The hidden truth about interest rates

The prize for journalistic innovation of 2012 must surely go to whoever thought of a way to turn a cut in the official interest rate from good news to (the much more valuable) bad news: abandon the media's eternal assumption that everyone's a borrower and let the grey-power lobby bang on about the evils of lower deposit rates.


It's such an improvement on the standard good-into-bad transformation: bleating about the greedy banks not passing on all the rate cut to people with mortgages.

If we keep down this track we can turn all rate stories into bad news: as Reserve Bank board meetings approach you hold the mike up to all the professional urgers predicting death to the economy if rates aren't cut. Then, when the Reserve obliges, you pass the mike to whingeing oldies.

I suppose it's a good thing for the media to discover at long last that interest rates are a two-way street; that though borrowers gain from lower rates, savers lose. And that there are actually a lot more savers than borrowers.

There's just one problem with the newly fashionable bleeding for retired depositors: it doesn't necessarily follow that a cut in the banks' interest rates for people with home loans leads to similar cuts in rates paid to depositors - a point the grey-power lobby didn't bother making clear to a newly sympathetic media.

There are probably few more underreported topics than what's happening to deposit rates. The banks don't mention them in their press releases announcing cuts for borrowers, and the media rarely press the banks to be more forthcoming.

But even if some of the big four banks shave their deposit rates, I doubt they all will. And those that do are not likely to cut them by as much as the 20 basis points they're lopping off mortgage rates.

Why not? Well, if the media had been reporting the whole affair conscientiously, rather than turning it into a comic-book contest between good guys and bad guys, ripoff merchants and impoverished victims, you'd already know why.

The reason the banks haven't been cutting deposit rates the way they've been cutting mortgage rates goes to the heart of their reason for not passing on official rate cuts in full. Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the banks have been locked in a battle to attract deposits from ordinary Australian savers.

This battle has forced up the rates being paid to depositors. Whereas before the crisis the rates on at-call savings accounts were about 100 basis points below the official interest rate, today they're on par with it. And whereas term-deposit "specials" were below the equivalent rates paid in the wholesale market (bank bills), today they're about 150 basis points above them.

So, savers ought to be the last people complaining about the way events have transpired since the financial crisis changed the rules of the game. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

Indeed, the higher rates being paid to depositors (relative to where the official rate happens to be), are by far the greatest reason the banks have been imposing "unofficial" rate rises on home (and business) borrowers and now are passing on only about 80 per cent of the official rate cuts. The lesser reason is the higher rates they have to pay on their foreign "wholesale" borrowings.

In other words, it's not the banks that are supposedly ripping off poor home buyers, it's the whingeing retirees. The banks' cost of borrowing has increased, and all they've done is pass the higher cost on by cutting mortgage rates by less than the fall in the official rate.

But that doesn't give people with mortgages a licence to feel hard done by. Why not? Because, as the Reserve's deputy governor, Dr Philip Lowe, reminded us yet again last week, the Reserve has cut the official rate by more than it would have, just to ensure home buyers get the desired degree of rate relief. They haven't been short-changed.

On the face of it, the banks have done nothing wrong. They've merely passed on their higher cost of borrowing, leaving their "net interest margin" (the gap between the average rate they charge and the average rate they pay for funds) at about 230 basis points, virtually unchanged from what it was immediately before the crisis.

But it's not that simple. The question we need to ask is the one the media rarely do: why has the banks' cost of borrowing risen so much since the crisis? And why has a deposit-seeking war broken out among them?

Short answer: because the crisis revealed them to be dangerously dependent on foreign wholesale borrowing for their funds. So, the sharemarket and the credit rating agencies have forced them to lift their reliance on "stickier" retail deposits to about 54 per cent of their total funding.

But this means running a bank is now less risky than it was before the crisis. This, in turn, means their risk-adjusted rate of return on capital no longer needs to be as high as it was.

So, the degree of competition among the banks is sufficient to force them to give depositors a much better deal, and sufficient to have them wanting to preserve their profitability (and their chief executives' remuneration packages) relative to the others, but insufficient to force down their rates of return the way the textbook says should happen.

In all the millions of angry words the media have spilt on the topic this year, the hidden truth is that home borrowers have little to complain about and depositors even less - save for the small truth that our banks remain far more profitable than they need to be.

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Economy slowing, not dying

To hear many people talk, the economy is in really terrible shape. Trouble is, we've been waiting ages for this to show up in the official figures, but it hasn't. This week's national accounts for the September quarter are no exception.

You could be forgiven for not realising this, however, because some parts of the media weren't able resist the temptation to represent the figures as much gloomier than they were.

One prominent economist was quoted (misquoted, I trust) as inventing his own bizarre definition of recession so as to conclude the economy was in recession for the first nine months of this year.

Really? Even though figures we got the next day showed employment grew by 1.1 per cent over the year to November, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 5.2 per cent? Some recession.

What the national accounts did show - particularly when you put them together with other indicators - is that the economy is in the process of slowing, from about its medium-term trend growth rate of 3.25 per cent a year to something a bit below trend.

That's not particularly good news - it suggests unemployment is likely to rise somewhat - but it hardly counts as an economy in really terrible shape.

The accounts show real gross domestic product growing by 0.5 per cent in the September quarter and by 3.1 per cent over the year to September - which latter is "about trend".

This quarterly growth of 0.5 per cent follows growth of 0.6 per cent in the previous quarter and 1.3 per cent the quarter before that. So that looks like the economy's slowing - although the figures bounce around so much from quarter to quarter it's not wise to take them too literally.

But the accounts contain a warning things may slow further. We always focus on the growth in real gross domestic product, which is the quantity of goods and services produced during the period (and is the biggest influence over employment and unemployment).

But if you adjust GDP to take account of the change in Australia's terms of trade with the rest of the world, to give a better measure of our real income, you find "real gross domestic income" fell by 0.4 per cent in the quarter to show virtually no growth over the year.

Leaving other factors aside, this suggests our spending won't be growing as fast next year, leading to slower growth in the production of goods and services (real GDP) and thus slowly rising unemployment.

Our terms of trade are falling back from their record favourable level because of the fall in coal and iron ore export prices as the first stage of the three-stage resources boom ends. (The second stage is the mining investment boom and the third is the rapid growth in the quantity of our mineral exports.)

For some time the econocrats and other worthies have been reminding us that, when ever-rising export prices are no longer boosting our incomes, we'll be back to relying on improved productivity - output per unit in input - to lift our real incomes each year.

This makes it surprising we've heard so little about the figures showing that GDP per hour worked rose by 0.7 per cent in the quarter and by a remarkable 3.3 per cent over the year. Again, it's dangerous to take short-term productivity figures too literally, but at least they're pointing in the right direction.

They also put a big question mark over all the agonising we've heard about our terrible productivity performance.

This week's figures confirm what we know: some parts of the economy are doing much worse than others. Business investment in plant and construction rose by 2.6 per cent in the quarter and 11.4 per cent over the year - though most of this came from mining, with investment by the rest of business pretty weak.

One area that isn't as weak as advertised is consumer spending, up by 0.3 per cent in the quarter and 3.3 per cent over the year - about its trend rate. The household saving rate seems to have reached a plateau at about 10 per cent of disposable income, meaning spending is growing in line with income.

Investment in home building grew 3.7 per cent in the quarter, suggesting its chronic weakness may be ending, thanks to the big fall in interest rates. Adding in home alterations, total dwelling investment was up 0.7 per cent in the quarter, though still down 6.3 per cent over the year.

The volume (quantity) of exports rose 0.8 per cent in the quarter and 4.7 per cent over the year, whereas the volume of imports rose 0.1 per cent and 3.5 per cent, meaning "net exports" (exports minus imports) are at last making a positive contribution to growth. This suggests we're starting to gain from the third stage of the resources boom, growth in the volume of mineral exports. The greatest area of weakness was spending by governments. Government consumption spending was down 0.4 per cent in the quarter (but still up 3.5 per cent over the year). Government investment spending fell 8.2 per cent in the quarter and 7 per cent over the year even though, within this, investment spending by government-owned businesses was strong.

All told, the public sector made a negative contribution to GDP growth of 0.5 percentage points in the quarter, and a positive contribution of just 0.3 per cent over the year - obviously the consequence of budgetary tightening at both federal and state levels.

This degree of contraction isn't likely to continue. But a strong reason for accepting the economy is slowing somewhat is the news from the labour market.

Don't be fooled by the monthly farce in which unemployment is said to jump one month and fall the next. If you're sensible and use the smoothed "trend estimates" you see unemployment steady at 5.3 per cent since August.

Even so, the economy hasn't been growing fast enough to employ all the extra people wanting work, causing the working-age population's rate of participation in the labour force to fall by 0.4 percentage points to 65.1 per cent.

And we know from the labour market's forward-looking or "leading" indicators - surveys of job vacancies - that employment growth is likely to be weaker in coming months.

That's hardly good, but it ain't the disaster some people are painting.

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Wellbeing index gives better picture of mining boom

DON'T believe the doomsayers.This week's national accounts indicate the economy is slowing to something a bit below trend but the critics of the great god gross domestic product are right: it is a quite inadequate and often misleading measure of the nation's progress.

This is why, for more than a year, the Herald has commissioned Dr Nicholas Gruen, principal of Lateral Economics, to calculate a broader index of wellbeing, which we have published within a few days of the release of the Bureau of Statistics' quarterly national accounts, with GDP as their centrepiece.

Our purpose has been to supplement rather than supplant the official figures, which have valid - if narrower - uses and were never intended to be treated as the nation's all-encompassing bottom line.

The Herald-Lateral Economics wellbeing index uses the national accounts to produce a modified version of GDP called "net national disposable income". This adjustment takes account of the annual depreciation (using up) of man-made capital and of the income earned within Australia which isn't owned by Australians.

It also shifts the focus from the value of the nation's production to how much disposable income the nation's households have available to spend on consumption or save, in the process allowing for the change in the prices of our exports relative to the prices of imports.

To this figure the index adds adjustments for the value of the net depletion of natural resources (after allowing for new discoveries), the estimated cost of future climate change, all levels of education and training, changes in income inequality, various measures of the nation's health and employment-related satisfaction.

All this means the index is well placed to help answer a question on many people's minds: what will we have to show for the resources boom?

Unlike GDP, the wellbeing index takes account of the loss of the minerals dug up and sent overseas, not just the export income earned from doing so. It also takes account of the loss of real income we have suffered from the end of the first stage of the boom: the marked decline in the world prices of coal and iron ore during the three months to the end of September.

This was the main factor that converted the growth of 0.5 per cent in GDP during the quarter - a measure of the quantity of goods and services produced in the economy - to a fall of 0.7 per cent in our net national disposable income.

But the accounts confirm that Australian households are continuing to save the high proportion of their disposable incomes. So that is proof we have been saving rather than spending some of our windfall gain from the boom.

But the broader index shows we have also increased our investment in the education and training of our workforce. So much so that, despite the fall in export prices, the index rose by 0.2 per cent during the quarter.

We should be using our good fortune to raise the value of workers' labour and improve their lives in the years ahead - and the wellbeing index shows we are.

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Top economist says what we hardly dare to think

Just as it s taking the world a lot longer to recover from the global financial crisis than we initially expected, so it s taking a lot longer than we might have expected for voters and their governments to learn the lessons and make the changes needed to ensure such devastation doesn t recur. But the penny has dropped for some.

Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University, is one of the biggest-name economists in the world. Yet in his book, The Price of Civilisation: Economics and Ethics after the Fall, he admits America s greatest problem is moral, not economic. Actually, he says that at the root of America s economic crisis lies a moral crisis. He puts into words thoughts most of us have hardly dared to think.

Sachs says America s weaknesses are warning signs for the rest of the world. The society that led the world in financial liberalisation, round-the-clock media saturation, television-based election campaigns and mass consumerism is now revealing the downside of a society that has let market institutions run wild over politics and public values, he says.

His book tracks the many ills that now weigh on the American psyche and the American financial system: an economy of hype, debt and waste that has achieved economic growth and high incomes at the cost of extreme income inequality, declining trust among members of the society and the public s devastating loss of confidence in the national government as an instrument of public well-being .

Even if the American economy is on the skids, he says, the hyper-commercialism invented in America is on the international rise. So, too, are the attendant ills: inequality, corruption, corporate power, environmental threats and psychological destabilisation.

A society of markets, laws and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty and compassion toward the rest of society and towards the world. America has developed the world s most competitive market society but has squandered its civic virtue along the way.

Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.

America s crisis developed gradually over several decades, he argues. It s the culmination of an era the baby-boomer era rather than of particular policies or presidents. It is a bipartisan affair: both Democrats and Republicans have played their part.

On many days it seems that the only difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that Big Oil owns the Republicans while Wall Street owns the Democrats.

Too many of America s elites the super rich, the chief executives and many academics have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility. They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned, he says.

We need to reconceive the idea of a good society. Most important, we need to be ready to pay the price of civilisation through multiple acts of good citizenship: bearing our fair share of taxes, educating ourselves deeply about society s needs, acting as vigilant stewards for future generations and remembering that compassion is the glue that holds society together.

The American people are generally broadminded, moderate and generous, he says. But these are not the images of Americans we see on television or the adjectives that come to mind when we think of America s rich and powerful elite.

America s political institutions have broken down, so that the broad public no longer holds these elites to account. And the breakdown of politics also implicates the public. American society is too deeply distracted by our media-drenched consumerism to maintain habits of effective citizenship.

Sachs says a healthy economy is a mixed economy, in which government and the marketplace play their roles. Yet the federal government has neglected its role for three decades, turning the levers of power over to the corporate lobbies.

The resulting corporatocracy involves a feedback loop. Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth.

How have American voters allowed their democracy to be hijacked? Most voters are poorly informed and many are easily swayed by the intense corporate propaganda thrown their way in the few months leading to the elections.

We have therefore been stuck in a low-level political trap: cynicism breeds public disengagement from politics; the public disengagement from politics opens the floodgates of corporate abuse; and corporate abuse deepens the cynicism.

Sachs says globalisation and the rise of Asia risks the depletion of vital commodities such as fresh water and fossil fuels, and long-term damage to the earth s ecosystems.

For a long time, economists ignored the problems of finite natural resources and fragile ecosystems, he writes. This is no longer possible. The world economy is pressing hard against various environmental limits, and there is still much more economic growth and therefore environmental destruction and depletion in the development pipeline.

Two main obstacles to getting the global economy on an ecologically sustainable trajectory exist, he says. The first is that our ability to deploy more sustainable technologies, such as solar power, needs large-scale research and development.

The second is the need to overcome the power of corporate lobbies in opposing regulations and incentives that will steer markets towards sustainable solutions. So far, the corporate lobbies of the polluting industries have blocked such measures.

In Australia, of course, the public interest has so far triumphed over corporate resistance. But the survival of both the carbon tax and the mining tax remains under threat.

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CitySwitch Awards Night, December 3, 2012

No one ever promised moving to a green economy - an economy making minimal use of fossil fuels - would be easy, and so it has proved. Indeed, in recent years the challenge has look dauntingly tough. It’s too easy to leave it to other people - and other countries - to make the first move. It’s too easy to make excuses and even to deny there is a problem. Sometimes I think I’m glad I didn’t do much science at high school, so I’m not tempted to think I can explain to the scientists where they’re getting it all wrong.

Even so, I get the feeling we’re making more progress in recent days - and that we’ve been making more progress than popularly believed. Here in Australia, the breakthrough may have come with the introduction of the carbon tax on July 1 which - as many of us prophesied - wasn’t nearly as catastrophic as the public had been led to expect. The tax had been designed to be as least disruptive as possible, and so it has proved. With any luck, this anticlimax will see a turning of the tide in our resolve to get on with preparing for a green future. I read that the carbon tax is now more popular than Tony Abbott - though that’s not setting the bar very high. (46/44; -31 net approval)

In recent days we’ve seen a number of new authoritative reports - mainly from scientific authorities, but also from no more unexpected body than the World Bank - reminding us the climate change problem hasn’t been wished away. It’s still there and, if anything, getting more pressing. That’s hardly good news, but I get the feeling these reports have been getting more media attention than they would have done a year ago.

Another bit of encouraging news is that, soon after his comfortable re-election, President Obama reaffirmed his view that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming, and stated his intent to continue to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He said: “I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behaviour and carbon emissions,” noting that, “we have an obligation to future generations to do something about it.”

It’s true the US Senate has declined to agree to an emissions trading scheme, but though that may be the best way to progress the move to a green economy, it’s not the only way. And the Obama Administration has made great strides in instituting stringent new fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. A related approach is greenhouse gas regulations issued by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which would limit emissions from certain power plants. And we shouldn’t forget that California and several other states are proceeding with trading schemes.

Similarly, many people don’t realise how much progress China is making in the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and, particularly, solar. When Julia Gillard’s recent white paper on the Asian century included projections for the growth in Chinese demand for our coal, Professor Ross Garnaut expressed the view that these seemed far too high because they underestimated the extent to which China would be relying on green energy sources.

And then, of course, there’s the little publicised fact that the Chinese government is proceeding with an emissions trading scheme on a trial basis in various provinces. Knowing the Chinese way of doing things, I won’t be surprised to see this develop into a nation-wide scheme.

The final bit of good news is the way so many of our own businesses are seizing the challenge and the opportunity to become front-runners in the shift to a green economy. This is occurring in various areas of business, but - as we’ve heard - in none more successfully than in the CitySwitch program. It’s great to see building managers and tenants combining with city councils to use energy more efficiently. They say there are no free lunches in the economy, and it’s true many lunches that look free aren’t really, but there are some, and when you can combine doing the right thing by the planet - and by our grandchildren - with saving on energy costs, this surely qualifies. If doing the right thing and saving on costs also brings competitive advantages - including by making more conscientious employees keener to work for such an enlightened employer - then all I can say is: you deserve it. I’m pleased to be here tonight to honour all the participants in the CitySwitch program as well as those receiving awards.

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Treasury secretary cracks the whip over super funds

When Peter Costello announced his mindbogglingly generous changes to the taxation of superannuation in 2006, the air was thick with economists prophesying such profligacy would soon prove unsustainable.

Even in business circles, the good news was widely judged too good to last. Super payouts would be tax-free for those 60 and over (thus making people's age as well as the extent of their income a criterion for how much tax they paid) and the salary-sacrifice lurk for the better off was opened wide.

At the time, Treasury, whose advice seemed to have been followed by the Howard government, wasn't having a bar of the conventional criticism, and I volunteered to make sure the government's side of the story got an airing.

Since the arrival of the Rudd-Gillard government, however, the approach to super seems to have changed, suggesting the policy advice may also have changed. Despite (or maybe because it is) planning to phase up the compulsory employer contribution rate from 9 per cent of salary to 12 per cent, Labor has been chipping away at the cost - and the unfairness - of the super tax concession. It has largely eliminated the salary-sacrifice lurk, corrected the situation where those on low incomes gained no concession on their contributions and, in effect, restored the Howard government's 15 per cent super surcharge for those earning more than $300,000 a year.

Last week, the present secretary to the Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson, removed any doubt that Treasury's attitudes have changed in a tough speech to the super funds association. He warned that, looking ahead, there were challenges for the present super arrangements. An obvious one, he said, was the ageing of the population. Although Australia was much better placed than many of the developed economies to cope with the budgetary costs of ageing, "the question remains, however, whether the current framework for our superannuation system will be sustainable into the future. While changes to the superannuation guarantee have been important for improving adequacy, they will clearly come at the cost of forgone revenue. Also, governments over time have introduced a range of concessions that encourage increased voluntary saving in superannuation. Again, these concessions come at a cost, indeed a very significant cost.

"With the Commonwealth budget coming under increasing pressure over the next few decades, the fiscal sustainability of all policies, including superannuation, will demand greater public scrutiny. This scrutiny will be even more important to the extent that existing concessions are seen to favour some at the expense of the majority."

When you remember all the promises both sides are taking into next year's election, and the difficulty whoever wins will have keeping the budget on track, it is not hard to guess where Treasury will be suggesting they look for savings.

Apart from the motor industry, there are not many sectors greedier in their rent-seeking than the super sector. Dr Parkinson took the opportunity to remind the funds in person he is no soft touch. How is this for frankness: "The government ensures the superannuation sector is provided with a steady, guaranteed and concessionally taxed supply of money. No other industry has this guarantee. None."

That sounds to me like a heavy hint the government is entitled to, first, keep the industry pretty tightly supervised and, second, expect a high standard of performance. He who pays the piper ...

"I would suggest that the superannuation industry has a responsibility to its stakeholders, including members and the government, to invest money prudently so the returns are in the best interests of members and to develop new products to meet the demands of our ageing population," he said.

"To date, the superannuation sector has focused primarily on the accumulation phase. But as the system matures, as more people move into the withdrawal phase, and as people in general live longer, there will be increased demand on the industry to assist individuals to manage the various phases of retirement and key risks like longevity ...

"Members reasonably ask: What has super delivered for me? And, more importantly, what will super deliver for me into the future? That means asking tough questions about the industry's readiness and capability to meet future challenges."

Now cop this: "I am not necessarily advocating any particular investment pattern, although I do have reservations about excessive reliance on equities."

It is a safe bet that, not long after the contribution rate reaches 12 per cent of salary, the industry will resume agitating for it to be raised to 15 per cent.

Dr Parkinson left the super funds in no doubt where he stands on the question of super's adequacy, quoting the example of a 30-year-old entering the workforce today, earning median wages and working for 37 years. They are projected to retire with an income equivalent to 90 per cent of their standard of living while working.

He said the level of super funds' management fees had been "a concern for Treasury". To tackle this concern, the government commissioned the Cooper review, from which had emerged its "stronger super" reforms, including SuperStream and MySuper.

SuperStream will see greater automation, common date standards and a network to centralise information and transactions. MySuper will provide a low-cost default super product that removes unnecessary and costly features.

The reforms could increase the retirement payout of a typical young worker by $40,000. I get the feeling that, should industry resistance prevent the reforms from delivering as expected, the issue will stay on Treasury's to-do list.

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The two speeds not as far apart as claimed

Some people spent much of this year worrying about how the two-speed economy was affecting the south-eastern states. There was concern Victoria was on the brink of recession and South Australia and Tasmania were already in one.

So when, a week or two back, the Bureau of Statistics finally published the figures for the real growth in the various states' gross state product last financial year, 2011-12, there would have been great interest from the media, right?

Wrong. The only definitive figures we've had for economic growth by state for the past 12 months went virtually unreported.

Why? Because they were a bit dated? No. More likely because they showed no sign of recession. They also showed the gap between the fast and slow states to be narrower than we'd been led to believe.

Turns out we did a lot of worrying for nothing, misled by figures we should have known are always misleading.

The unreported figures show Victoria's gross state product grew by 2.3 per cent for 2011-12 as a whole, just a fraction less than NSW's 2.4 per cent. South Australia grew by 2.1 per cent and even Tasmania pushed ahead by 0.5 per cent.

By contrast, Queensland grew by 4 per cent and Western Australia by 6.7 per cent. Overall, gross domestic product (the national measure) grew by a respectable 3.4 per cent.

A point to remember, however, is that the populations of the states are growing at quite different rates and this accounts for part of the difference in the rates at which their economies are growing. Only to the extent a state's gross state product per person is increasing is it better off materially.

Nationally, economic growth of 3.4 per cent in 2011-12 drops to 1.8 per cent per person. Queensland's growth drops from 4 per cent to 2.2 per cent, while WA's drops from 6.7 per cent to 3.7 per cent.

Not quite so much cause for envy.

If you recollect reading during the year figures a lot more dramatic than these, you're right, you did. As I say, definitive figures for gross state product are published only once a year, on an annual basis. The figures the bureau publishes each quarter as part of the national accounts are for something quite different: state final demand.

These figures are always widely reported by the media, with journalists happily assuming SFD and GSP must surely be pretty much the same thing. Trouble is, they're not. And the media's insistence on reporting these largely meaningless figures means the public is regularly misled about the extent of differences between the state economies.

State final demand and gross state product would be pretty much the same thing if the states' shares of Australia's exports and imports never changed and, more to the point, if there was no trade between the states.

It shouldn't surprise you there's a lot of trade between the states. Nor should it surprise you the mining states import a lot more from the other states than they export to them. The other side of the coin is the other states - particularly NSW and Victoria - export more to the mining states than they import.

This trade between the states spreads the benefits of the resources boom around the continent. In consequence, the much-quoted state final demand figures tend to overstate how well the mining states are doing and understate how well the other states are doing.

That's how the recession furphy got started.

Consider this. According to the latest figures for 2011-12, WA state final demand of 13.5 per cent turned into gross state product of 6.7 per cent, while Queensland's final demand of 8.6 per cent was more than halved to 4 per cent.

By contrast, Victoria's final demand of 2.2 per cent was increased a fraction to gross product of 2.3 per cent, while NSW's final demand of 2 per cent was increased to 2.4 per cent.

SA's final demand and gross product were the same at 2.1 per cent (meaning it neither wins nor loses from the inclusion of international and interstate exports and imports), while Tasmania's final demand growth of zero was increased to gross product growth of 0.5 per cent.

You see how misleading those quarterly state final demand figures are. They exaggerate the true extent of the differences between the states.

So why do the media make so much of them? Because, at a time when the resources boom is doing so much to change the industry structure of our economy, there's much interest in what this is doing to the respective sizes of the state economies.

The quarterly state final demand figures don't give reliable answers to this question, but they're the best that regularly come our way.

But also because the ever-intensifying competition between the news media has prompted them to select their news on the basis of all care but no responsibility. If some information is interesting or controversial it will be published, even if the journalists know or suspect it's dodgy. After all, if I don't do it, my competitors will.

The relative sizes of the six state economies have been changing since federation, partly - but not solely - because of their differing rates of population growth. But, though it's possible to exaggerate the extent to which the resources boom is causing the mining and non-mining states to grow at different rates, the states' relative sizes have been changing particularly rapidly in recent years.

Those recent figures no one bothered to report, known as the State Accounts, showed how the states' shares of overall gross domestic product have changed over the eight years to 2011-12.

In that time, NSW's share has dropped 3.8 percentage points to 30.9 per cent. Victoria's share has dropped 2.6 points to 22.3 per cent.

By contrast, Queensland's share has increased 1.7 points to 19.3 per cent, while WA - which long ago overtook SA in the pecking order - had its share increase a remarkable 5.4 points to 16.2 per cent of overall GDP.

That leaves SA's share falling 0.8 points to 6.2 per cent and Tassie's falling 0.3 points to 1.6 per cent. Its share is now less than the ACT's (2.2 per cent) and only a fraction greater than the Northern Territory's (1.3 per cent).

Whether we like it or not, the shape of our economy is changing.

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A new economic history of Australia

It drew little comment, but the centrepiece of Julia Gillard's white paper on the Asian century was her target of raising Australia's standard of living - income per person - from the 13th highest in the world into the top 10 by 2025. Considering the three richest economies on the list are the tiddlers of Qatar, Luxembourg and Singapore, it's clear we're already very rich.

Perhaps the reason this grand objective excited so little interest is that, for us Australians, there's nothing new about being in the materialist winners' circle. As Ian McLean, an economic historian at the University of Adelaide, reminds us in a new book, Why Australia Prospered, we joined that company from about 1820, and between 1860 and 1890 we were the richest country of all.

Few countries have been so successful for so long, he says. Some have achieved comparable levels of income only since World War II (think Japan or Italy). Many Asian countries are making good progress in catching up to these levels, though they still have some distance to travel (even South Korea).

McLean reminds us one country has experienced long-term relative decline after having achieved membership of the rich nations' club in the early 20th century: Argentina. And even New Zealand, which tagged along near us for most of the journey, has been falling further behind since the 1970s.

So, in the first major economic history of Australia for 40 years, McLean sets out to explain why we became rich so soon and how we've managed to stay that way for the most part of 200 years.

The story we have in the back of our minds explains it in a phrase: we're the Lucky Country. The Europeans who settled in this vast land had the good fortune to arrive at a place well suited to farming and teaming with valuable minerals. For more than 200 years we've been living off that great luck.

There's no doubt Australia's longstanding prosperity owes a lot to the exploitation of its bountiful "natural endowment". We became a major world producer and exporter of wool as early as the 1820s, and it stayed our principal export earner until the 1950s, save for the 1850s and 1860s when it was supplanted by gold.

McLean says the gold rush was "no flash in the pan". Gold continued to be important to our prosperity for several decades. And we remain a significant world producer to this day.

At the start of the wool boom in 1820, Australia's European population was just 30,000. By the time gold was discovered in 1851, it was up to 430,000. Thanks to the gold rush, in just 10 years it had reached 1.2 million. Most of those people stayed, and by the start of the serious depression of the 1890s it was 3.2 million.

The story of our lucky natural endowment continued with the discovery of many mineral deposits in the 1960s, right up to the Asia-driven resources boom of the past decade. Still today, primary products account for two-thirds of our export income.

But McLean disputes the notion our unending prosperity can be explained simply in terms of our lucky strikes. For one thing, their study of many countries has led modern economists to the conclusion that possession of some valuable resource deposit is almost always a curse rather than a blessing.

It tends to lead to squabbling over who gets the proceeds, corruption, complacency, underdevelopment and stagnation. By contrast, resource-bereft countries such as Singapore or Taiwan seem to have succeeded precisely because they knew they had nothing going for them beside their own efforts.

Clearly, Australia is an exception to the "resource curse" rule. But then we have our erstwhile southern hemisphere twin, Argentina, as a reminder you do have to play your cards right.

Our long prosperity defies another conventional wisdom: colonies get exploited by their colonising power. McLean finds no evidence of significant exploitation by the British. On the contrary.

Unlike some Asian colonies, our economy had to be built from scratch. Who built the foundations and paid for them? The British taxpayer. We benefited from our convict origins. The Brits were expecting it to cost them, and the 160,000 convicts they sent us were selected for their suitability for hard work.

A big part of the reason we got rich so quickly was that such a high proportion of the population was in the workforce. Then there was the advantage of being part of the British Empire trading bloc and the privileged access it gave us to Britain's market.

Self-government came early and bloodlessly in the 1850s.

But McLean gives much of the credit to the quality of our economic and political "institutions" - legal system, property rights, control of corruption, political arrangements and social norms - most of them inherited from the Brits.

The test of our institutions is their flexibility, their ability to adapt in response to changing circumstances and needs. As evidence of flexibility McLean cites the ending of transportation of convicts, a solution to the monopolisation of grazing land by squatters and the pull-back from using indentured islander labour on sugar plantations.

Much more recently you can point to all the economic reforms we undertook in the 1980s and '90s to open our economy to a globalising world. And to our skilful response to the global financial crisis - just the latest of many economic shocks the world has thrown at us.

Australians don't have tickets on themselves as great managers of our economic fortunes, but a look at the record - and at the performance of comparable countries - says we've had a lot more going for us than just luck.

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What business needs to learn about politics

The way big business sees it, economic reform has ground to a halt because the politicians on both sides have lost the political will to make the tough decisions. But I think big business must share the blame for the stalemate we've reached.


Business leaders have lost confidence in the Gillard government and, having concluded its days are numbered, are uncharacteristically willing to attack it in public. In private, though, most would doubt an Abbott government would be any more willing to grasp the nettle.

Consider the GST. Despite all the good sense Nick Greiner was talking last week about the need to fix it, both sides refuse even to discuss the topic. It was specifically excluded in the terms of reference for Ken Henry's "root and branch" review of the tax system (which didn't stop him proposing a similar tax with a different name).

It's not hard to see what the problem is. Each side is afraid that, if it showed the slightest interest in considering the topic, the other side will use this as a pretext to launch a scare campaign.

Or, consider the mining tax. Although it's not true the tax raised no revenue in its first quarter, it is true it raised less than expected, mainly because of the fall in commodity prices.

But prices have recovered from their lows in the first two months of the quarter. As well, the nature of the quarterly instalment process means collections are likely to pick up in later quarters.

Even so, it is true that the compromise tax Julia Gillard negotiated with the big three mining companies was both badly designed and too generous to the miners.

Why did she give in to them? Because the opposition had sided with the miners in opposing the original tax and, in their efforts to destroy the Rudd government, the big miners would have given the opposition huge funding in the 2010 election campaign.

One reason the miners were so opposed to the original tax was that the government caught them off guard with a strange tax they didn't understand. This would not have happened had Labor released the Henry report for discussion well before it made up its mind about which recommendations to accept, reject or modify.

So, why didn't it? Because it was so afraid the opposition would run a scare campaign claiming that Labor intended to implement all of Henry's most controversial proposals.

Next, consider company tax. For reasons I can't fathom, big business has its heart set on a cut in the company tax rate. Labor promised a cut of 2 percentage points, but the deal with the miners obliged it to reduce the cut to 1 point.

Then the combined opposition to this from the opposition and the Greens allowed Labor to renege completely. Although all previous cuts to the rate have been funded by the removal of concessions, big business can't agree on which concessions it's prepared to give up.

This has allowed Labor to shelve the idea. And I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an Abbott government to find the revenue needed to fund a cut.

Finally, consider all the reform the Hawke-Keating government undertook during the 1980s and early '90s: deregulating the financial system, floating the dollar, phasing out import protection, deregulating more industries than you can remember and decentralising wage-fixing.

What do these reforms have in common? They went virtually unchallenged by the Liberal opposition of the day, under the dominant influence of John Howard and John Hewson.

Are you starting to see a pattern? All the reforms that aren't getting up (or, in the case of the mining tax, got badly botched) have become party-political footballs. And almost all the reforms we did get were bipartisan policy - with the GST and the carbon tax as the notable exceptions (although in both these cases the lack of bipartisanship led to inferior policy).

The point is, it's not so much unhappy voters governments fear, it's their political opponents seeking to take advantage of the voters' unhappiness.

What many business people don't understand about politics is the power of oppositions to influence what governments do and don't do. It's rare for governments to make controversial reforms when they know their opponents are waiting to pounce.

The bipartisan support for micro-economic reform lasted throughout the Hawke-Keating government's 13 years, but broke down after Paul Keating's defeat in 1996. Since then, both sides have gone for short-term political advantage at the expense of the nation's longer-term interests.

So, the first lesson big business needs to learn is that it's not enough to pressure the government of the day to show "political will". You must also pressure the opposition to resist the temptation to score cheap political points.

That's particularly the case when it's the opportunism of a Liberal opposition that is discouraging a Labor government from doing what it knows it should.

The second lesson is that big business won't get far until it abandons its code of honour among thieves. That is, when one industry goes into battle with the government to resist a new impost or get itself a special concession, all the other industries keep mum, even though they know the first industry is merely on the make.

Big business looked the other way as the three big miners connived with the opposition to destroy the Rudd government. Its reward was to have its precious cut in company tax snatched away.

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States are correcting earlier mismanagement

In most states around Australia, recent years have seen long-standing Labor governments tossed out and replaced by Coalition governments. In all cases, the new governments have immediately embarked on campaigns to cut government spending. Why?

Is it American-style anti-government ideology? Is it uniform Labor mismanagement across the nation? Could it be some changed feature of the national economy, or just the state governments' irrational pre-occupation with preserving or restoring their triple-A credit ratings?

Turns out to be a bit of most of those.

The Commonwealth Grants Commission, which is responsible for deciding how the proceeds of the goods and services tax are divided between the states, has published an information paper on the changes in state budgets over the 10 years to 2010-11 (which you can find on its website).

It found that, taking all the states and territories together, they ran small overall budget deficits (known as the "net borrowing position") in the first two years of the noughties. Then, for the next five years, from 2002-03 to 2006-07, they ran quite large overall budget surpluses ("net lending position"), meaning they could run down their level of government debt.

Great. But then, for the final four years, they switched back into ever-growing overall budget deficits, rising from $4.3 billion in 2007-08 to a mammoth and unsustainable $15.3 billion in 2010-11.

Can you think of some momentous event about that time that might help explain such a marked deterioration in the states' finances? How about the global financial crisis, which began in August 2007 and reached its climax in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank?

But there was another factor, which got going a bit earlier: the states' rapidly increased spending on capital works. How much does this explain?

Before we go any further, note that these figures relate only to the states' "general government" sector. That is, they don't include the activities or the borrowing of government-owned businesses, such as water boards or electricity authorities.

Also, note that state budgets are heavily influenced by the receipt and spending of grants from the federal government. These receipts are the proceeds of the GST, plus "special purpose payments" - which include federal grants for spending on capital works. Much of the Rudd government's fiscal stimulus went on capital works spending by the states.

Total grants from the federal government account for about half the total revenue received by the states. Until 2007-08, the GST accounted for about 60 per cent of all federal money received; since then its share has fallen to half, a sign it's no longer the "growth tax" it was.

So far, however, this decline in the relative importance of GST money has been offset by increased special purpose payments - though whether this will remain true is different matter.

So next the Grants Commission's information paper strips out all federal payments (and the spending of them) so we can see what's been happening to the states' "own-account" revenue-raising and spending.

It turns out the states' own-account "expenses" - that is, their spending for recurrent purposes - have grown quite strongly relative to the growth in their economies, from 7.3 per cent of gross state product in 2005-06 to 8.1 per cent in 2010-11.

At the same time, however, the states' own-account revenue - composed of mainly of state taxes and receipts from public transport fares and public housing rents - has fallen relative to gross state product, from a peak of 7.8 per cent in 2006-07 to 7.4 per cent in 2010-11.

This explains the marked deterioration in the states' own-account "operating balance" from a surplus of $4 billion in 2006-07 to a deficit peaking at $12.1 billion in 2009-10, before falling to $9.7 billion in 2010-11.

All this suggests there was a degree of mismanagement by the mainly Labor governments in power at the time. While their own-account revenue raising was failing to keep pace with their economies, they were allowing their own-account expenses to grow very much faster than their economies.

I don't have a problem with a growing public sector, but I do have a problem with politicians allowing their day-to-day spending to grow rapidly without being willing to increase taxes to cover it. Particularly at the state level, that's not being "progressive", it's being irresponsible.

To be fair, much of the weakness on the revenue side of their budgets wouldn't have been the state premiers' fault. In particular, conveyancing duty - which accounts for 12 per cent of the states' own-account revenue - made a negative contribution to revenue growth after 2005-06.

This was due to the global financial crisis's effect on the housing market. At the same time the state governments were allowing their own-account operating budgets to deteriorate, they were also stepping up their own-account spending on capital works. This increased from a mere $32 million in 2004-05 to $5.6 billion in 2010-11. (If these figures seem low, it just shows how much of state capital works spending is financed by the feds - in the final year, about two-thirds.)

But if you look at it from the last overall budget surplus of $1.2 billion in 2006-07 to the overall deficit of $15.3 billion in 2010-11, the increase in own-account capital spending accounts for just $2.8 billion of the $16.5 billion deterioration.

So the popular impression that the states are in bother with the credit rating agencies simply because of their need to overcome the widely assumed (but rarely demonstrated) infrastructure backlog seems far from true.

The main problem is borrowing to finance recurrent operations - which, unless states are in the depths of recession, can't be defended.

I don't have much time for Standard & Poor's, Moody's and the other rating agencies. Their dereliction of duty contributed greatly to the global financial crisis, for which they've got away with far too little public censure.

Sometimes I suspect they run an especially hard line on government borrowers to distract attention from the way they disgraced themselves with their paying-customer private sector borrowers in the years before the crisis. They're walking proof that an independent opinion on your financial affairs is not something you can buy.

But in this case they're in the clear.

The main reason for all the belt-tightening by state governments is old-fashioned mismanagement.

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