It's slowing the spin doctors' spin that keeps me busy

Do you remember former prime minister John Howard’s ringing declaration that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”? It played a big part in helping him win the 2001 federal election. But it’s only true in part.

The job of economic commentators like me is supposed to be telling people about what’s happening in the economy and adding to readers’ understanding of how the economy works.

But the more our politicians rely on spin doctors to manipulate the media and give voters a version of the truth designed always to portray the boss in the most favourable light, the more time I have to spend making sure our readers aren’t being misled by some pollie’s silken words.

These days, I even have to make sure our readers aren’t being led astray by the economics profession. For the first time in many years, I’ve found myself explaining to critical academic economists that I’m a member of the journos’ union, not the economists’ union.

Like many professions, economists are hugely defensive. And they like to imagine my job is to help defend the profession against its many critics. Sorry, I’m one of the critics.

My job is to advise this masthead’s readers on how much of what economists say they should believe, and how much they should question.

It’s not that economists are deliberately misleading, more that they like to skirt around the parts of their belief system that ordinary people find hard to swallow.

And then there’s the increasing tendency for news outlets to pick sides between the two big parties, and adjust their reporting accordingly. My job is to live up this masthead’s motto: Independent. Always.

So, back to Howard’s heroic pronouncement. It’s certainly true that “we” – the federal government – decide the circumstances in which people may come to Australia. If you turn up without a visa, you’ll be turned away no matter how desperate your circumstances. If you come by boat, your chances of being let in are low.

But if you come by plane, with a visa that says you’ll be studying something at some dodgy private college when, in truth, you’re just after a job in a rich country, in you come. If we’ve known about this dodge, it’s only in the past few weeks that we’ve decided to stop it.

No, the problem is, if you take Howard’s defiant statement to mean that we control how many people come to this country, then that’s not true. We decide the kinds of people we’ll accept, but not how many.

There are no caps because, for many years, both parties have believed in taking as many suitable immigrants as possible. It’s just because the post-COVID surge in immigration – particularly overseas students – has coincided with the coming federal election that the pollies are suddenly talking about limiting student visas.

But remember, the politicians have form. Knowing many voters have reservations about immigration, they talk tough on immigration during election campaigns, but go soft once our attention has moved on, and it’s all got too hard.

It’s a similar thing with Anthony Albanese’s Future Made in Australia plan. Polling shows it’s been hugely popular with voters. But that’s because they’ve been misled by a clever slogan. It was designed to imply a return to the days when we tried to make for ourselves all the manufactured goods we needed.

But, as I’ve written, deep in last month’s budget papers was the news that we’d be doing a bit of that, but not much. It’s just a great slogan.

On another matter, have you noticed Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ dissembling on how he feels our pain from the cost-of-living crisis, which is why he’s trying so hard to get inflation down?

What he doesn’t want us thinking about is that, at this stage, most of the pain people are feeling is coming not from higher prices, but from the Reserve Bank’s 4.25 percentage-point increase in interest rates.

Get it? The pain’s coming from the cure, not the disease. The rise in interest rates has been brought about by the independent central bank, not the elected government, of course. But when Chalmers boasts about achieving two successive years of budget surplus, he’s hoping you won’t realise that those surpluses are adding to the pain households are suffering, particularly from the increase in bracket creep.

And, while I’m at it, many people object to businesses raising their prices simply because they can, not because their costs have increased. This they refer to disapprovingly as “gouging”.

But few economists would use that word. Why not? Because they believe it’s right and proper for businesses to charge as much as they can get away with.

Why? Because they think it’s part of the way that market forces automatically correct a situation where the demand for some item exceeds its supply. In textbooks, it’s called “rationing by price”.

Rather than the seller allowing themselves to run out of an item, they sell what’s left to the highest bidders. What could be better than that?

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Politicians don't control migrant numbers, and usually don't want to

Suddenly, everyone’s talking about high migration and the way it’s disrupting the economy. Why is the government letting in so many people, and why hasn’t it turned off the tap?

Short answer: because, the way we run immigration, it has little control over the tap.

But, at times like this, that’s not something either side of politics wants to admit. The truth is, they could exercise more control over immigration, but neither side has particularly wanted to.

Usually, the pressure on them to keep immigration high greatly exceeds the pressure to keep it low. The upward pressure comes from business, which finds it easier to increase profits when it has a continuously growing market.

For many years, business’s main interest was in getting more factory fodder. More people to buy the products of our highly protected manufacturing industry and give it a little of the economies of scale it lacked.

This was why it had to be protected from imports from overseas manufacturers with much bigger domestic markets. As well, our manufacturers needed a steady supply of less-skilled workers to staff their production lines.

In more recent decades, the emphasis has switched from factory fodder to preferring those immigrants with the skills we particularly need to fill shortages as they arise. This, I fear, has allowed our employers to take less interest in ensuring they were always training up enough locals to meet their industry’s future needs.

Another change has been from focusing on permanent migration to encouraging people to come here for a while on temporary visas: workers with skills coming to see what it’s like, students coming to gain further education and young people coming on working holidays, aka backpackers.

We’ve become quite dependent on this huge inflow and outflow of temporary migrants, which far exceeds people coming on permanent visas. Businesses often want their temporary skilled workers to stay on.

The sale of education to overseas students has become one of our biggest exports, one on which our universities have become heavily dependent. Our hospitality industries rely on the casual employment of overseas students and backpackers. And farmers and country towns rely on backpackers for fruit picking and other unskilled work.

On top of all that, federal governments have become reliant on high migration to make our GDP growth figures look better. They often boast about how well our growth compares with the other rich countries, without ever mentioning that most of this is explained by our faster population growth.

And right now, of course, the economy’s growth is so weak we’d be in recession if not for the recent immigration surge.

All these are the reasons successive federal governments want to maintain strong immigration, despite the public’s longstanding reservations. Former prime minister John Howard did a great line in diverting the punters’ attention to resentment of some uninvited arrivals by boat, while he ushered in visa-wielding immigrants arriving by the plane load.

It’s only when high immigration becomes an issue before elections, as now, that the pollies make noises about slowing the inflow. It’s true that, since we reopened our borders following the lockdowns, our “net overseas migration”, people arriving minus people departing, but not counting those on brief visits, leapt to 528,000 in 2022-23, more than double what it was in 2018-19. And it may exceed another 400,000 in the financial year just ending.

This surge does seem to have contributed to the present acute shortage of rental accommodation and the big jump in rents, but Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is drawing a long bow in blaming the recent surge for the unaffordability of buying a home, which has been worsening for decades.

The telltale sign that Dutton is fudging is his plan to make more homes available by cutting the government’s permanent migration program from 185,000 a year to 140,000.

The government does control the size of this program, and often moves it up or down a bit, but the size of the program makes little difference to what matters most for the economy: annual net overseas migration.

The trick is that about 65 per cent of the permanent visas go to people who are already here on temporary visas. Changing their visa status makes no difference to net overseas migration.

At times like this, the pollies would like you to think they have the power to move immigration up or down according to the economy’s needs at the time.

But they don’t. For the most part, the level of net migration is, as economists would say, “demand determined”. And, as the demographers will tell you, net migration tends to go up and down with the state of our economy.

When the economy’s booming, migrants are keen to come to Australia, and our employers are keen to have them, particularly if they have skills. What’s more, locals and former immigrants are more likely to want to stay here than go overseas.

It’s a different story when our economy’s weak. Employers are less keen to bring in people and migrants are less keen to come.

Now, our present circumstances don’t fit that long-established cyclical pattern. But that’s mainly because the economy’s been returning to normal after the end of the pandemic. This is particularly true of the people most disrupted by the pandemic, and who’ve done most to account for our recent downs and ups in net migration: overseas students.

Most students went back home during the lockdowns, but now many of them, and many newbies, are coming back in. We’ve had a lot more students than expected because, to encourage their return, the Morrison government removed the limit on how much paid work they could do. It took the Albanese government too long to wake up and end the concession.

If you find it hard to believe the government has little control over the number of immigrants it lets in, note this. To be given a temporary visa, you have to fit one of the many categories the government wants: skilled, student, backpacker and so on. But there are no limits on the number of applicants accepted in each category.

Until now. Because it’s the students who’ve contributed most to the recent surge, the government is planning to impose caps on how many it will admit. The opposition is promising something similar.

Remember this, however. The economy is weak – and it is forecast to remain so for a year or two – so it’s reasonable to expect that, even without the caps on overseas students, net migration will fall back soon enough.

But an election is coming. Voters are unhappy about high migration and the high cost of housing, and both sides want to be seen doing something about it. How much the winner actually bothers to do after the election, may be a different matter.

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Treasury tells all: how the housing market is so stuffed up

Would you believe that our ever-rising house prices are a sign there’s something badly wrong with our housing market? Would you believe our housing arrangements are worse than in the other rich countries?

Well, I would when that’s what Treasury is admitting in the annual sermon it tacks onto the budget papers. This year it’s about meeting our housing “challenge”.

In a well-functioning economy, its industries can respond to the increase in demand for their good or service by increasing their supply without much delay. Of course, it takes a lot longer to build a new house or apartment than it does to churn out more ice-creams or haircuts.

But, even so, our housing industry has been too slow to respond to the increased demand for housing. This comes from our rising population which, thanks to continuing high levels of immigration, has grown faster than most of the other rich countries.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group of mainly advanced economies, show that our number of dwellings per 1000 people increased only from 403 to 420 between 2011 and 2022. This compared poorly with most other countries.

In 2011, our level of housing supply was just 92 per cent of the OECD average. And by 2022 it had fallen to 90 per cent. This was behind countries such as Canada, the United States and England.

Our completions of new private dwellings reached a peak of more than 200,000 a year in 2018-19 but have since fallen to about 160,000 a year. This has left us with an acute shortage of properties available to buy or rent.

Nationwide, the number of homes being offered for sale has fallen since 2015, while the number offered for rent has been falling since early 2020.

Speaking of renting, Treasury says the rental market is considered to be in balance – meaning renters have little trouble finding a place and landlords have little trouble finding a tenant – when the vacancy rate is about 3 per cent. In cities such as Sydney and Melbourne it’s now down to about 0.5 per cent. Ouch.

Not surprisingly, when demand grows faster than supply can keep up with, prices rise. The rise in the cost of newly built homes, and the cost of renting, have contributed significantly to the general cost-of-living crisis.

So, why has our housing industry become so slow to respond to increased demand? Treasury says the causes are “multifaceted, complex and affect all stages of the housing construction process, including all levels of government and industry”.

One way to improve the market’s response to greater demand is to accelerate the construction process. But Treasury says that completion times for apartments, townhouses and detached houses actually worsened by 39 per cent, 34 per cent and 42 per cent respectively over the 10 years to June 2023.

Calculations (or, if you want to sound more scientific, “modelling”) by a federal government agency says that, over the next six years, the nation’s existing unmet demand will never be satisfied unless completion times are speeded up. In six years’ time, we’ll still have a backlog of about 39,000 dwellings.

Treasury says the expectation that churning out homes faster will help to lower house prices is supported by empirical research. One study found that those OECD countries that built more housing over the 15 years to 2015 experienced lower real growth in house prices.

Another study showed that adding an extra 50,000 homes a year for a decade could reduce house prices by up to 20 per cent.

So, what can be done to increase the housing industry’s annual output? Treasury says planning and zoning restrictions can limit the speed at which land is made available.

Delays in approving development applications by local councils can be excessive. I think councils and government departments are monopolists and, like all monopolists, they take advantage of the lack of competition.

Private sector monopolists whack up their prices and don’t worry about the quality of the service they provide. Public monopolists make you jump through hoops that aren’t strictly necessary, and they fix your problem in their own good time.

I wonder whether, over all these years, those outfits have ever had much pressure on them to lift their game. If that changed, I’m sure we could get more homes built per year.

Treasury says average times for the approval of development applications vary by state, with Victoria and NSW experiencing the longest waiting times early this month of 144 and 114 days, respectively.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Treasury wants housing to be delivered in well-located areas where the demand is greatest.

Dense development in the “missing middle” of major cities, where households can reside closer to jobs in areas with higher quality amenities and infrastructure, has been limited by planning and zoning restrictions and slow release of infill land, Treasury says.

Global supply constraints and price shocks on imported building materials associated with the pandemic have added to the cost of construction, driving up the price of newly built homes. Although prices aren’t rising as fast as they were, they haven’t fallen back.

Shortages of building labour have also increased the prices of newly built homes and slowed the pace of construction. The growth in non-dwelling construction activity has drawn labour away from home building. The productivity of labour in construction has not improved since the early 2000s.

The industry blames these shortages on the drop-off in rates of skilled migration during the pandemic. But I wonder if the deeper problem is that the former ready availability of imported labour tempted the industry to save money by failing to train as many apprentices as they should have.

So, what’s the Albanese government doing about this mess? It’s finally grasped the nettle and is spending big – $32 billion, including $6 billion in this month’s budget – to “address historical underinvest in the housing system” and build 1.2 million new, well-located homes. We’ll see how they go.

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We need to talk (sense) about immigration

It’s a safe bet there’ll be much talk about immigration between now and the next federal election, due this time next year. Peter Dutton has seen to that. Trouble is, much of it will just be hot air, much of it will be misleading and much will reflect the vested interests of the person doing the talking.

And some of it will reveal us at our worst: our tendency to blame incomers for all our ills. The more ignorant among us will shout abuse at some poor soul they see on the street whose clothing or skin colour looks different.

But none of that says our immigration policy isn’t a legitimate subject for sensible debate. Personally, I’d like to see it a lot lower.

You know strange things are happening when the leader of the Liberal Party says he wants to slash immigration. The Libs are, and have always been, the party of high migration.

But they’ve fallen on hard times with the loss of so many heartland seats to the teals, and Dutton figures his best hope of winning is to pick up seats in the outer suburbs, where their social class says people should vote Labor, but their social values give them greater affinity with the conservatives.

It’s because many immigrants gravitate to the outer suburbs that the locals find it easier to blame them for traffic congestion and other overcrowding, rather than governments’ failure to build enough infrastructure.

Ordinary Australians have always tended to think there’s been too much immigration. But the Liberals support it because it’s what business wants. The easiest way to increase profits is to sell into a growing market. Consider what you’d want if you were in the business of building new homes.

In recent times, Labor has supported high immigration too, mainly because it doesn’t want to get offside with business.

Almost all economists support strong immigration. I suspect that’s because their obsession with economic growth makes them susceptible to the fallacy that bigger is always better. Not if it comes at the expense of quality.

The economists do have one sensible point to make. Many people fear the migrants will take all the jobs. But the dismal scientists refute this. The newcomers and their families add about as much to the demand for labour to produce more goods and services as they add to the supply of workers.

All this – the gap between voters’ doubts about immigration and the pressure on governments to keep it coming – helps explain what seasoned political observers know: the pollies professed enthusiasm for cutting immigration is a lot stronger during election campaigns than it is after an election’s become a receding memory.

As for Dutton’s proffered solution, it doesn’t amount to much and would do little to fix the problems he claims he wants to fix. By the same token, the government’s claims that his plans would hasten the end of the universe are exaggerated.

Here’s a tip. Any pollie banging on about what they intend to do to the “permanent migration” program either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or, more likely, is pretty sure you don’t. What affects the economy’s workings is not permanent migration so much as “net overseas migration”, which is arrivals minus departures (ignoring people coming or going on short visits).

This actually went negative when we closed our borders during the pandemic, but soared after we reopened them. Net migration exceeded 520,000 in the year to June 2023, and over the year to this June may be as much as 400,000.

This huge surge is what’s causing the fuss. A lot of the swing is explained by incoming overseas students, which the universities will tell you is a wonderful thing. It’s one of our biggest export earners, and the unis have come to rely on this income to fund much of their research work.

I have some sympathy for them. Successive federal governments have made them more dependent on overseas students by using this as an opportunity to limit the support the unis get from the budget.

Even so, it seems clear that the inflow of students needing somewhere to live has contributed to the recent acute shortage of rental accommodation and added to the jump in rents.

The Albanese government wants to see a big drop in net migration and, to this end, is talking about imposing caps on how many overseas students the unis can admit.

The unaffordability of home ownership is a good issue for the election campaign, but Dutton is drawing a long bow in linking it to immigration. Homes have become harder to afford over several decades for various reasons. The recent immigration surge won’t have made much difference.

What’s true is that the more people we let in, the more capital investment – in the form of homes, business equipment and public infrastructure – we need to meet their needs. When this investment fails to keep up with the growth in the population, problems arise and the benefits to the economy that the advocates of high immigration have promised don’t happen.

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Want better productivity? Cut population growth

A simple reading of orthodox economics tells you that the urge to maximise profits leads businesses to continuously improve the productivity of their activities. But, as former competition tzar Rod Sims has often reminded us, improving productivity is just one way to increase profits, and there are other ways to do it that are a lot easier.

One other way is to increase your share of the market by having a better product. Or better, coming up with a marketing campaign that merely cons people into believing your product is better.

Another way to increase market share is to undercut your competitors’ prices. But in oligopolies dominated by only a few big players, which many of our markets are, the threat of mutually damaging retaliation is so great that price wars are rare.

(This why the big four banks were so shocked and offended when the Macquarie group, a huge financial group with deep pockets and a small bank, decided recently to get itself a slice of the lucrative home loan market by offering below-market interest rates.)

Another way to increase profits is to take over a competitor. This may or may not increase profitability – percentage return on the share capital invested in the business – to the benefit of shareholders. But the managers of the now-bigger business will have to be paid commensurately higher wages and bonuses.

But the simplest, easiest way to increase profits? Sell into an ever-growing market. And how do you do that? Persuade the government to maintain a high rate of immigration. This is a mission on which big business has had great success in recent decades.

Polling shows the public does not approve of high immigration. With some justification, the punters tend to blame it for road congestion and rising housing costs.

But the Howard government and its Coalition successors did a roaring trade in keeping the punters’ disapproval focused on poor people who arrived uninvited on leaky boats, while they were quietly ushering in all the immigrants that business was demanding. These people arrived by plane, and so drew no media attention.

Is it mere coincidence that productivity improvement has been weak during the period in which immigration-driven population growth has been so strong? I doubt it, though of course, I’m not claiming this is the only factor contributing to weak productivity improvement.

While it makes self-interested, short-sighted sense for businesspeople to be so untiring in their clamour for ever more immigration, the strange thing is that the virtue of rapid population growth goes almost wholly unquestioned by the nation’s economists.

Population growth is an article of faith for almost every economist. For a profession that prides itself on being so “rational”, it’s surprising how little thinking economists do about the pros and cons of immigration. There’s little empirical evidence to support their unwavering commitment to high immigration, but they don’t need any evidence to keep believing what almost all of them have always believed.

Before we get to the narrowly economic arguments, let’s start with the bigger picture. The primary reason for doubting the sense of rapid population growth is the further damage every extra person does to the natural environment.

As the sustainable population advocates put it: too many people demanding too much of our natural environment.

Economists have gone from the beginning of their discipline assuming that the economy and the environment can be analysed in separate boxes. This further assumes that any adverse interaction between the two is so minor it can be safely ignored.

In an era of climate change and growing loss of species, this is clearly untenable. The economy and the natural environment that sustains it have to be joined up. But when it comes to population growth, these are dots the profession hasn’t yet joined.

Even on narrowly economic considerations, however, economists long ago stopped checking their calculations. It’s obvious that a bigger population means a bigger economy, and since economists are the salespersons of economic growth, what more do you need to know?

Well, you need to know that economic growth achieved merely through population growth leads to what the salespersons are promising the punters: a higher material standard of living. Simply, higher income per person.

If there is evidence higher population growth leads to higher income per person, I’ve yet to see it. I have seen a study by the Productivity Commission that couldn’t find any. And I have seen a study showing that the higher a country’s population growth, the lower its growth in gross domestic product per person.

But it doesn’t surprise me that the committed advocates of population growth don’t wave around any evidence they have to support their faith. What is well understood, though the advocates seem to have forgotten it, is that, whatever economic benefits immigration may or may not bring, it comes with inescapable economic costs.

Which are? That every extra person dilutes our existing per-person investment in business equipment and structures, housing stock and public infrastructure: schools, hospitals, police stations, roads and bridges, and much else.

In other words, every extra person requires us to spend many resources on preventing this population growth from diminishing our economic and social capital per head, and thereby making us worse off.

Economists call this “capital widening”, as opposed to “capital deepening”, which means providing the population with more capital equipment and infrastructure per person.

Trouble is, there’s a limit to how much the nation can save – or borrow from overseas – to finance our investment in housing, business equipment and structures, and public infrastructure. So resources we have to devote to capital widening, thanks to population growth, are resources we can’t devote to the capital deepening that would increase our standard of living.

Using immigration to raise our living standards is like trying to go up a down escalator. You have to run just to stop yourself going backwards. This is smart?

In practice, it’s worse than that. There’s a big government co-ordination problem. It’s the federal government that’s responsible for immigration levels, and that collects most of the taxes the immigrants pay, but it’s mainly the state governments that are lumbered with organising the extra housing and building the extra sewers, roads, transport, schools, hospitals and other facilities needed to avoid congestion and overcrowding.

Another thing to remember is that the easier you make it for businesses to get the skilled workers they need by bringing them in from abroad, the more you tempt them not to go to the expense and inconvenience of bothering with apprentices and trainees.

This is why so many businesses were caught short when, during the pandemic, their access to imported skilled labour was suddenly cut off. No wonder they were shouting to high heaven about the need to reopen their access to cheap labour. A lot of it was actually unskilled labour from overseas students, backpackers and others on temporary visas, who are easy to take advantage of.

Have you joined the dots? If giving business what it wants – high immigration to grow the market and provide ready access to skilled and unskilled workers – hasn’t induced business to increase the productivity of its labour, why don’t we try the opposite?

Make it harder for business to increase profits without improving productivity and investing in training our local workforce. Of course, this would require us to value productivity improvement more highly than population growth.

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Why our standard of living will be rising more slowly

You could call it gloom, or call it realism, but the likelihood is the economy will be growing more slowly from now on.

And we’re talking not just the next year or two – where the Reserve Bank’s rapid rise in interest rates means if we don’t go backwards, we’ll have been let off lightly – but the next maybe 40 years.

No one – not even economists – knows what the future holds, of course. But this long-term slowing is the considered guess of the secretary to the Treasury, Dr Steven Kennedy, who this week gave us his summation of the Treasury’s recent intergenerational report, which makes largely mechanical projections – not hard-and-fast forecasts – for the economy over the 40 years to 2063.

 Kennedy says the projections are “illustrative”. A key assumption on which they’re based, that present government policies don’t change, means the projections demonstrate “the longer-term implications of our current path”.

The report’s “aim is to avoid the risks projected … through ongoing improvement and reform of policy settings”.

Even so, I think we’re justified in concluding that the slower growth the report projects is more likely to eventuate than either unchanged or faster growth. That’s because so many of the factors likely to affect our future growth are beyond the government’s control.

The report projects that real gross domestic product – the nation’s total production of goods and services – having grown by an average of 3.1 per cent a year over the past 40 years, will slow to growth of 2.2 per cent a year over the coming 40 years.

How would this slowdown be explained? The Treasury’s standard way of analysing economic growth is to break it up into the three main drivers of growth – known as “the three Ps”: growth in the population, growth in the population’s participation in the labour force, and growth in the productivity of the workforce.

Notice how people-centred this way of chopping up economic growth is?

First. Population. Whereas our population grew at an average rate of 1.4 per cent a year over the past 40 years, it’s projected to grow by just 1.1 per cent over the coming 40.

These days, “natural increase” – births minus deaths – accounts for only about 40 per cent of the growth in our population, with “net overseas migration” accounting for the remaining 60 per cent.

The Treasury projects a further slow decline in our “fertility rate” – the number of births per woman – which has long been well below the 2.1 children “replacement rate” needed to hold the population steady over the years.

So we’ve long used high immigration to keep the population growing. Net migration fell sharply when we closed our borders during the pandemic. It has surged since the borders were reopened, but the Treasury expects it to fall back to 235,000 people a year once the surge has passed.

This level is what the Treasury projects for the rest of the years to 2063 – meaning that fixed number would fall as a percentage of the growing population. Even so, the population is expected to exceed 40 million in the early 2060s.

It’s just a projection, but I don’t have trouble believing immigration levels will decline rather than increase in the coming years. With all the rich countries – and China - having fertility rates well below the replacement rate, I can see far more competition for immigrants than there has been, especially since we only want skilled immigrants.

This expected slowdown in immigration means the overall size of the economy wouldn’t be growing as fast as it has been, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those of us who are already here will be worse off. That depends less on the economy’s overall growth and more in what’s happening to growth in GDP per person.

The report projects that, whereas real GDP per person grew by 1.8 per cent a year on average over the past 40 years, it will slow to 1.1 per cent a year over the coming 40.

Ahh. So, not just slower growth in the economy, but a much slower rate of improvement in our material standard of living. We’d still be getting more prosperous, but at a rate so small that it would be hard to notice.

And the problem must be coming from the other two Ps – participation and productivity improvement.

At present, the “participation rate” – the proportion of the working-age population that’s either in work or actively seeking it – is the highest it’s ever been, at 66.6 per cent, but the Treasury projects it will have fallen to 63.8 per cent by 2063.

Why? Because the proportion of the population aged 65 and over is projected to rise from 17 per cent to 23 per cent. So population ageing means more people will be too old to work.

But this will be countered to an unknown extent by more women of working age taking paid employment, and a healthier post-65 population choosing to keep working, even if only a few days a week.

However, most of the slowdown in GDP growth per person is explained by the expectation that the rate of improvement in the productivity of labour will be slower.

Whereas productivity improved at an average rate of 1.5 per cent a year over the past 30 years, it’s improved by only 1.2 per cent a year over the past 20 years – and that’s the rate the Treasury has projected over the coming 40 years.

There are plenty of reasons to expect productivity improvement will become harder to achieve. Just one is the greater share of GDP coming from the provision of labour-intensive services and the lesser share from the capital-intensive production of goods. It’s a lot easier to make machines more productive than do the same for people.

Finally, another reason for expecting population, participation and productivity to be weaker in coming decades is that various other rich countries’ experience is leading them to expect the same.

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We need economic growth to make us better off, right? Well, actually

For all our lives, worthies – our politicians, business people and economists – have assured us we need economic growth to make us better off. Almost everything I write assumes this to be true. But is it?

These days, there are more doubters than there used to be. Some people don’t believe that spending your life striving to own more stuff will make you happy. (Spoiler: they’re right.)

But a growing number of scientists tell us unending growth in the economy simply isn’t physically possible, and the more we keep growing the more we’ll damage the natural environment, to our great cost. Climate change is just the most glaring example of the damage we’re doing.

Historians remind us that our obsession with The Economy is relatively recent. It didn’t take hold until the middle of last century.

What we call “the economy” is all economic activity. It’s people getting up every morning, going out to earn a living, and then spending what they’ve earned. So it’s “getting and spending”, production and consumption. This is measured by gross domestic product – the value of all the goods and services produced during a period.

It was only when we started regularly measuring GDP in the mid-1950s that we began our obsession with whether it was growing and by how much. Or whether – God forfend – it was going backwards.

But these are just modern words and concepts. In truth, Australians have been preoccupied by what today we call economic growth since the day white people arrived. Their magic words were “settlement”, “progress” and “nation building”.

The recent arrivals saw a “new” nation where nothing had been done, but with huge potential for endless bush to be made to resemble the old country. They set about clearing the land, damming rivers, building houses, establishing farms and digging up minerals.

Why? To become more prosperous. They spurred themselves on with the belief they must “populate or perish” – be taken over by invading Asians.

So how do you achieve what we call economic growth? The easiest way is to grow the population. Have lots of kids and encourage (in those days, white-only) immigration. That gives you more people to work, but also more people needing to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

Bingo. A bigger economy. But while increasing the population makes the economy, GDP, bigger, it’s really only if the growth increases GDP per person that it can be claimed to make us better off, to have raised our material standard of living. And this doesn’t follow automatically.

The harder way to grow the economy is to increase the proportion of the population in paid employment, or to increase our investment in plant and equipment, and (well-chosen) public infrastructure. This does increase GDP per person.

But there’s another, more magical way to increase GDP per person. It’s to take the same quantity of resources – raw materials, labour and capital equipment – and use them to produce more output of goods and services than you did.

This is what people mean when they talk about increasing our “productivity”. It’s achieved, as economists keep repeating, by “working smarter, not working harder”.

How? By building a better educated and more skilled workforce, and by finding ways to make the organisation of factories and offices more efficient, but mainly by advances in technology that create better machines (and these days, computer programs) doing better tricks.

This is the bit scientists don’t get. When they hear the word “growth” they think of one thing: growth in humans’ exploitation of natural resources and all the damage we do to the environment in the process.

But that’s not what GDP measures. Economists know that most of the growth in GDP over the long term comes from increased productivity, not increased inputs of raw materials, labour and physical capital.

This means that, unless you believe there’s a limit to human ingenuity, it’s not true that continuing growth in GDP is impossible.

But when scientists say more clearly the kind of “growth” they’re referring to – growth in the use of natural resources and “ecosystem services” – it’s not possible to argue with the laws of physics.

While economists used to argue that the “limits to growth” weren’t as close at hand as some scientists had calculated, the possibility of the developing world enjoying the same profligate use of natural resources as the rich world is not credible. We expect the bottom 80 per cent to resign themselves to lives of relative poverty, while we in the top 20 per cent continue partying as though there’s no tomorrow.

So I accept that we and other rich countries will have to greatly constrain our use and abuse of the natural environment if the planet is to remain functional. A “circular economy” in which resources are so expensive that almost everything has to be repaired, reused and recycled? Sure.

But here’s the joke. It wouldn’t be the scientists who worked out how we could move to such an economy, it would be the economists.

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Labor's 'plan' to fix the economy has three big bits missing

If you think the jobs summit was stage-managed, you’re right. Anthony Albanese & Co got the tick for policy changes they’d always wanted to make. But the two top-drawer economists who addressed the summit – Professor Ross Garnaut and Danielle Wood, boss of the Grattan Institute – proposed three other vital matters for the government’s to-do list, which it had better get on with if it’s to manage the economy successfully.

Both wanted action on competition policy, immigration policy and fiscal (budget) policy. All of these could play an important role in making the economy less inflation-prone, achieving and retaining full employment, improving our productivity and ensuring workers get their fair share of the proceeds.

The major element in our inflation problem that no one dares to name – certainly not Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe who, in a long speech about the problem last week, didn’t find time to mention it – is the pricing power that our oligopolised economy gives our big businesses.

Much Treasury research has found that Australia’s businesses lack “dynamism”. To be blunt, they’re fat and lazy. Wood reminds us that lower levels of dynamism and innovation have been linked to a lack of competitive pressure in the economy.

“In competitive markets, excess profits should be dissipated over time as new and innovative competitors enter. But increasingly in Australia and elsewhere, we have seen the biggest and most profitable firms remain largely untroubled by new competitors,” she says.

“While being relaxed and comfortable may be profitable, it is not good for Australia’s long-term economic prospects.”

So, what should Labor do about it? “Making sure that Australia’s competition laws are fit for purpose is part of the response ... The former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, has argued that the current merger laws are failing to adequately protect competition. His warnings should prompt serious thought,” Wood says.

Garnaut agrees. He says we have to think about the increasing role of “economic rents” – the ability to earn profits exceeding those needed to keep you in the business. “Productivity is reduced and the profit share of [national] income increased by monopoly and oligopoly,” he says.

The answer? “Rod Sims has drawn attention to the increasing role of oligopoly in the Australian economy, and the competition policy reforms that would reduce it.”

The point for the government to note is that, if it leaves big business’s pricing power unchecked, but restores the unions’ bargaining power, that will be a recipe for a more inflation-prone economy – and a Reserve Bank using high interest rates to keep the economy comatose.

Both Garnaut and Wood gave the highest priority to urging a lasting return to full employment and the many social and economic benefits it would bring, if the jobs market was always about as tight as it is now.

But, as Garnaut says, full employment is hard work for employers. “Many prefer unemployment, with easy recruitment at lower wages.”

Which helps explain why they’re so desperate to get the immigration flood gates reopened and flowing. They talk about shortages of skilled labour but, in truth, they’re just as keen to have less-skilled labour. High immigration is just one of the instruments from their toolbox they’ve been using to keep their labour costs low, including the cost of training workers.

But we can’t keep our gates shut forever, so what should the government do to open up without losing the benefits of full employment (including a strong incentive to train our own youngsters)?

Garnaut says immigration is much more likely to raise, rather than lower, average real wages if it is focused on permanent migration of people with genuinely scarce and valuable skills that are bottlenecks to valuable Australian production, and cannot be provided by training Australians.

Wood says we need to fix “out-dated” skilled migration rules. “Targeting higher-wage migrants directly for both temporary and permanent skilled migration would improve the productivity of the migration system and the Australian workforce,” she says.

Which brings us to the budget. Wood says that although our response to the pandemic may now seem to have stimulated demand more than is helpful, these pressures will dissipate, “especially if the federal government and the central bank work in tandem to address strong demand, and do what is possible to boost supply”.

That’s her nice way of saying that, if the government fails to get its budget deficit down, the Reserve Bank will take interest rates higher than it would have. And she’s right, it will.

The deficit needs to come down despite Labor’s expensive – but welcome – promise to greatly increase the wage rates of the mainly female workers in aged care and other parts of the care economy.

How can this circle be squared? To Garnaut, the answer’s obvious. If the government has to do more and pay more – including on defence – it will just have to tax more.

He reminds us that “in the face of these immense budget challenges, total and federal and state taxation revenue, as a share of gross domestic product, is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed-country average.”

And when it comes to what more the government could tax, Garnaut has some ideas. Disruption from the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given our fossil fuel companies record profits from higher coal and gas prices, while substantially lowering living standards by greatly increasing electricity prices.

Garnaut says the government shouldn’t kid itself that leaving this disparity unchallenged wouldn’t leave deep wounds in the public’s faith in government.

Introducing a tax on these windfall profits would be one solution, but I suspect he wants something more substantive. He says a significant part of the increase in the profit share of national income in recent years has come from mining.

One response would be for mine workers to get much higher wages. But, he says, miners are already paid much more than workers in other industries. So, the appropriate public policy response is a mineral rent tax – that is, a tax on the mining companies’ excess profits – which would share the benefits with all of us.

Finally, Garnaut rebukes those economists who rely on fancy calculations to tell them how low the unemployment rate can get before we have a problem with inflation. He says this is not an output from an econometric model, it’s “an observed reality”. That is, you have to suck it and see.

“Economics is less amenable than physics to definitive mathematical analysis because it is about people, whose responses to similar phenomena change over time. We build models in our minds or computers that fit observed reality at one point in time, and reality changes. Then we have to think harder about what’s going on.”

Economics is about the behaviour of people! Who knew?

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I foresee a world where workers gain the upper hand

Former NSW premier Neville Wran was the first politician – but far from the last – to say the election would be about “jobs, jobs, jobs”. That line captured perfectly one of the great economic certainties of our age: you can never, ever have enough jobs to go around.

That’s what most of us think, and the reason we think it is that it’s been true for the past 50 years. That’s how long it’s been since we had a rate of unemployment so low no one worried much about it.

But, as my colleague Jessica Irvine reminded us only yesterday, at 3.5 per cent, unemployment is at its lowest in almost 50 years.

To put it more positively, at more than 64 per cent, the proportion of the working-age population with a job is higher than it’s ever been. If you don’t find that gratifying news, there’s something wrong with you.

At present, we have a record number of unfilled job vacancies, about as many as we have unemployed workers. (Of course, not all the jobless have the right training – or live in the right part of the country – to fill those vacancies.)

Now, you can argue this happy outcome is just a temporary consequence of the pandemic. For two years, the official interest rate was almost zero, and governments – federal and state – were spending like wounded bulls.

So we had a huge increase in the demand for labour, but at a time when there was a two-year ban on imported workers. Little wonder employment grew strongly, vacancies shot up and employers complain incessantly about skill shortages.

You can also argue that, now our borders have reopened, our normal high inflow of foreign students, backpackers and skilled workers on temporary visas will resume, and the jobs market won’t stay nearly so tight.

Then you can argue that it only needs Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe to step too hard on the interest-rate brakes and we – as with many other developed economies – will be plunged into recession and rising unemployment.

You can argue all that. But I think these short-term factors are hiding deeper, longer-term trends that have brought us to a turning point. We’re going from never having enough jobs available for people to fill, to never having enough people available to fill all the jobs.

And here’s the bonus: if I’m right, we’ll be going from insecure jobs and stagnant wages to much higher wages and bosses falling over themselves to attract and retain the workers they need.

Business people are nothing if not opportunistic. When workers are plentiful, they pick and choose and make demands. But when workers are hard to find, they become wonderful people whose only concern is their workers’ welfare.

The first factor that’s working to turn the tables is the ageing of the population: more oldies leaving the workforce than youngsters joining it. Fertility has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids per woman.

For many years we’ve sought to slow population ageing by maintaining one of the advanced economies’ highest rates of immigration, with an emphasis on young, skilled workers.

Skilled immigration is also used to keep downward pressure on wage rates. With the pandemic receding, big business is desperate for high immigration to resume ASAP. And the Albanese government is likely to oblige.

But setting high immigration targets is one thing; attaining them is another. These days, migrants come mainly from developing countries. But all the other rich countries have an ageing problem, so we’ll be competing against them for takers.

China’s population is also ageing rapidly. Our intake of foreign students – some of whom are allowed to stay on – has been reduced by our falling out with China, but has always been a temporary play while Asia’s emerging economies get their universities going.

The final factor that will keep the demand for workers growing faster than the supply is the way the rich economies are becoming service economies, much of which represents the growth of the “care economy”.

Australia has already reached the point where 80 per cent of our production and 90 per cent of our employment is from the services sector. The thing about services is that they’re mainly delivered by people. As the Productivity Commission has noted, it’s much easier to use machines to replace people in farming, mining and manufacturing than it is in the services sector.

As people become old, they need more services – from doctors, nurses, paramedics and age care workers. All these people require education and training – by more services-sector workers.

Have you noticed all the stories lately about shortages of teachers, GPs, hospital workers and, before that, aged care and childcare workers? We’re going to get them all from overseas? I doubt it.

I noticed a tweet from an economics professor: “‘skill shortage’ = wages too low to attract workers”.

Get it? If we want all these people, we’ll have to pay them a lot more than we do now – and treat them a lot better.

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Our aspirations for a Big Australia need a big trim

Almost all the nation’s business people, economists and politicians believe too much population growth is never enough. But if there’s one thing I hope to be remembered for, it’s that I always subjected this case of group think to critical examination.

I remain to be convinced that a Big Australia would be better either for our material living standards or for our efforts to limit the damage our economic activity is doing to our natural environment – the erosion of the nation’s “natural capital”.

But, in any case, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s intergenerational report last week is a useful warning that our aspirations for a Big Australia need a big trim.

The pandemic is an immediate setback to such ambitions, but beyond that is the likelihood that most countries’ population growth is slowing and, in many countries, will eventually begin falling.

One big message from the report is that population growth over the next 40 years is projected to be much slower than earlier thought, with its size now expected to reach 40 million in the first half of the 2060s, about eight years later than the 2015 report projected.

This is explained by the pandemic, which is expected to cause a temporary fall in the birth rate and four years of below-average net overseas migration (foreigners arriving minus locals leaving). Annual net migration is expected actually to fall in the financial year just ended and in the new financial year, then take two years to return to 235,000 in 2024-25, at which level it then stays every year through to 2060-61.

That is, no catch-up is expected for the growth lost because of the pandemic. The assumed annual net intake of 235,000 is based on unchanged existing federal government policy on permanent and temporary migration levels.

The report’s “sensitivity analysis” shows that, were net migration projected to grow in line with the growing population (at a rate of 0.82 per cent a year) rather than stay at a flat 235,000 a year, real gross domestic product per person would be only a fraction higher in 2060-61, the labour force would be 1 million bigger and the old-age dependency ratio would be 2.8 workers per oldie rather than 2.7.

But you have to doubt whether future governments will remain free to just dial up their preferred level of annual immigration the way they have been over the past 40 years.

If there’s one demographic lesson we should have learnt by now, it’s that as families become more prosperous over the generations, they choose to have fewer children. This has become possible because of effective contraception.

Add growing longevity and you see why a declining fertility rate (expected number of births per woman), not just the retirement of the Baby Boomer bulge, has left all the developed economies with an ageing population. And, thanks to its one-child policy, the world’s most populous economy, China, also has a (rapidly) ageing population.

Like all the other rich countries, our fertility rate has long been below the population replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Unlike most of the others, however, we’ve kept our population growing strongly by ever-increasing immigration.

To date we’ve had no trouble attracting all the skilled (and unskilled) workers we need, mainly from poor countries. We’ve even been able to make a lot of them pay full freight for their Australian-quality education before we scooped them up.

But with population ageing and old-age dependency ratios becoming more acute around the rich world, global competition to attract skilled workers from developing countries may become more intense.

On the other side of the equation, the supply side, as the poor countries become more developed, their living standards rise and their fertility rates fall, there may be fewer skilled workers willing to emigrate to the rich countries.

Population growth is already slowing in most developed and developing countries. It’s already falling in Japan and some European countries. It will start falling in China this decade. Our population growth is also likely to slow, and the day may come when – horror of horrors – it starts to fall.

Slower growth in the population means slower growth in the size of the economy, of course. But I can’t see why this should be a worry.

It’s notable that, though the intergenerational report projects a consequent slowing in economic growth over the next 40 years, it expects this to have little effect on economic growth per person and thus on living standards.

Whereas real GDP growth is projected to slow from 3 per cent a year over the past 40 years to 2.6 per cent over the coming 40, annual growth in real GDP per person is projected to slow only marginally from 1.6 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

Even that small slowing seems to be explained not by lower population growth, but by a similar fall in the assumed rate of average annual productivity improvement.

Taken at face value, this is an admission by the report’s authors that faster population growth makes little or no contribution to the improvement of our material living standards. The immigrants may gain by moving to Australia, but the rest of us don’t gain from their coming.

However, the report’s fine print (aka its technical appendix) advises that its projections “do not capture the broader economic, social or environmental effects of migration, such as technology spillovers or congestion”.

But if those effects were thought to be significant, you’d expect the authors to have made the effort to model them. And, of course, the effects are likely to be both beneficial and detrimental.

Looking at the economic effects, the advocates of high immigration always point to the benefit of greater economies of scale, while brushing aside the costs of the increased housing, capital equipment and public infrastructure that a bigger population and workforce must be provided with to ensure the productivity of its labour doesn’t fall.

Indeed, it’s possible our high rate of population growth is a factor contributing to our weak rate of productivity improvement.

Similarly, it’s inconsistent for advocates of high immigration also to be advocates of Smaller Government. When you’re causing congestion by failing to spend enough on the extra public infrastructure needed, including more schools and hospitals – perhaps because you’re trying to please discredited American credit-rating agencies – you shouldn’t be surprised if economic growth is weaker.

The need for governments to spend more on a bigger population is complicated and compounded by the division of responsibilities between federal and state governments. The budgetary costs and benefits of immigration are not spread evenly between federal and state governments.

The feds pick up most of the tax that immigrants pay, while the states pick up most of the cost of the extra infrastructure and services needing to be provided (especially since immigrants are denied access to many federal benefits for the first four years).

This reveals a major distortion in the intergenerational report’s continual claim that higher immigration does wonders to improve the budget. The federal budget, yes. But state budgets, probably the reverse.

Finally, there are the environmental consequences of a bigger population that both the intergenerational report and most business people, economists and politicians refuse to come to grips with.

Jenny Goldie, president of Sustainable Population Australia, reminds us that the intergenerational report “fails to take into account the environmental costs of urban encroachment on natural bushland, threatening iconic species such as the koala [and biodiversity more generally], and adding to carbon emissions.

“It fails to address the social costs of crowding, housing unaffordability and longer waiting times that generally accompany population growth,” she concludes.

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Business lobbies use the productivity slump for rent-seeking

It’s encouraging to see the scepticism with which this week’s intergenerational report from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been greeted. Any attempt to peer 40 years into the economy’s future will prove close to the mark only by happy accident.

But it’s discouraging to see the way the usual suspects have seized on the report’s most glaring weakness to do no more than push their vested interests in the name of “reform”.

This fifth version of the five-yearly intergenerational report allows us to see how far astray the report’s earlier projections have been, even though we’re only halfway towards the first report’s picture of the economy in 2041.

In their projections of growth in the population, its authors have repeatedly overestimated the fertility rate (expected number of births per woman) and underestimated the growth in net overseas migration (foreigners arriving minus locals leaving).

They predicted that the retirement of the Baby Boomers would see a fall in the rate at which people of working age participate in the labour force, but this “participation rate” has recently been at record highs.

It would be nice to think that, since the object of all these projections has been to alert us to looming pressures on the budget – caused, in particular, by the ageing of the population – governments have responded accordingly, thus making the reports’ prophecies self-defeating. Nice, but not likely.

The pandemic, and the expected four years of weak net overseas migration in particular, is rightly blamed for our population “growing slower and ageing faster” than previously expected. And slower growth in the size of the population means slower growth in the size of the economy.

We’re told that, whereas real GDP grew at the average rate of 3 per cent a year over the past 40 years, it’s now projected to slow to an average rate of 2.6 per cent over the coming 40.

But the justification for our obsession with economic growth is our desire for faster improvement in our material standard of living. And here’s a point Frydenberg hasn’t highlighted: according to the report’s calculations, the projected marked slowing in the economy’s overall rate of growth is expected to affect growth in GDP per person – a crude measure of living standards - only a little.

GDP per person’s average annual growth is projected to fall only from 1.6 per cent over the past 40 years to 1.5 per cent over the coming 40.

It’s here, however, that business and its media cheer squad have read the fine print and are deeply sceptical: that projection of GDP growth per person rests heavily on the mere assumption that the productivity of labour (output of goods and services per hour worked) will improve at the same average annual rate in the coming 40 years as it did over the past 30 years.

And they’re right. Of all the many assumptions on which the report’s mechanical projections depend, this assumption is far the most critical. As Frydenberg rightly says, improving productivity is what explains almost all the improvement in our standard of living over the decades.

And the sceptics are right to doubt that productivity will improve over the next 40 years at anything like the rate of 1.5 per cent a year. For a start, that 30-year average includes the 1990s, a decade when productivity improved at a rate far higher than experienced before or since.

For another thing, productivity improvement in recent years has been much weaker than usual.

So, purely by omission, the latest intergenerational report reminds us of the second biggest threat to our living standards: a continuing slump in productivity. (The biggest threat is the world’s inadequate response to climate change – another thing the report omits to take into account.)

What’s discouraging, however, is the way the business lobby groups have used this inadvertent reminder to bang the same old self-serving drum. The productivity slump has been caused by this government and its predecessors’ failure to continue the economic reform program begun by Hawke, Keating and Howard, we’re assured.

And what reforms do they have in mind? A cut in the rate of company tax for big business and changes in the wage-fixing rules to make the labour market more flexible for employers.

This lobbying is objectionable on three grounds. First, it implies that productivity improvement depends on an unending stream of changes in government policies, which is absurd. The day “reform” stops, productivity stops.

Second, it shifts the blame for weak productivity improvement from the actions of the private sector – in whose farms, mines, factories, offices and shops productivity either gets better or worse – to the politicians in Canberra.

Third, it seeks to disguise blatant rent-seeking as economic “reform”. Productivity would improve if business owners and high income-earners paid less tax, leaving the punters to pay more, and if the balance of bargaining power between bosses and workers shifted further in favour of bosses.

What this self-serving bulldust ignores is that productivity improvement has slumped in all the rich countries, not just in Australia because our pollies are so defective.

Michael Brennan, chair of the Productivity Commission, says the world’s economists are still debating the causes of the productivity slowdown.

They’ve pointed to “mismeasurement issues, a shift towards lower productivity industries, population ageing, a slowdown in the pace of technological discovery, a slowdown in the pace of technological diffusion, a plateauing of improvements in human capital, reduced rates of firm entry and exit, increased concentration and market power, lower capital investment, a shift to intangible capital and the slowing growth in global trade”.

As Melinda Cilento of CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, has noted, “research by federal Treasury . . . showed leading Australian firms were not keeping up with leading global firms on productivity”.

Treasury would be much better employed continuing to research the causes of our productivity slump than doing literally unbelievable projections of what’s unlikely to happen over the next 40 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Morrison is taking the recovery too cheaply

In theory, recovery from the coronacession will be easier than recoveries usually are. In practice, however, it’s likely to be much harder than usual – something Scott Morrison’s evident reluctance to provide sufficient budgetary stimulus suggests he’s still to realise.

The reasons for hope arise from this recession’s unique cause: it was brought about not by a bust in assets markets (as was the global financial crisis and our recession of the early 1990s) nor by the more usual real-wage explosion and sky-high interest rates (our recessions of the early 1980s and mid-1970s), but by government decree in response to a pandemic.

This makes it an artificial recession, one that happened almost overnight with a non-economic cause. Get the virus under control, dismantle the lockdown and maybe everything soon returns almost to normal.

It was the temporary nature of the lockdown that justified the $70 billion cost of the unprecedented JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme. Preserve the link between employers and their workers for the few months of the lockdown, and maybe most of them eventually return to work as normal.

Note that, even if this doesn’t work out as well as hoped, the money spent still helps to prop up demand. Had we not experimented with JobKeeper, we’d have needed to spend a similar amount on other things.

Because this recession has been so short and (not) sweet, it’s reasonable to expect an early and significant bounce-back in the September quarter. Just how big it is, we shall see. But, in any case, there’s more to a recovery than the size of the bounce-back in the first quarter after the end of the contraction.

And there are at least five reasons why this recovery will face stronger headwinds than most. The first is the absence of further help from the Reserve Bank cutting rates. People forget that our avoidance of the Great Recession in 2009 involved cutting the official interest rate by 4.25
percentage points.

Second, Australia, much more than other advanced economies, has been reliant for much of its economic growth on population growth. But, thanks to the travel bans, Morrison is expecting net overseas migration to fall by a third in the financial year just ending, and by 85 per cent in 2020-21.

Now, unlike most economists, I’m yet to be convinced immigration does anything much to lift our standard of living. And I’m not a believer in growth for growth’s sake. It remains true, however, that our housing industry remains heavily reliant on building new houses to accommodate our growing population. And if Morrison’s HomeBuilder package is supposed to be the answer to the industry’s problem, it’s been dudded.

Third, we’re used to our floating exchange rate acting as an effective shock absorber, floating down when our stressed industries could use more international price competitiveness, and floating up when we need help constraining inflation pressures – as happened during most of the resources boom.

But this time, not so much. With the disruption to our rival Brazilian iron ore producer’s output, world prices are a lot higher than you’d expect at a time of global recession. And with world foreign exchange markets thinking of the Aussie dollar as very much a commodity currency, our exchange rate looks like being higher than otherwise – and higher than would do most to boost our industries’ price competitiveness.

Fourth, the long boom in house prices has left our households heavily indebted, and in no mood to take advantage of record-low interest rates by lashing out with borrowing and spending. The “precautionary motive” always leaves households more inclined to save rather than spend during recessions, but the knowledge of their towering housing debt will probably make them even more cautious than usual.

The idea that bringing forward the government’s remaining two legislated tax cuts could do wonders for demand is delusional. If you wanted the cuts spent rather than saved, you’d aim them at the bottom, not the top.

Finally, although our politicians and econocrats refuse to admit it, our economy – like all the advanced economies – has for most of the past decade been caught in a structural low-growth trap. We can’t get strong growth in consumer spending until we get strong growth in real wages. We can’t get strong growth in business investment until we get strong consumer spending. And we can’t get a strong improvement in the productivity of labour until we get strong business investment.

Meanwhile, the nation’s employers – including even public sector employers - will do what they always do and use the recession, and the fear it engenders in workers, to engineer a fall in real wages. Which will get us even deeper in the low-growth trap.

I fear, however, that Morrison and his loyal lieutenant, Josh Frydenberg, will learn all this the hard way.

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High immigration is changing the Aussie way of life

The nation’s economic elite – politicians of all colours, businesspeople and economists – long ago decided we need to grow our population as fast as we can. To them, their reasons for believing this are so blindingly obvious they don’t need to be discussed.

Unfortunately, however, it’s doubtful most ordinary Australians agree. A survey last year by researchers at the Australian National University found that more than 69 per cent of respondents felt we didn’t need more people, well up on a similar poll in 2010.

This may explain why Scott Morrison announced before this year’s election a big cut in our permanent migrant intake – while failing to mention that our booming temporary migrant intake wouldn’t be constrained.

He also foreshadowed measures to encourage more migrants to settle in regional cities. What he didn’t say is what he’d be doing differently this time, given the many times such efforts had failed in the past.

In between scandalising over the invading hordes of boat people, John Howard greatly increased the immigration intake after the turn of the century, and this has been continued by the later Labor and Coalition governments. “Net overseas migration” accounts for about 60 per cent of our population growth.

In 2000, the Australian Bureau of Statistics projected that our population wouldn’t reach 25.4 million until 2051. We got there this year. Our population is growing much faster than other developed countries’ are.

The growth in our economy has been so weak over the past year that they’ve had to stop saying it, but for years our politicians boasted about how much faster our economy was growing than the other economies.

What they invariably failed to mention was that most of our faster growth was explained by our faster-growing population, not our increasing prosperity. Over the year to June, for instance, real gross domestic product grew by (a pathetic) 1.4 per cent, whereas GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent.

That’s telling us that, despite the growth in the economy, on average our material standard of living is stagnant. All that immigration isn’t making the rest of us any better off in monetary terms.

Of course, that’s just a crude average. You can be sure some people are better off as a result of all the migration. Our business people have always demanded high migration because of their confidence that a bigger market allows them to make bigger profits.

Economists, on the other hand, are supposed to believe in economic growth because it makes all of us better off. They’re not supposed to believe in growth for its own sake.

This week one of the few interest groups devoted to opposing high migration, Sustainable Population Australia, issued a discussion paper that’s worth discussing. It reminds us that many of the problems we complain about are symptoms of migration.

The biggest issue is infrastructure. We need additional public infrastructure – and private business equipment and structures, and housing – to accommodate the needs of every extra person (locally born as well as immigrant) if average living standards aren’t to fall.

Taking just public infrastructure – covering roads, public transport, hospitals, schools, electricity, water and sewage, policing, law and justice, parks and open space and much more – the discussion paper estimates that every extra person requires well over $100,000 of infrastructure spending.

When governments fail to keep up with this need – as they have been, despite a surge in spending lately – congestion on roads and public transport is just the most obvious disruption we suffer.

The International Monetary Fund’s latest report on our economy says we have “a notable infrastructure gap compared to other advanced economies”. Spending is “not keeping up with population and economic growth”. We have a forecast annual gap averaging about 0.35 per cent of GDP for basic infrastructure (roads, rail, water, ports) plus a smaller gap for social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, prisons).

One factor increasing the cost of infrastructure is that about two-thirds of migrants settle in the already crowded cities of Sydney and Melbourne – each of whose populations is projected to reach 10 million in the next 50 years, with Melbourne overtaking Sydney.

According to a Productivity Commission report, “growing populations will place pressure on already strained transport systems. Yet available choices for new investments are constrained by the increasingly limited availability of unutilised land”.

New developments such as Sydney’s WestConnex have required land reclamation, costly compensation arrangements, or otherwise more expensive alternatives such as tunnels. It’s reported to cost $515 million a kilometre, with Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel costing $1.34 billion a kilometre.

Who pays for all this? We do – one way or another. “Funding will inevitably be borne by the Australian community either through user-pays fees or general taxation,” the commission says.

Combine our growing population with lower rainfall and increased evaporation from climate change and water will become a perennial problem and an ever-rising expense to householders and farmers alike.

The housing industry’s frequent failure to keep up with the demand for new homes adds to the price of housing. And the only way we’ll double the populations of Melbourne and Sydney is by moving to a lot more high-rise living.

High immigration is changing the Aussie way of life. Before long, only the rich will be able to afford a detached house with a backyard.

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Why Morrison has changed his tune on immigration

Wow. And you thought the punters had no political power. Scott Morrison’s change of tune on population growth – following on the heels of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian – will please a lot of ordinary voters and enrage big business.

Be clear on this: almost to a man or woman, the nation’s business people, economists, Coalition politicians and Labor politicians have long believed in high rates of immigration, going back to the days of “populate or perish”.

They still do. They’ll have one dismissive, contemptuous word for the Liberal Party’s seeming backflip – “populism”.

By contrast, the public has long had reservations about immigration, going back to Chinese joining the gold rush and, as the movie Ladies in Black reminds us, to post-war resentment of “reffos” (not to mention dagoes and wogs).

It’s quite possible Gladys had a word in the ear of Scott, but I have no doubt both are reacting to results from their party’s private polling and focus groups. (If so, Labor politicians would be getting a similar message.)

That would explain their changed thinking on the topic. Their sudden sensitivity to popular opinion may be explained also by the proximity of elections in Victoria, NSW and federally.

Morrison is nothing if not direct. He’s left no doubt that this is a Sydney and Melbourne special. In the reduction in the size of the annual national permanent migration program he says he expects to emerge from the review, NSW and Victoria may wish to have fewer migrants, while other states may wish to have more.

Whether such picking-and-choosing is practically possible will be a matter for the experts to debate. Sydney and Melbourne are natural entry points of migrants. They have more jobs going, and immigrants are more likely to have relatives, friends and communities already established there. The two big cities’ businesses are likely to want to sponsor more skilled workers.

Before we leave elections, a cautionary tale from the 2010 federal election. Early that year, Kevin Rudd brought forward the next Intergenerational Report, showing the population was projected to reach 36 million by 2050. Rudd proudly proclaimed himself a Big Australia man – which, among other benefits, would give Australia (and him) more clout at international forums.

Then came the backlash. By the time of the election in July, both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were loudly proclaiming their opposition to Big Australia.

But here’s the point: after Gillard’s election in 2010 and Abbott’s in 2013, nothing was heard again about the evils of Big Australia. Immigration continued on its merry way.

If the public has always had reservations about immigration, what’s brought matters to a head?

Again, Morrison is direct. Though population growth has played a key role in our economic success, he says, “I also know that Australians in our biggest cities are concerned about population. They are saying: enough, enough, enough.

“The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full. The schools are taking no more enrolments. I hear what you are saying. I hear you loud and clear.”

So, in a word, resentment over congestion has brought simmering disapproval to a rolling boil.
But I suspect there’s a further factor.

Because the establishment’s enthusiasm for high immigration has always been at odds with the public’s instincts, there was for many years a tacit agreement between both sides of politics not to wake up the question of immigration.

Want to know why this nation of immigrants has never had a formally established population policy? That’s why. (I know because once, during the Fraser government’s time, I wrote in my naivety that we needed a great big debate about immigration and population. The immigration minister immediately slapped me down, almost accusing me of racism.)

That bipartisanship has broken down as politicians realised there were cheap votes to be had by echoing the public’s objection to “too many Asians”. When asylum seekers started arriving by boat, it was on for young and old between the parties.

John Howard allowed very high levels of immigration during his almost 12 years in office – the population was growing by 2 per cent a year at the end of his reign – but the public’s disapproval never boiled over.

Why not? Perhaps because traffic congestion wasn’t as bad as it is today. But my theory is that, while coping with the genuine problem of boat people, Howard also used them to draw the public’s attention away from high levels of conventional immigration. Sometimes you even hear political candidates claiming its boat people who are clogging the roads.

But now there are no boat people arriving – not, we belatedly discover, because none are setting out, but because of our navy’s success in turning them back – this diversionary tactic is no longer available. The voters’ ire turns back to ordinary immigrants.

But what of the much-touted economic benefits of immigration? Business people want a bigger population because having more people to sell to is the easiest way to increase their profits. But that doesn’t necessarily leave you and me better off.

The traditional fear that immigrants take our jobs is wrong – they add about as much to the demand for labour as to its supply.

Immigration does slow down the ageing of our population, but most of the other efforts to show how much benefit it brings the rest of us rest on economic modelling exercises using convenient assumptions. I hae ma doots.

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