leadership, we’re in the former group.

Edwards says that, because of our early success in controlling the virus, the "pandemic in Australia is fading sooner and with less economic damage than expected. While the secondary wave of infection in Victoria is a big setback and there may yet be other regional or local outbreaks, the economic recovery already evident is set to continue."

The pandemic "from which Australia is now emerging was the most abrupt, savage and frightening economic shock in the lifetime of most Australians. But the jolt was also short and unexpectedly shallow."

If you judge it by the progress of the economy’s output (real gross domestic product), you may not be convinced the recovery has begun. But judging it by the state of the jobs market, which is what matters most, leaves little doubt.

The best measure of the immediate employment response is the total number of hours worked in the economy. Between March and April we experienced an astonishingly swift fall of 9 per cent. The following month it fell by less than 1 per cent. In June, however, it rose by 4 per cent. The 1.3 per cent rise in July signals a slowdown in the rate of the jobs recovery.

So in July we were still down 5 per cent on July 2019. But here's Edwards’ other way of looking at it: "Through the four months of what was widely portrayed as a general economic cessation, a large proportion of Australian employees kept working.

"New networking technologies permitted most office work to be performed at home. Mining and farming continued. So did much of manufacturing and construction. Electricity, gas and water utilities employees kept their jobs.

"Throughout Australia, public servants continued working, often at home. Tradespeople, cleaners and gardeners more often than not were working. Most health employees remained on the job, busier than ever. Childcare facilities remained open in most places and, where necessary, classroom teaching continued remotely. Media workers struggled to keep up with the demand for news and entertainment.

"The economic cessation, such as it was, centred on restaurants, clubs, pubs and accommodation, discretionary retail such as clothing and furniture, local and international travel, sports, entertainment, and the arts.

"Take-up of the JobKeeper program, which helped businesses retain employees, was far lower than expected because the economic damage was less than expected. All up, most of the Australian workforce remained on the job, either from their usual place of work or from home."

Surprisingly, most of the economic downturn took the unusual form of a sudden cessation in household consumption.

While it’s true that colleges and universities have been hurt by the suspension of foreign student arrivals, Edwards says the majority of international students living in Australia before the pandemic stayed. Indeed, many of them had little choice. Quarantines will remain necessary, but plans are now being made to permit the resumption of student arrivals.

More than nine million foreigners, mostly tourists, visited Australia last year. The number arriving since March this year is “scarcely worth counting," he admits. The resumption of mass foreign travel, unimpeded by quarantine, awaits not only the discovery and approval of a vaccine, but also its worldwide distribution in millions of doses.

But get this: in the short term, however, the suspension of normal international travel actually adds to Australia’s gross domestic product. That’s because Australians’ spending abroad exceeds foreigners’ spending in Australia.

Now, compare how we’ve fared with how the other rich countries have. Taking total coronavirus deaths as a proportion of the population, Edwards calculates that our rate is less than a thirtieth of the rates for the United States and Britain.

So it’s little wonder our economy hasn’t been as badly hit. Using the forecasts of the International Monetary Fund, the economic contraction in the United States, the whole of the Euro area, Britain and Canada will be twice the size of our contraction.

Global economic growth will be lower than it would otherwise have been for years to come. And, "while unemployment will be the principal domestic problem, the changing global context will also shape the Australian economy for years to come", Edwards predicts.

Doesn’t sound good. But he has found a silver lining: “The impact for Australia of lower global demand and production is mitigated because three-quarters of its goods exports are to East Asia, a region that is growing faster than Europe or the United States and which, in most cases, has handled the pandemic well.

"While world output [gross world product] will contract nearly 5 per cent in 2020 on IMF forecasts, developing Asian countries will contract by less than 1 per cent."

For us, it all could have been much worse.

Read more >>

Tribal prejudices about wages guarantee a weak recovery

Neither side of politics wants to admit it, but it’s a safe bet that the economy’s recovery from the coronacession will be weak and slow until we get back to strong growth in wages.

Scott Morrison and the Liberals can’t admit it because it flies in the face of their tribe’s view that the unions have too much power, that wage rises are always economically damaging and that public servants are underworked and overpaid.

Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese and Labor can’t admit it because they live in fear of being portrayed as anti-business and because tribal loyalties mean they’ve taken on the union movement’s vested interest in ever-increasing compulsory super contributions.

Last week we learnt that, as measured by the wage price index, after growing by a weak 0.5 per cent or so per quarter for the past six years, wages grew by just 0.2 per cent in the June quarter, the first virus-affected quarter. This took annual growth down to 1.8 per cent.

Worse, wages in the private sector grew by just 0.1 per cent in the quarter. This included actual falls in some wage rates, those negotiated by individual arrangement with people in senior executive and highly paid jobs.

The Reserve Bank sees annual wage growth falling to 1.25 per cent by the end of this year, and staying there until the end of next year. By the end of 2022, it will have recovered only to its present well-below-par rate.

Wage growth is the key to recovery because wages are the greatest single driver of economic activity and employment. But rather than thinking of ways to get wages up, both sides are working on ways to slow them further.

Not that private sector employers will need any help. They always skip pay rises during recessions because, afraid of losing their jobs, workers know they’re in no position to argue.

But, while as individuals, firms benefit from cutting the real value of the wages they pay, when all of them do it at the same time, they all suffer because the nation’s households have less money to spend on the products of the nation’s businesses.

So what can governments do? Well, they can at least avoid doing anything that makes real wage growth any weaker. Federal and state governments can resist the temptation to cut the real wages of their own employees.

This helps sustain household income directly, but also indirectly because employer and employee judgments about what’s “a fair thing” are influenced by what other employers are doing – that is, by wage “norms”.

State Labor governments have been as bad as Coalition governments in using weak growth in private sector wages as an excuse to slow the growth in their own wages. They haven’t, however, been as muddle-headed as the NSW government in freezing its public servants’ wages so as to “stimulate” their economy by using the saving to pay for additional infrastructure spending.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul ain’t stimulus. And the Australia Institute has used the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “input-output tables” to show that whereas every $1 million spent by consumers (including public servants) generates 1.79 jobs directly, every $1 million spent on construction generates only 0.97 jobs.

But federal Labor is worse. It’s thrown its weight behind the for-profit and industry superannuation funds’ campaign to ensure the rate of compulsory employer super contributions is raised from 9.5 per cent of wages to 12 per cent over the next few years.

Labor and the unions have turned a blind eye to the theoretical and empirical evidence that employers largely recover the cost of super contributions by granting pay rises that are lower than otherwise.

So, at a time when we need workers to be spending as much as they can, and the rate of household saving is way too high, the labour movement wants workers to save an even higher proportion of their wage – even though the more we save the less jobs growth we get.

(The Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates has demonstrated that the present contribution rate of 9.5 per cent is sufficient to yield workers a comfortable income in retirement, and that the Morrison government’s early release of super to distressed workers will have little effect on this because most of it will be made up by part-pension payments that are higher than otherwise.)

Finally, Morrison and the Liberals are working on plans to further “reform” the wage-fixing system by making changes that the employers want but the unions oppose. This would leave everyone better off, we’re told, by making the system more “flexible”.

At a time when the system is, if anything, too flexible – witness: so much part-time and casual labour, labour-hire, phoney self-employment, the “gig economy”, almost non-existent strikes, and six years of chronically weak wage growth – this could only increase employers’ power to keep wages low.

See what I mean? Wage growth looks set to stay even weaker than it was before the coronacession.

Read more >>

Virus lockdown pushes already weak economy into recession

If you needed the news that the economy contracted in the March quarter or Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s official admission that, because Treasury expects the present quarter to be much worse, we are now in recession, go to the bottom of the class. Sorry, but you just don’t get it.

To anyone who can tell which side is up, what characterises a recession is not what happens to gross domestic product in two successive quarters or even half a dozen, it’s what happens to employment.

The role of the economy is to provide 13 million Australians with their livelihoods. When it falters in that role, that’s what we really care about. We call it a recession, and it’s why just hearing that word should frighten the pants off you. It means hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of families will be in hardship, anxiety and fear about the future, which could go on for months and months.

So you should have been in no doubt that the economy was in recession from the day, weeks ago, you turned on the telly to see footage of hundreds of people queueing round the block to get into Centrelink and register for unemployment benefits – the JobSeeker payment as it’s now called.

The statistical confirmation of recession came not this week, but more than three weeks ago when the Australian Bureau of Statistics issued labour force figures showing that, in just the four weeks to mid-April, the number of Australians with jobs fell by an unprecedented 600,000.

What more proof did you need? There was more. The total number of hours worked during the month fell by more than 9 per cent. Also unprecedented. In consequence, the rate of under-employment (mainly part-timers wishing to work more hours than they are) leapt by almost 5 percentage points to 13.7 per cent. “Gee, do you think a recession might be coming?”

Of course, what happens to jobs is closely related to what happens to GDP – the volume of goods and services being produced during a period. When firms or government agencies decide to reduce the goods or services they’re producing, it’s a safe bet they’ll also reduce the number of workers they need to help with the producing.

No, my point is just, don’t get the monkey confused with the organ-grinder. We don’t need GDP to tell us whether we’re in recession, we need it to help us understand why we’re in recession and which aspects and industries are most affected.

So let’s start again. The “national accounts” issued by the bureau this week showed real GDP fell by 0.3 per cent in the March quarter so that the economy grew by only 1.4 per cent over the year to March.

To put that 0.3 per cent fall into context, had the economy continued growing at its previous rate it would have increased by about 0.5 per cent. So it’s a fall of 0.8 per cent from what might have occurred. A bit of that fall is explained by the bushfires, but most of it by the early stages of the economic response to the coronavirus – particularly the travel bans and first two weeks of the lockdown.

The largest factor explaining the actual fall is consumer spending, which fell by 1.1 per cent and so contributed minus 0.6 percentage points to the overall fall of 0.3 per cent. Some of this fall was involuntary (as the early days of the lockdown closed many businesses and prevented housebound families from getting out to shop), but much would have been deliberate, as households tightened their belts in anticipation of tough times to come.

Investment spending on new homes and alterations continued to fall – by 1.7 per cent – and business investment spending fell by 0.8 per cent. So, all told, the private sector’s subtraction from growth increased to 0.8 percentage points.

In contrast, government consumption spending (which included spending related to the bushfires and the virus) grew by 1.8 per cent. Add modest growth in infrastructure spending and the public sector made a positive contribution of 0.3 percentage points to the overall fall in GDP during the quarter.

Apart from a fall in inventories that subtracted 0.3 points from the overall change, that leaves “net exports” (exports minus imports) making a positive contribution of 0.5 percentage points. But that’s not as good as it sounds. The volume of our exports actually fell by 3.5 per cent, so we got a positive contribution only because the volume of imports fell by more.

The main factor influencing trade was the travel bans, which hit inbound tourism and incoming overseas students (both exports) and hit outbound tourism (an import) harder. We’re a net importer of tourism.

You see happening in this recession what happens in every recession: it’s the private sector that contracts, whereas the public sector (via federal and state budgets) expands to fill the vacuum. The extent to which governments apply “fiscal stimulus” and allow their budget deficits to rise has a big influence on how severe the recession is, how high unemployment goes and how long it takes to get everyone back to work.

Frydenberg claimed on Wednesday that the economy entered the crisis “from a position of strength”. This is simply untrue. People will stop believing what the Treasurer says if he continues playing so lightly with the truth.

The truth comes from economist David Bassanese of BetaShares: “Let’s not forget the economy was already struggling before the virus crisis due to a downturn in housing construction, weak business investment and tapped out consumer spending. Those fundamental challenges have not gone away, and the shock of COVID-19 has only exacerbated them.”

The truth Frydenberg is so unwilling to face up to is that, with the private sector already so weak, we were relying on the federal and state budgets to prop up the economy for many quarters before the virus arrived. Pretending otherwise won’t create a single job.

Read more >>

Many illusions performed in the name of creating jobs

How on earth can someone get to be Treasurer of our oldest state and yet say something as uncomprehending as that he has to freeze NSW public servants’ wages so he can use the money to create jobs? Fortunately, Victoria’s Treasurer is better educated.

So, for the benefit of Dominic Perrottet, Economics 101, lesson 1: every dollar that’s spent by governments, businesses, consumers or the most despised welfare recipient helps to create jobs. And don’t tell me that, as well as creating jobs directly, your pet project will also create jobs indirectly. That’s also true of every dollar spent.

In high school economics it’s called “the circular flow of income”. They ought to write a song about it: the money goes round and round. That’s because what’s a cost to an employer is income to their employee. And when that employee spends part of their wage in another employer’s business, that cost to the employee becomes income to the other business. (I know it’s complicated, but stick with it.)

You have to be a duly elected politician to believe that only dollars that are spent by governments, bearing the label “job creation”, do the trick – preferably with a ribbon to cut while the cameras roll.

Perrottet claims that “everything for me is jobs, jobs, jobs”. He’s certainly right to believe that the political survival of every government – state or federal – will depend on their success in getting people back to work after this terrible, government-ordered recession. And it won’t be easy.

But if he cared as much about jobs as he claims to, he’d raise state public sector wages by 2.5 per cent as normal and spend big on his specific, look-at-moy, look-at-moy job creation projects.

If it’s all so important, why must one form of job creation be sacrificed to pay for another? Why must Peter be robbed to pay Paul? Perrottet says “this is not about the budget. This is not about savings”.

Really? Then what is it about? Well, one possibility is that it’s about party prejudices. Perrottet hails from the Liberal tribe, whose members tend to regard people who work for the government as overpaid and underworked. If private sector workers are likely to miss out on a pay rise this year, those tribe members might be pretty unhappy about seeing nurses and teachers and pen-pushers escape unscathed.

But I suspect the real reason is Perrottet’s unreal fear of debt and, more particularly, of having the state’s triple-A credit rating downgraded. In the old days, governments worried a downgrading would mean having to pay higher interest rates on their bonds. But these days rates are already so close to zero you couldn’t see the difference with a magnifying glass.

So why are our politicians – state and federal – willing to cede their sovereignty to a bunch of American rating agencies, whose creditability was smashed in the global financial crisis? Not only did they fail to see it coming, they contributed to it by selling triple-A ratings to business borrowers whose debt was later found to be “toxic”.

So why? Because the pollies live in fear of the drubbing they’d take from the other political tribe. Unfortunately, Labor is as much into playing cheap tit-for-tat politics as are the Libs. Being downgraded by a bunch of Yanks on the make is, we’re always assured, the ultimate proof of economic incompetence. Yeah, sure.

Turning to the private sector, its long-established practice is for annual pay rises to be forgone during recessions. Despite the Victorian government’s support for a 3 per cent increase in national minimum and award wages, the Fair Work Commission is likely to follow precedent and give it a miss. The Morrison government wouldn’t have the gumption to propose otherwise.

Individual big businesses will press their unions to skip a beat, and workers afraid they could be next on the dole queue won’t be inclined to argue. Economic orthodoxy says it’s never smart to raise the price of something – labour, in this case – when you’re not selling enough of it. (It’s just a pity there’s so little empirical evidence to support this over-simplified model of how the job market works.)

One of the troubles with recessions is they encourage counter-productive behaviour. Fearful of losing my job, I cut my spending and save as much as I can. But when everyone does the same, we all suffer.

It’s the same with wages. When business is weak and profits are down, it makes sense to keep your wage bill low. But when every business does it, the result is no growth in the wages your customers use to buy your product and get you back to health and strength. Allow you to employ a few more people even.

What gets me is that their “debt and deficit” phobia stops even the Liberals from seeing that, at times like this, the role of the public sector is to do whatever it takes to rescue their mates in the private sector (which includes you and me). Even the business lobby groups don’t seem to get it.

Read more >>

Reserve Bank has just one thing to say to Scott Morrison

It’s possible Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has been reading a book about speechmaking – the one that says: keep the message simple and keep saying it until it sinks in. See if you can detect his one big message last week in his evidence to the Senate inquiry into the response to the coronavirus.

Lowe said that when the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme was due to end in late September was "a critical point for the economy". This was also when the banks’ six-month deferral of mortgage and other payments would come to an end.

"It will be important to review the parameters of that [JobKeeper] scheme. It may be that, in four months’ time, we bounce back well, and the economy does reasonably well, and these schemes, which were temporary in nature, can be withdrawn without problems," he said.

"But if the economy has not recovered reasonably well by then, as part of [Treasury’s] review we should perhaps be looking at an extension of the scheme, or a modification in some way. . . More generally, right through the next year or so, I think the economy is going to need support from both monetary policy [interest rates] and fiscal policy [the budget].

"There are certain risks if we withdraw that support too early. I know, from the Reserve Bank’s perspective, we’re going to keep the monetary support going for a long period of time, and I’m hopeful that the fiscal support will be there for a long period of time.

"If the economy picks up more quickly, that can be withdrawn safely. But if the recovery is very drawn out, then it’s going to be very important that we keep the fiscal support going," he said.

The Reserve’s contribution was to keep interest rates low and make sure credit was available. It had the official interest rate down at 0.25 per cent, which was effectively as low as it could go. But, as the head of the US Federal Reserve kept saying, "Central banks work through lending, not through spending".

"So it’s an indirect channel and there’s a limit to what we can do. . . Going forward, fiscal policy will have to play a more significant role in managing the economic cycle than it has in the past. . . In the next little while there’s not going to be very much scope at all to use monetary policy in [the way it’s been used in the past 20 years].

"So I think fiscal policy will have to be used, and that’s going to require a change in mindset," he said.

Lowe said he thought it was going to be "a long drawn-out process" to get back to full employment which, before the crisis, he’d thought was an unemployment rate of 4.5 per cent, "which means that we’re going to keep interest rates where they are perhaps for years".

It was too early to say what the economy was going to be like in four months’ time, but "if we have not come out of the current trough in economic activity, there will be, and there should be, a debate about how the JobKeeper program transitions into something else, whether it’s extended for specific industries or somehow tapered".

"It’s very important that we don’t withdraw the fiscal stimulus too early," he said, adding a minute later that "my main concern is that we don’t withdraw the fiscal stimulus too early".

Several minutes later, in answer to another question, he said that "if we’re still in the situation where there hasn’t been a decent bounce-back in four or five months’ time, then ending that fiscal support prematurely could be damaging".

Later: "My main point here is: we’ve got to keep the fiscal stimulus going until recovery is assured. I’ve seen, particularly over the past decade, the fiscal stimulus withdrawn too quickly and the economy suffered".

He’s referring, I think, to the US, Britain and the euro-zone countries which, not long after their recoveries from the global financial crisis in 2009, took fright at their rising levels of public debt and switched abruptly to policies of "austerity" – cutting government spending and raising taxes – causing their economies to languish for the past decade.

"The level of public debt in Australia, while it’s rising, is still low. The government can borrow for three years at 0.25 per cent, and it can borrow for 10 years at 0.9 per cent. The [Treasury] held a bond auction two weeks ago and it was able to borrow $19 billion at 1 per cent for 10 years.

"The Australian government has the capability to borrow more, and I think it would be a mistake to withdraw the fiscal stimulus too quickly," he said.

I think I’m getting the message, but is it getting through to Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg?

Read more >>

Treasury: no depression, but no big bounce-back either

Although the virus has delayed the budget until October, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will deliver an update on the budget and – more importantly – the economy, within the next fortnight. But last week the secretary to the Treasury dropped some big hints on what to expect.

In evidence to the Senate committee inquiring into the response to the virus, Dr Steven Kennedy started with the outlook for the labour market. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics are for the four weeks up to mid-April.

In round figures, they show that 900,000 people lost their jobs during the period (although 300,000 gained jobs), 1 million people worked fewer hours and three-quarters of a million kept their jobs but worked no hours (most of them protected by the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme).

So that’s a total of 2.7 million workers – about one worker in five - adversely affected by the snap recession. Total employment fell by 4.6 per cent, but total hours worked fell by twice that – 9.2 per cent, telling us much of the pain was borne by part-time workers. The rate of under-employment (mainly part-timers working fewer hours than they want to) leapt by almost 5 percentage points to 13.7 per cent.

The “good” news is, Kennedy thinks that’s most of the collapse in employment we’re likely to see. We may get a bit more in the figures for May, and maybe even a fraction more in June. But that should be it.

The trick, however, is that though the underlying position won’t be getting much worse, we’ll see the rate of unemployment shooting up. It had risen by “only” 1 percentage point to 6.2 per cent by mid-April, but Kennedy expects it to be closer to 10 per cent by mid-June. (And it would have gone a lot higher but for the JobKeeper scheme.)

Such a strange outcome – it’s not actually getting much worse, but the unemployment rate is rocketing – is explained by the strange nature of this coronacession: a recession caused by the government, acting under doctors’ orders.

In an ordinary recession, almost all the people who lost their jobs in April would have immediately started looking for a new one, and so met the bureau’s tight definition of being unemployed. This time, most people didn’t start looking because many potential employers had been ordered to cease trading and, in any case, you and I had been ordered to stay in our homes and rarely come out.

As the lockdown is eased, however, people will start actively looking for work, and the bureau will change their status from “not in the labour force” to unemployed, making the figures look a lot worse.

On Wednesday, the bureau will publish the “national accounts”, showing what happened to real gross domestic product – the change in the economy’s production of goods and services – during the March quarter.

Kennedy is expecting real GDP to have fallen a bit, mainly because of the bushfires and the ban on entry to Australia by foreign tourists and overseas students. He’s expecting the big fall to come in the June quarter, and for the combined fall since December to be as much as 10 per cent.

If it’s anything like that big it will be humongous. The total contraction in the last recession, in the early 1990s, was just 1.5 per cent. But, as with the job figures, Kennedy is expecting the contraction in GDP to end with the June quarter.

The big question is, what happens after that? With most of the economy reopened – but, of course, our borders still closed to international travel – will most of us be back at work and producing and spending almost as normal? That is, will the period of the economy dropping like a stone be followed by it bouncing back like a rubber ball, producing a graph that looks like a big V?

No. Kennedy told the Senate committee “I’m not predicting a V-shaped recovery in any sense, but the way we entered this [downturn], and the nature of this shock, give me some hope that if governments respond well, particularly through their fiscal levers [that is, their budgets], we needn’t have what’s called the L-shaped recovery”.

That is, economic activity drops a long way, but stays there without growing. Kennedy says the L-shape is probably what people would think of as more like a depression.

Kennedy noted that, according to separate figures from the bureau, the number of jobs in the accommodation and food sector fell by more than 25 per cent in just the three weeks to April 4, while jobs in the arts and recreation services sector fell by almost 19 per cent.

He drew some hope from the fact that the sectors worst affected by the lockdown are “quite dynamic”. “They’re sectors that have high turnover in businesses coming and going, quite high turnover in employees and a lot of casuals,” he said.

So, in the right conditions, they had the potential to re-establish quickly. In contrast, it was hard to re-establish a manufacturing plant quickly. In this strange recession, manufacturing, construction and mining had been allowed to continue without much disruption.

If you rule out V-shaped and L-shaped recoveries, what’s left is a U-shape. You go down fast, but bounce along the bottom before going back up. But our success in suppressing the virus means we’ve been able to start dismantling the lockdown earlier than the six months initially expected.

“So in some ways we’re actually a little more optimistic [than we were] – maybe we just squeeze the U together a bit,” he said.

That’s looking at our domestic economy. Looking at the prospects for the global economy, it’s possibly worse than he first thought. But even here Kennedy finds some source of hope. It so happens that our major trading partners – China, South Korea and Japan – are among the countries that have done better at beating the virus and getting back to work.

Read more >>

Treasury: the budget won't ruin us, but will help save us

Something we should be thankful for is that Scott Morrison saw fit to return the leadership of Treasury to another highly respected macro-economist in the months before the arrival of a virus obliged Morrison to hit the economy for six.

The key to our success in suppressing the virus was his willingness to follow his medicrats’ Treasury-like advice to “go early, go hard”. Unfortunately, going hard meant governments closing our borders and ordering a large slab of private enterprise to cease supplying goods and services to their customers.

We’re left with a sudden, unexpected, government-ordered, supply-side “disease-led” shock to the economy that’s without precedent. By mid-April, this had caused 2.7 million Australians to have either lost their jobs or had their hours reduced.

It would have been several million souls worse than that, but for the quick thinking that saw we needed a new measure – the JobKeeper wage subsidy – to preserve the attachment between businesses and their workers, even though there was much less work to be done.

Treasury and the Australian Tax Office had to design and implement this completely unfamiliar program within a few weeks. It thus shouldn’t be too surprising that their initial estimate of its size and cost proved badly astray. Especially when you remember how far their staffing levels have been run down in the name of smaller (and thus less capable) government.

The JobKeeper program is now expected to involve 3.5 million rather than 6.5 million workers, and cost $70 billion over six months rather than $130 million. According to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, this $60 billion reduction is “good news for the Australian taxpayer” - which suggests he’s yet to learn that the economy matters more than the budget.

Make a note, Josh: the budget serves the economy (and society), the economy doesn’t serve the budget. Taxpayers gain their livelihoods from the economy, which brings them many benefits (starting with three meals a day) along with taxes to pay. In my experience, someone who loses their job gets little comfort from the knowledge that they’ll be paying less tax.

In truth, the $60 billion stuff-up is good news for the economy and the people whose livelihoods it supports. It suggests that fewer businesses than expected have had their revenues cut by 30 per cent (or 50 per cent for big businesses), so that fewer workers than expected have had their livelihoods threatened.

In any case, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy’s remarks to the Senate committee examining our response to the virus, made the day before the stuff-up was announced, suggest there’ll be plenty of other important uses to which the $60 billion could be put.

Kennedy stressed the central role that the budget (“fiscal policy”) would have to play in getting the economy back to full employment “in the months and years ahead”, especially because the other instrument for managing demand, “monetary policy”, is “not able to provide the usual impact that it would”.

That is, interest rates are already as low as they can go, whereas in the global financial crisis they were cut by 4.25 percentage points to help stimulate demand.

As we move away from the supply shock and cautiously reopen industry, “it will become more about managing demand and more about confidence. The focus will be very much on fiscal policy – how it’s contributing to growth and how the composition of those policies contributes to growth and how they encourage re-employment”.

It was obviously a matter for the government but, in the run-up to the budget in October, Treasury would be advising the government on “macro-policy and the composition of existing fiscal stimulus and whether any more is required”.

“I realise people are very excited about lots of reform, but I would encourage us not to get too far ahead of ourselves; we need to keep the economy afloat as it is now and to also get it open,” Kennedy said.

When they think of the huge budget deficits coming up, readers ask me where all the money will be coming from. Short answer: it will be borrowed. And Kennedy advised the committee there was no shortage of institutions keen to buy the government’s bonds (including, no doubt, your super fund, but also foreign institutions).

Countries such as Australia and New Zealand had been “incredibly well placed” to borrow more because “we did start with relatively low levels of debt”. This meant our deficit spending in response to the economic shock could be managed without much debate, he said.

And with the cost of borrowing so low (10-year government bonds cost the government an interest rate of 1 per cent), once the economy was back to growing strongly and the budget balance improving – which wouldn’t be for some time – “debt will bring itself down over time”.

Read more >>

Joblessness hasn't been worse in our lifetimes - nor as hidden

Voters have highly stereotyped views about which side of politics is better at handling which of our problems. So it’s no surprise that the party of the bosses is seen as better at managing the economy, the budget and interest rates, whereas the party of the workers is regarded as better at industrial relations and anything that involves the government spending money.

These stereotypes aren’t necessarily right, but they’re deeply engrained in our thinking. What keeps politics interesting, however, is that voters’ list of our most pressing problems keeps changing with our circumstances. Sometimes Liberal strongpoints are at the top; sometimes Labor strongpoints.

The new problem for Scott Morrison is that though the Libs are seen as best at managing the economy and the budget, when the economy falls into to recession, voters’ focus shifts to the massive unemployment.

That’s a problem his opponents are regarded as better at – perhaps because we know fixing it involves spending shed-loads of money. The Libs are feeling terribly guilty about the $200 billion they’ve committed to spending so far, and are telling themselves they’ll be turning off the tap in September, come what may.

I’m sure you remember the shocking TV footage we saw some weeks back of long queues outside Centrelink offices. You’ve seen the movie; now read the stats. They arrived last Thursday. They showed what had happened in the jobs market just between mid-March and mid-April.

They were the most appalling news on jobs we've had since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Actually, they’re worse than then, in the sense that they happened in just a month (with some more bad months to come), whereas in the Depression it all took several years.

But the unique nature of this coronacession – where, acting under doctors’ orders, the government simply instructed non-essential businesses to close their doors – makes it much harder than usual to see what’s happening in what the media call “the jobs market” and the Australian Bureau of Statistics calls “the labour force”.

At present, a lot of the job loss remains hidden. Tracing what’s happening is like peeling an onion. Except that onions get smaller as you peel, whereas this problem gets bigger as you delve into the fine print. Much bigger.

How do we know how bad it was in the Depression? We know the rate of unemployment got to 20 per cent. By that measure, our problem is small. In April the number of people classed as unemployed by the bureau rose by about 100,000 to more than 800,000. Expressed as a proportion of the labour force (that is, everyone with a job or actively seeking one), the rate of unemployment rose just from 5.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent.

But don’t trust this. As most people know, the bureau’s definition of what it means to be unemployed is very narrow. You have to be actually looking for work and ready to take up any job you’re offered.

You get a better idea from the news that, of the 13 million Australians employed in March, 900,000 lost their jobs in April. However – and I know you’ll find this hard to believe – 300,000 people without jobs gained one during the month, so the net loss of jobs was almost 600,000.

But why, then, did unemployment rise by only 100,000 rather than 600,000? Because 500,000 people didn’t look for another job – understandable since so many employers were in lockdown – and so were classed as “not in the labour force”.

So that’s the first source of hidden joblessness. Most of those people will start looking for jobs as soon as it makes sense to, and then will be counted as unemployed.

The next source of hiddenness comes from the new and worthy JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, intended to preserve the attachment between employers and their workers even though, during the lockdown, those employers don’t have much work needing to be done.

There are now more than 6 million workers on the JobKeeper allowance – that is, about half the entire workforce. Because they’re receiving a wage, they’re all counted as employed. Some are working pretty much as normal and some are working reduced hours, but many do no work at all.

It turns out that the best guide to what’s happening comes from the change in the total number of hours worked during the month. It’s fallen by an unprecedented 9.2 per cent, double the 4.6 per cent fall in the number of people employed.

The fall in hours is explained by people losing their jobs, people keeping their jobs but being given fewer hours to work, and people on JobKeeper working fewer hours – or none. This explains why, despite the limited rise in unemployment, the rate of underemployed workers (those working fewer hours than they want to) leapt from 8.8 per cent to 13.7 per cent.

All told, that means about 2.7 million people – almost one worker in five – either lost their job or lost hours during just a month. Gosh.

Read more >>

There's a lot of economic worry about, but here's what matters

If you’re wondering what shape the economy will be in when we come out of lockdown, how the recovery will go – what to worry about and what not to – there are three key issues: the economy and its growth, the budget and its deficit, and unemployment and its consequences.

These three are different but related. The trick is to understand how they’re related. What causes what. The media bombards us with information about them — without pausing to put them into context.

For instance, we hear so much about the budget and its deficit (which adds to the huge amount of debt) that I’m sure some people think the budget is the economy. If only we could get the budget balanced, the economy would be right, right?

No. But you could be forgiven for thinking so because Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, have been saying things that get the two muddled up. They’ve been saying: terribly sorry about what the lockdown's done to the economy, and all the money we’ve had to spend on JobKeeper and JobSeeker and the rest as a consequence, but at least we’d got the economy back in good shape before, through no fault of ours, we were hit by the virus.

But they’re not talking about the economy, they’re talking about the budget. It was the budget they’d finally got back to balance after six years in office and were set to it get back into surplus this year before the virus upset their plans.

They were saying, at least we’d got the budget back in balance before we had to start spending like mad — about $200 billion so far — and going back into (huge) deficit. Trouble is, they’d got the budget back in shape by causing the economy to grow more slowly than it would have. So the economy was in a weak state before the virus hit – which doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.

Huh? Let’s get back to basics. The budget is just a summary of the federal government’s finances: how much money it brings in from taxes and charges, less how much money it puts out in spending on health, education, pensions and the rest.

When it raises and spends equal amounts, its budget is in balance. When it spends more than it raises, its budget is in deficit and this deficiency has to be covered by borrowing. When it raises more than it spends, its budget is in surplus. It will use the surplus to repay money it’s borrowed in earlier years.

The government and its budget are just part (a reasonably small part) of the economy, which consists of all our businesses and our households (you and me) as well as the government (federal, state and local).

The money the government raises in taxes comes from the rest of the economy, whereas the money it spends goes to the rest of the economy. So when the government reduces its deficit (as it has been until now), this means it’s reducing the net amount it’s putting into the private sector, causing its growth to be weaker than otherwise.

This can be a good thing if the private sector is growing too strongly and threatening to worsen inflation. But if the private sector’s growth is weak, as it has been, this pullback by the government will weaken it further – as it has been.

Until now. The response to the virus, with all the lockdown has done to reduce the turnover of businesses and the income of workers, has hit the private sector for six. But all the extra government spending – which has hugely increased the budget deficit – has done much to break the private sector’s fall. That cushioning will make it easier for businesses and workers to get back on their feet.

But here’s the thing: the government’s big spending (plus, don’t forget, the much less income and other taxes we’ll be paying on our greatly reduced incomes) has blown out the budget deficit and will hugely increase the government’s debt.

So, which is the bigger worry? The big increase in the government’s debt, or the big contraction in the economy? I think it’s obvious. It’s the health of the economy that matters most because that’s where all Australians (even the retired) gain their livelihood.

The budget isn’t an end in itself. It’s an instrument – one of the means to the ultimate end of helping Australians have a good life. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the government doing what all governments do: using its budget to protect our lives and livelihoods.

Sure, that will leave us with a lot more deficit and debt. But first things first. What matters most is the health, economic and social wellbeing of the people who constitute “the economy”.

We’ll worry about the debt later. In any case, as I’ll explain another day, the debt isn’t as worrying as it looks. Hint: the lower interest rates are, the less you need to worry about how much you owe — and the less hurry you need to be in to pay it back.

Next, what’s the relationship between the economy’s growth and unemployment, and which matters more? The economy is usually measured by the value of all the goods and services we produce – gross domestic product – during a period, which is also the nation’s income.

The econocrats are expecting real GDP to fall by an unprecedented 10 per cent in the present quarter, but then start growing quite quickly as businesses get back to normal. If that happens, it will be good because it’s goods and services that people are employed to help produce.

So an early return to growth in the economy is good because it gets employment up and unemployment down – which is what matters most if you think people matter more than money.

But here’s the trick: the economy returns to growth a lot earlier than unemployment returns to where it was.

Read more >>