Let’s stand against misleading modelling

Many people have been left with red faces following their part in last week's disastrous intervention into the negative-gearing debate by forecasters BIS Shrapnel. Let's hope they all learn their lesson.

This isn't the first time that "independent" modelling purchased from economic consultants has been used by vested interests to try to influence government decisions. Nor the first time the questionable results have been trumpeted uncritically by the media and misrepresented by the side of politics whose case it happens to suit.

But BIS Shrapnel's late entry into this dubious game has come at a time when the game's credibility is wearing thin and qualified observers are more willing to go public with their critiques of the quality of the modelling, the plausibility of its assumptions and the internal consistency of its findings.

As is common practice, various of the BIS Shrapnel model's findings were expressed in a highly misleading way. "Rents will rise by up to 10 per cent ($2,600) per annum", for instance, doesn't mean rents will rise by up to 10 per cent a year. It actually means that, by the 10th year, annual rents will be up to 10 per cent higher than they otherwise would be. Not nearly as bad as it was made to sound.

The first lesson for BIS Shrapnel is that when you publish commissioned modelling, but agree not to disclose who commissioned it, you attract a lot more criticism and scepticism. When it's not possible for those on the other side of the debate to say "they would say that, wouldn't they", they examine your assumptions and methodology a lot more critically.

Another lesson is that when what you're modelling looks like it's a party's policy but isn't, you should say so up front, not in mitigation after that party has denounced you from the rooftops.

Similarly, "unfortunate typos" saying $190 billion when you meant $1.9 trillion get you hugely adverse attention. Your "trust me, I'm an economist" line implodes.

I can't remember when so many economists of repute have gone out of their way to attack a modeller's findings, and done it so bluntly.

John Daley, of the genuinely independent Grattan Institute, referred to the report's "convoluted logic", "manifestly ridiculous predictions", "outlandish" and "fanciful" claims, and "implausible" and "unjustified" assumptions. It was "nonsense on stilts".

The lesson for other economic consultants is that the days when you could produce for a client a bit of happy advocacy posing as objective econometric analysis, and have the rest of the profession look the other way, are coming to an end.

There's now a far greater likelihood that other economists or economic journalists will subject your assumptions, methodology and findings to scrutiny and make their conclusions public.

There's now much greater familiarity with the standard tricks of the trade, such as misuse of the Bureau of Statistics' "input-output tables" to exaggerate the "indirect effects" of some measure; saying "employment will fall by X" when you really mean "the growth in employment will be X less than otherwise", or presenting effects that build slowly over many years as changes that occur fully in the first year and occur again in each subsequent year.

The lesson for relatively new treasurers trying to establish a reputation for economic competence, and the ability to explain complex economic concepts persuasively, is you'll never do it if you act like a political brawler and latch on to whatever third-party modelling seems to be going your way.

A treasurer looking for respect doesn't identify himself with any modelling before his experts – the economists in his department, not the ambitious young politicos in his office – assure him it's kosher.

If I was a subscriber to an Australian newspaper that led its front page with a wide-eyed account of BIS Shrapnel's findings as though they were established fact, only to have them exposed the same day as highly debatable, I wouldn't be impressed.

The lesson for the economics profession is that the modelling they value so highly is too often being used by other economists to mislead rather than enlighten. The reputation of models and modellers is being trashed, and with it the credibility of the profession.

If economists don't want to be regarded by the public as charlatans, they should consider the call by the Australia Institute – a noted debunker of misleading modelling – for a code of conduct for economic modelling. It would "require key assumptions to be revealed, context and comparison to be provided, and the identification of who, if anyone, commissioned the work".

Since the profession has failed to act, the institute wants the code implemented by governments.

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Why the economy is growing faster

So, the shock, horror economic news of the week was something good. The national accounts showed the economy grew a lot more strongly during the last part of last year than anyone was expecting.

Whereas economists – both on the official and the market side – were expecting growth in real gross domestic product of 0.4 per cent or less during the December quarter, leading to growth of 2.5 per cent for the year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics came up with figures of 0.6 per cent and (thanks to upward revision of growth in the September quarter) 3.0 per cent for the year.

Why? Because the statisticians found stronger growth in consumer spending – particularly spending on services – than people were expecting, as well as stronger exports of services.

In other words, our domestic economy – indeed, not just our internal economy but the household sector of our economy – is a bigger part of our destiny than many imagine.

It should be a lesson to those who assume that problems in other economies immediately translate to problems in our economy.

Or that problems in financial markets – particularly the sharemarket – immediately translate to problems in the "real" economy inhabited by you and me. That once the bad news starts, all the news is bad.

The lesson holds even though this week's news relates mainly to a period that began five months ago and ended two months ago, whereas the bad news about China and the sharemarket and all the rest came in the new year.

The first conclusion to draw from this week's accounts is that, if we enjoy a long period of exceptionally low interest rates and a significant fall in the value of our dollar, these forms of stimulus will eventually get the economy growing faster.

The second conclusion is that, thanks to the help of low interest rates and a low dollar, the economy's transition from mining-led growth to growth in the rest of the economy is proceeding satisfactorily.

The national accounts showed business investment spending falling by 3.3 per cent in the December quarter and by 10.1 per cent over the year, with most of that explained by the sharp drop-off in mining and natural gas construction.

On the other side of the transition, the first effect of low interest rates was to encourage a surge in the buying and selling of existing houses, leading to a rise in the prices of those houses and the building of a lot of additional houses.

Spending on building new homes and altering existing ones grew by 2.2 per cent in the quarter and by 9.8 per cent over the year.

Consumer spending grew by 0.8 per cent in the quarter (following upwardly revised growth of 0.9 per cent in the September quarter) to show healthy growth of 2.9 per cent over the year.

Explaining this isn't easy. Let's turn to the "household income account" - which means we switch from quoting real (inflation-adjusted) changes to quoting nominal changes.

We know that household income wouldn't have been growing too strongly because, although a lot more people got jobs in the December quarter, wage growth has been very low. Household income grew by just 0.4 per cent in the quarter.

And household disposable income grew by less than 0.1 per cent, mainly because payments of income tax grew by 1.2 per cent in the quarter.

And yet consumer spending grew by a remarkably strong 1.2 per cent during the quarter (that figure's nominal, remember).

How was this possible? It happened not because households "dipped into their savings" as was mistakenly reported, but because they chose to reduce the amount of what they saved from the quarter's disposable income.

According to the accounts, the nation's households reduced their saving during the quarter by $2.9 billion, dropping it to $19.5 billion. This means the net household saving ratio fell from 8.7 per cent of household disposable income to 7.6 per cent.

Remember that the estimate of household saving is calculated as a residual (income minus consumption), so it can be distorted by any errors in the other items in the sum.

It's not hard to believe the rate of saving has fallen, because for the past four years it's been edging down from its post-financial crisis peak of 11.1 per cent at the end of 2011.

Even so, last quarter's drop of more than 1 percentage point seems very big, about double the size of the biggest previous quarterly falls. It may be revised to a smaller drop.

The best explanation for households' falling rate of saving is that people are less worried about their debts and about keeping their jobs, with rapidly rising house prices in most cities leading them to feel wealthier than they were.

The decline in the rate of saving as house prices rise is pretty convincing evidence of a "wealth effect" helping to bolster consumer spending at a time when household income isn't growing strongly.

And the wealth effect coming via house prices helps tie the strength of consumer spending back to the period of low interest rates and its ability to stimulate spending in different ways.

The news of faster growth in production also fits with the already-known strong growth in jobs – particularly in the later part of last year – and modest fall in the rate of unemployment.

It makes the good news we've been getting on the labour market easier to believe because it's now more consistent with the story we've been getting from the national accounts.

Annual real GDP growth of 3 per cent is a fraction higher than the economy's newly re-estimated trend or "potential" growth rate of 2.75 per cent. And this above-trend growth is what's usually required to have the unemployment rate falling – as it has been.

Of course, whether growth stays at or a little above trend this year isn't guaranteed.

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Doctors share blame for a sick budget

Some of my best friends are doctors. These days, I even have in-laws who are doctors. I've just become a grandad and my tiny grandson stands a fair chance of ending up as a doctor, too.

But I'm still a journo, and have to do my job. So let me let me adapt something Kerry Packer said about a youthful Malcolm Turnbull: never get between a doctor and bag of money.

If you wonder why it will be so long before we get the federal budget back into surplus, doctors are part of the reason.

If, as Scott Morrison keeps telling us, the trouble with the budget is a spending problem, not a revenue problem, the government's decision last week to greatly increase our spending on defence has just made the problem a lot worse.

That's the problem with saying government spending is the problem. Politicians – of all stripes – are much keener on increasing spending than on reducing it.

A lot of the growth in spending – especially if you include the state governments – is coming from spending on healthcare. Part of it's the ageing of the population, but most of it's the higher cost of new pharmaceuticals, prosthetics and medical procedures.

There's actually nothing terrible about that. If we're getting a little more prosperous each year, what's more natural than that we choose to spend a fair bit of that increase on improving our health?

If so, the problem isn't our spending, it's our reluctance to pay for it. Which means the real problem with the budget is the aversion of pollies on both sides to confronting voters with that simple truth: if you want more spending on better healthcare you're welcome to it but, as with everything else in life, you'll have to pay more for it.

The problem with the debate about spending and taxing is that government budgets are so huge – about $430 billion a year, and a lot more if you add in the states – with so many taxes spent on such a multitude of things – that it's easy for each of us to lose our sense of cause and effect, in a way we'd never do with our own, household budget.

But to say that spending on healthcare should and will continue growing strongly – so the pollies had better learn to live with that fact – is not to say that every dollar spent on health is a dollar well spent.

Every doctor I know tells me there's plenty of waste in the health system. Governments should be trying to find and eliminate that waste, thereby giving taxpayers better value for money, as well as slowing the rate of healthcare spending's inexorable rise.

Here I have to tell you that, under the greatly improved leadership of federal Health Minister Sussan Ley, and after the public's summary rejection of the harebrained idea of imposing a $7-a-pop patient co-payment on GP visits, the Health Department is making a much better effort to identify and remove waste.

Trouble is, just because a payment is judged unnecessary doesn't mean there isn't someone for whom that payment is part of their income. Threaten to take it away and all hell breaks loose as they fight to protect that income. Especially if they're a doctor.

Late last year the Turnbull government proposed saving $650 million over four years by removing bulk-billing incentives for pathology services and reducing them for diagnostic imaging.

The boss of the nation's most powerful union, aka the Australian Medical Association, was out of the blocks within moments, prophesying death and destruction.

Doctors would have no choice but to impose their own charges on patients, many of whom would struggle to afford them, leaving some poor people declining to get the tests they needed.

Yeah, sure.

Some years ago the Labor government tried to save money by cutting the rebate for eye operations. The ophthalmologists created an enormous stink, telling every little old lady they could find they'd have to start charging thousands for a cataract removal and urging them to write to their local member.

It worked. The Labor government beat a hasty retreat. Some years later, a doctor mate told me everyone in medicine knew the opthos were raking it in. The fees in the medical benefits schedule had been set long before the procedure had become highly automated, allowing surgeons to do far more operations in a day.

Everyone in medicine knew this, but while the opthos were bludgeoning the government, they kept their mouths shut – a practice known as "professionalism".

It's a similar story with pathology rebates. Advances in automation have made the rebates far higher than they need to be – which is why the special bulk-billing incentives aren't needed.

And because automation also offers big economies of scale, we now have about three-quarters of the nation's pathology tests being done by just two big companies, both listed on the stock exchange – a small fact the AMA boss didn't feel he needed to mention.

For once, this isn't about greedy specialists. This is a fight to protect the excessive profits of two big listed companies. But please still write to your local member.

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Change of Senate guards on gate to economic reform

Sometimes it's things that don't seem to have anything to do with economics that have the biggest effect on economic policy.

The proposed changes in voting arrangements for the Senate, which Malcolm Turnbull is pushing through Parliament with as little scrutiny as possible, are a case in point.

If they're passed – as it seems they will be – they're likely to make life a lot easier for lobbyists, who'll have a much smaller list of Senate parties to get around – in both senses.

Another fear about Turnbull's voting change – being supported by the Greens and Nick Xenophon, but opposed by everyone else in the Senate – is that it will lead to a decline in political competition by raising the barriers to entry by other, newly emerging parties.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow, first came to prominence with his "impossibility theorem".

He proved mathematically that when voters have to choose between three or more options, no system of ranking their preferences can produce a single, indisputably best order of precedence.

That is, there's plenty of room for argument over which voting system, while not being perfect, is better than the others.

This is why we need time – the usual Senate public inquiry would do – to hear from the experts and examine the properties of the voting system one side of politics has come up with and wants to ram through.

If the Coalition has proposed a move to optional preferential voting, allowing people to express their preference for up to six party groupings, it's a fair bet it believes such a system will advantage it over its Labor rival.

If the left-leaning Greens and centrist Xenophon party are happy to give the Coalition what it wants, it's a fair bet that's because the deal leaves room for their comfortable survival, while raising the drawbridge against the emergence of new minor-party rivals of either leaning.

The benefit to the Liberals is that their coalition (their joint voting ticket) with the Nationals, and the greatly reduced scope for the emergence of new, right-of-centre minor parties, minimises the wastage of right-leaning votes, whereas the lack of a coalition agreement between Labor and the Greens leaves significant scope for the wastage of left-leaning votes.

That's the point about optional preferential voting – it leaves a lot of votes being wasted. And this is how it greatly reduces the possibility of new minor parties gaining a foothold.

When Xenophon first got himself elected to South Australia's upper house, he did so with a primary vote of less than 3 per cent. It was winning a seat that allowed his profile to grow and ensure much higher primary votes in subsequent (federal) elections.

Similarly, it was a quite small initial primary vote that allowed Bob Brown to get known and eventually spread the Greens to all states.

Turnbull's proposal doesn't change the requirement that, to win a seat in a half-Senate election, you need to amass 14 per cent of the votes in your state. For a full-Senate election after a double dissolution, the quota falls to 7.6 per cent.

If the indication of preferences becomes optional – meaning many people won't bother – the hurdle facing future Xenophons and Browns will be almost unreachable. They'd need a primary vote not far short of the quota.

Behavioural economists know that the way you "frame" a proposition greatly influences how people respond to it. Turnbull has framed his thus: if you want to put an end to micro-parties gaming the system and getting people with a primary vote of as little as 0.5 per cent elected, support my reforms.

Sorry, non-sequitur. You can agree with the first part – as I do – without accepting that Turnbull's solution is the only one, or even the best available.

A better solution – one that ended gaming by micro parties without stymieing all democratic change – would be to retain the present preference system but simply add the rule that candidates getting a primary vote of less than, say, 2 per cent, would be excluded from election and their preferences redistributed.

Turnbull and his minor-party collaborators claim that the rush to get his Senate changes into law by March 17, and for them to take effect immediately, is independent of his threat to call a double dissolution if his anti-union legislation is blocked.

But if he gets his voting changes through, it's hard to see him not calling an early, double D election. Why? Because once he's done the micro-party Senators in the eye, it's hard to see him ever getting anything through the present Senate.

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Why economic modelling results are dodgy

Modelling is hugely fashionable in Canberra (joke intended). Any lobby group seeking to persuade the government to do something – or not do something – produces allegedly independent modelling that supposedly backs up their case.

Government isn't above using modelling to make its case, either. Had Malcolm Turnbull decided to go ahead with raising the goods and services tax, he would have produced modelling to show how wonderful that would be.

When he decided not to increase the GST, he naturally produced modelling to show that the gains to the economy would have been minor.

Have you detected my note of scepticism? The mathematical models of the economy that economists produce are supposed to be an aid to thinking. In the public debate, however, they're used as a substitute for thinking.

When it suited the government to make public a version of Treasury's modelling of a "tax mix switch" – raising the GST and using the proceeds to cut income tax – it came with a product warning: "This modelling is indicative at best and care should be taken with its use".

That was inserted to protect the modellers' professional reputation from criticism by people like me.

It's a gross understatement. What it should say is: we've been asked to answer a question our model is incapable of answering with any reliability but, because we enjoy modelling – and are quite well paid to do it – we've fudged up something that looks like an answer.

People are impressed by economic modelling because it's done on a computer. It has to be because it involves solving so many equations and so many calculations.

So, at one level, modelling is highly sophisticated. At another level, however – and this is the bit the punters never get – it's amazingly primitive. Why? Because the economy is so hugely complicated that no simplified model of it is capable of doing justice to its many possible reactions to some development.

Be clear on this. I was pleased when Turnbull decided not to increase the GST. It wouldn't have been a good change. And I happen to agree that a tax mix switch reliant on the GST would do little to increase economic efficiency or foster "growth and jobs".

So I'm not attacking Treasury's modelling for the usual reason people do: because its findings don't accord with their prejudices. No, what I object to is the way economists (who just want to be paid to keep playing with their models) collude with politicians and vested interests in using modelling to hoodwink the public.

Try to con my readers and I'm like the mother bear in The Revenant.

What if I told you that rather than a tax with an $18,200 annual tax-free threshold and rates of tax rising from 21 per cent to 47 per cent as incomes rise, the personal income tax modelled by Treasury was a flat-rate tax of 16.7 per cent, applying from the first dollar of income?

It's true. You can read all about it in a Treasury working paper published last April.

But we've never had such a tax and are never likely to. It's radically different to the progressive tax we do have. So why on earth would you use it for the modelling?

Because it's the best the model can do. It's simply not capable of modelling our real-world income tax. Why not? Because the model has just one household in it - the "representative" household.

But it does have 111 businesses – one for each of the 111 industry sectors it identifies. To this it adds one government (not eight) and one "foreign sector".

The basic model Treasury – and many other modellers – uses is called a "static, representative household, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model".

The CGE bit means the model attempts to cover the whole economy, not just one bit of it. This allows it to capture some of "the main second-round effects of taxes on households, firms and investors". It's also able to capture interactions between different taxes.

But that advantage comes with the huge disadvantage of the single, representative household. We know Australia's 9.2 million households differ greatly in many respects – size, age, income, spending patterns, saving rates, ability and desire to work.

But for "analytical tractability" (to stop the model becoming impossible to understand, even by the modeller) all these dimensions are reduced to averages. And, as we know, the statistical average household, being a mixture of everything, is often quite un-representative.

Apart from being unable to cope with a progressive income tax, the model is also unable to cope with means-tested welfare benefits. It was able to model only a fraction of the compensation that would have had to accompany an increase in the GST (the huge cost of which is the real reason Turnbull abandoned the idea, not the happy modelling about benefits to the economy).

The model assumes that an increase in the rate of tax discourages people from doing as many hours of paid work. But it uses a single, average "elasticity of labour supply" (the degree of workers' responsiveness to changes in their after-tax wage) for the representative household.

Really? Professor Patricia Apps, of Sydney University, points to the empirical evidence showing that "primary" earners (mainly husbands working full time) have quite low elasticity – have you tried telling your boss that from now on you'll be working only 37 hours a week, not 38? – whereas "secondary" earners (mainly mothers working part time) have quite high elasticity.

Averaging the two together makes the exercise meaningless.

The modellers concede that "general equilibrium models are necessarily a simplification of the economy and, as such, they can only incorporate a stylised representation of the tax system".

I'd say models are a cartoon caricature of the economy, quite incapable of answering the intricate questions we ask of them.

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Turnbull is fumbling his bid for greatness

Malcolm Turnbull is slipping. Not just in the opinion polls, that's merely a symptom of his problem. No, he's slipping in his shot at being one of our great prime ministers.

And if he rushes off to a double dissolution election in July because he fears he may not win if he waits until September, that will be a sign his place in the prime ministerial hall of fame will be up the back with his three immediate predecessors.

When Turnbull displaced Tony Abbott five months ago I, like many others, dared to hope his ascension represented a new beginning for Australian politics.

An end to the spiral of ever-declining standards of political behaviour, the negativity, the broken promises, the short-sightedness, the tit-for-tat mentality, the reciprocal scare-mongering, the unceasing attempts to "wedge" the other side, the blatant appeal to our baser instincts.

The eternal emphasis on attaining and retaining power, rather than on using that power to make Australia a better place to live and work.

To be fair, there was no way any flesh-and-blood politician could have lived up to the unrealistic expectations we had for him. And Turnbull does fit the bill in one important respect: he speaks and looks and acts like a prime minister should. He has gravitas.

But the closer we get to the pointy end of the Coalition government's first term, the more possibilities for improvement are being taken off the table to leave the second-term work program awaiting the voters' approval, the more Turnbull seems to be shrinking to the size of his stunted predecessors.

Just in the past week or so we've Scott Morrison doing Joe Hockey impressions, and Turnbull resorting to the same cheap tactics as the man he overthrew.

I'm not prepared to condemn Turnbull for failing to slash and burn government spending at a time when the economy is still not fully back on its feet.

But when you remember all the Coalition's carry-on over the "budget emergency", the insouciance with which Turnbull and Morrison have consigned the budget deficit to the too-hard basket is breathtaking.

I've been happy to defend Turnbull against the unthinking notion that increasing the goods and services tax and channelling the proceeds to foreign investors and people on the top personal tax rate is the be-all-and-end-all of tax reform.

Fail to deliver for big business and you're utterly lacking in courage.

Nonsense. The four tax subsidies to which the tax reform spotlight has turned – superannuation tax concessions, work-related deductions, negative gearing and the concessional taxing of capital gains – carry plenty of potential for changes that make the tax system both a lot fairer and more economically efficient, that is, less distorting of the choices individuals and businesses make.

One of my fears has been that the success of Abbott's unrelentingly destructive attack on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government would leave us with a Labor opposition committed to nothing more than getting its own back.

Bad behaviour breeds bad behaviour. Labor has descended to pay-back. Bill Shorten's scare campaign on increasing the GST has been a match for all the dishonest things Abbott said about "debt and deficit" and the way the carbon tax would destroy the economy.

But in one important respect Labor has risen above negativity and created an opening for Turnbull to be greater than his predecessors. It has announced controversial policies to reform super tax concessions, negative gearing and the half taxation of capital gains that is the mainspring of negative gearing.

This has presented Turnbull with an opportunity to make this election a contest of ideas and plans rather than a slanging match. My plan's better than his for the following reasons.

I hope I'm wrong but, as each day passes, it seems clearer that Turnbull isn't preparing to match Labor's boldness with boldness of his own. He'll do something on each of those four tax subsidies, but not much.

Rather, he's reverting to the Abbott tactic of portraying Labor as high-taxing and the Libs as low taxers. (Only a true believer would believe it's that simple.) He's launched into an Abbott-like scare campaign, claiming Labor's negative gearing plan would knock house prices for six.

Turnbull's confidence seems to have faltered. He's looking behind him at his fractious backbench and at the Liberal heartland, who don't want to give up a cent of the tax subsidies that go mainly to them.

That's the behaviour of a survivor. The behaviour of a future great prime minister is to look out at all those uncommitted and even Labor-leaning voters who would vote for him if they thought he really cared about making the tax system fairer; if he still inspired them.

We wouldn't be onto our fifth prime minister in five years if federal politics wasn't dominated by moral pygmies – people lacking in courage, who see tactics but not strategy, whose only vision is of their survival in their seat and their progression up the party pecking order.

What the pygmies don't see is that the public can smell politicians and parties who put their careers ahead of serving the nation. What few people in Canberra remember is that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating achieved greatness by making changes they believed the nation needed, but their own supporters hated.

Turnbull will never be great if he takes his political advice from pygmies.

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Tax reform to bring greater fairness, efficiency

The Abbott-Turnbull government may be doing a good impression of a government going round in circles, but don't let big business and its cheer squad convince you we'll be getting little in the way of tax reform.

We look like getting quite a bit of reform, just not the type of reform the big end of town was hoping for. And this will require quite a bit of courage on Malcolm Turnbull's part.

To be fair, however, much of Turnbull's courage will be coming courtesy of his Labor opponents, who've broken the Abbott mould on short-sighted, destructive politicking.

Big business defines "reform" as cuts to the rate of company tax and the top personal tax rate – that is, rejigging the system in favour of foreign investors and high domestic income-earners. There'll be little of that.

What we do look like getting in the way of reform is greater fairness ("equity") in income tax via the removal or reduction of various "tax expenditures" – or tax subsidies as Labor calls them – used mainly by high income-earners.

Turnbull seems to be planning to use savings from the reform of superannuation tax concessions, work-related deductions, negative gearing and maybe even the concessional taxing of capital gains to pay for a modest round of tax cuts.

All four of those tax subsidies have been crying out for reform for years. The fact that they're yet to be fixed despite various attempts and quick retreats is a sign of how controversial they'll be.

Last year, when Joe Hockey was exploring superannuation reforms and Labor said it would definitely be proposing its own reforms, Tony Abbott immediately swore not to touch super so he could portray Labor as high taxing.

Fortunately, Turnbull isn't so destructive. He's more inclined to regard Labor's policies as providing cover for him to act – or maybe even pinch.

The government's super reform may involve limiting the amount of annual contributions able to be made at the concessional tax rate of 15 per cent. It may also tighten the limits on after-tax contributions.

Many workers exaggerate the size of their work-related deductions, but the real rorting is done by wealthy doctors and lawyers claiming for professional development seminars at that renowned hall of learning, Hawaii.

Last week Labor announced good policies to reform negative gearing and the capital gains tax. It proposes to limit negative gearing to new housing from July 2017, with existing investments unaffected.

It would halve the capital gains tax discount to 25 per cent for assets purchased after the same date, with previous purchases unaffected.

Labor's willingness to propose changes that the well-off won't like will encourage Turnbull to do something in this area, though he's unlikely to be as brave.

It sounds like he's planning to put a limit on the number of homes you're allowed to negatively gear, which would affect only a relative handful of investors.

But removing or reducing those four inequitable tax subsidies is only half the story; the other half being what will be done with the tax savings?

If the government had any guilt over its claims of a "budget emergency" to get itself elected, it would use those savings to reduce the deficit.

Instead, it will cut income tax at a time when that's the last thing the budget can afford. Why? Because it's raised expectations of a tax cut that it dares not disappoint.

It's spent its whole term exaggerating the problem of bracket creep to justify a tax cut. If it stuck to that rationale, people near the bottom of the tax scale would get proportionately bigger tax cuts – measured by the fall in their average tax rate – than people near the top.

But I bet they won't.

While all four reform areas would make the tax system fairer, there would also be economic efficiency benefits.

To tax some forms of investment income more lightly than others distorts behaviour.
We've got an investment tax regime that encourages borrowing over saving, speculation over hard work, and passivity over enterprise. A nation already too in love with bricks and mortar has a distorted tax system that makes it worse.

We have a negative gearing loophole no other country tolerates, which is forcing house prices far higher than they need to be and, in the process, locking much of the younger generation out of home ownership.

Don't try to tell me fixing those allocative​ inefficiencies isn't reform.

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Innovative idea would fix brown coal problem

Tony Abbott's decision to put short-term popularity ahead of the nation's longer-term economic interests by abolishing the carbon tax has left Malcolm Turnbull with more than a few problems. Just one is the likelihood that less-polluting power stations will close while more-polluting ones keep pumping out greenhouse gases.

At the Paris summit late last year, our government was shamed into promising to step up our reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, even though, without the carbon tax, we lack an economic instrument strong enough to bring the promised reduction about.

But we could make some progress if we could find an acceptable way of taking out of production the worst of Victoria's brown coal (lignite) power plants. The emissions per unit from these plants are about 50 per cent higher than for black coal plants.

The problem is explained in a paper by Associate Professor Frank Jotzo, of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and Salim Mazouz, of EcoPerspectives.

Thanks to our less wasteful use of electricity and the growth in sources of renewable energy, we now have excess capacity to produce coal-fired power. Sooner or later, some power stations will have to close.

Trouble is, the absence of a price on carbon means there's no guarantee it will be the more-polluting brown-coal plants that bite the dust.

That's because brown coal-fired electricity is significantly cheaper to produce than black coal-fired power.

Why? Because the brown coal power stations are right next to the brown coal mines, thus minimising the cost of shipping the coal to the station.

And the brown coal itself is cheaper because there's nothing else to do with the stuff, whereas black coal could be exported to foreign power plants, which would pay well for it. (Black has a higher "opportunity cost".)

The lower cost of brown coal-fired power (lower "short-run marginal cost", in the jargon) means the brown coal stations do well in the continuous auction to sell power into the national electricity grid.

This means that, though the decline in demand for power from the grid has caused the level of production capacity use to fall for all types of power plants, the brown coal plants are still operating at about 70 per cent of capacity, compared with black coal plants at about 50 per cent.

That's more reason to fear that, if the question is left to be resolved by the market, the plants that close won't be the high emitters.

If we had a decent carbon tax – or emissions trading scheme, they're much the same thing – it would add more to the cost of brown power than it would to black power, so to speak, because its impost varies according the emissions-intensity of the product being taxed.

So, provided the tax was sufficiently high, it would push the firms in the market in the direction that was most desirable from the perspective of tackling climate change. Which, of course, is the reason you have a carbon tax.

But although various power stations aren't making adequate profits, there's little sign that any of them is close to throwing in the towel.

Why not? Because each of the potential quitters is telling themselves that, if they can only hang in there longer than a couple of the others, they'll get their cut of the departing firms' market share, meaning they'll then be in better shape.

Such a Mexican standoff is known to economists as a "collective action problem". The firms in a market have got themselves into a situation where they realise that something they're each doing is damaging to themselves and everyone else, but no particular firm is willing to be the first to stop doing the crazy thing because they fear their rivals would take advantage of them.

Many economists give you the impression competition is an unalloyed benefit. Collective action problems are an example of the downside of competition.

Which means they're an instance of "market failure" – circumstances where problems can't be solved simply by leaving it to the market. (Another instance of market failure is, of course, the damage to the climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions.)

The existence of market failure establishes the case for government intervention in the market – provided you can be confident the intervention will make things better rather than worse.

Intervention by the government is pretty much the only solution to collective action problems. The government comes in over the top and imposes a solution equally on all the firms in the market, which go away pleased they no longer feel obliged to do the crazy thing.

Here's the point: Jotzo – an environmental economist of international stature – and his colleague have proposed an ingenious, innovative, agile solution to the brown coal problem, one that would cost the government and the taxpayers nothing.

You invite the four brown coal power producers to enter an auction by nominating the minimum amount they'd need to receive to be willing to close down. You'd pick the winner or winners according to the ones that offered the cheapest cost per unit of emissions reduced.

You'd be hoping the winners were Hazelwood, owned by GDF Suez, the oldest and most emissions-intensive generator, and Yallourn, owned by Energy Australia, the second oldest and second most emissions-intensive generator.

But the government wouldn't just hand over a cheque. Rather, it would recover the cost by imposing a levy on all the remaining black and brown power plants – those that would benefit from the closures – in proportion to their emissions.

It's true the remaining power stations would want to pass that extra cost on to their customers. But because distribution costs (poles and wires) are so great, the (higher) wholesale price is only a small part of the retail price, meaning the effect on households is likely to be small.

Not a bad idea.

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The real reasons GST won’t be changed

After the months we've spent debating changes to the goods and services tax, a lot of people were surprised to learn last week that the idea's been abandoned.

But not me. I've been expecting it since November 24. Why? Because everything has unfolded just as my colleague Peter Martin revealed in the column he wrote 12 weeks ago.

"The big GST decision, on whether to lift it to 15 per cent, is already as good as made. The Treasurer and Prime Minister won't do it. Nor will they extend the goods and services tax to food, to health or to education, although they might yet extend it to financial services," Martin wrote.

What was arguably the biggest political scoop of the year was ignored. Maybe the denizens of the House with the Flag on Top didn't believe it. What's an economics editor doing getting scoops? Why would you bury a scoop in a column? Why was he told when we weren't?

Or maybe it suited no one in the building to kill off the GST story so soon. Politics is like a drama, where each player sticks to his part. Labor didn't want to know there'd​ be no change to the GST because it wanted to keep running its scare campaign.

Similarly, the press gallery wanted to keep milking the story for scary headlines. As for the government, it would have wanted to manage expectations, gradually conditioning its backbenchers and business urgers to the idea that tax reform wouldn't be as radical as first thought.

When the time was ripe, ministers' offices would start leaking bits of the story to key journos – the proper way to get a scoop – preparing the way for the boss to drop a big hint on some TV program, before formally acknowledging the decision.

The trouble with Martin's scoop was it was out of sequence; it didn't fit the standard choreography; it was the media playing something other than their allotted role. When the play was only half-way through, a rogue journo stood up and read out the last page.

Better to pretend it hadn't happened.

But this means we've been given the sanitised, media-managed version of how the decision was reached. For a start, careful leaking has removed the demand for the government to explain why it rejected the options for broadening the GST base.

Fortunately, Martin gave us the unsanitised explanation. Extending the tax to fresh food "was never going to happen". It would hit low earners hardest, and these days it's almost impossible to compensate them, we were told.

Extending it to health and education was considered to be unfair. People who use public schools and hospitals would pay no extra, while those already paying for access to private schools and hospitals would pay extra, Martin told us.

Last week's official version of the government's reason for deciding not to increase the rate of GST was its Damascus-road experience on January 25 when Treasury surprised it with modelling showing that using an increase in the GST to cut rates of personal income tax would do nothing to foster "growth and jobs".

Two small problems. First, this should have come as no surprise to anyone who'd read the tax reform discussion paper issued last March, which advised that personal income tax and the GST were little different in terms of economic efficiency.

Second, it portrays the decision not to change the GST as a simple economic calculation, untouched by base political considerations. Yeah, sure.

For a start, Treasury's modelling also shows that big efficiency gains could be had by using an increase in the GST to cut the rate of company tax. The government's unwillingness to contemplate such a switch was obviously political.

But the really significant consideration glossed over by the media's sanitised version of events is Martin's revelation that, since the GST was introduced, it's become much harder and more expensive to compensate low and middle income-earners for the regressive effect of indirect tax increases.

These days, many low income-earners neither pay income tax nor receive government benefits. Labor excluded many part-time workers from income tax by trebling the tax-free threshold to $18,000 a year, while the Liberals made superannuation payouts tax-free.

When people neither pay income tax nor receive a benefit, how do you compensate them? How do you even know how much to give them?

This explains why Treasury now estimates that at least half the gross proceeds from a GST increase would be needed for compensation, leaving much less room for tax cuts – personal or company – and making the politics of tax reform much more daunting.

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One way to foster growth and jobs

Things may be gloomy in other countries, and even in parts of our own economy, but there's one aspect of Australian life where everything's on the up: we're enjoying a sustained prison boom.

Consider this. Over the 66 years to 1984, Australia's rate of imprisonment per head of population rose by a paltry 13 per cent. Over just the past 30 years, however, it's more than doubled.

How's that for progress? We now have more than 36,000 people behind bars, meaning our imprisonment rate exceeds that of Canada, Britain and most of Europe.

And I'm happy to acknowledge that the Aboriginal community has made a quite disproportionate contribution to this achievement. The Indigenous imprisonment rate is now more than 45 per cent higher than it was at the time of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

This exciting news is brought to us by Dr Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, in a conference paper to be delivered on Thursday.

Weatherburn calculates that if we can only maintain the rate of growth we've achieved in the past five years for another three, we'll be up to more than 43,000 prisoners nationwide.

Think of the contribution to "growth and jobs". A screws-led recovery. And think of the improvement in productivity as we stuff more prisoners into our existing jails.

But that's not the best of it. We've been able to keep prison numbers growing even as rates of crime have been falling. How's that for an achievement?

How's it been done? Easy. Over the past 30 years we've pursued policies that result in more people being refused bail, more people getting a prison sentence and more people staying in prison for longer.

Truly, the prison industry and its backers could teach the commercial world a thing or two about drumming up business.

To be fair, there was a long period when rates of crime got worse and worse. According to Weatherburn, it started in the 1960s when servicemen returning from Vietnam brought heroin with them. The rate of heroin use began to climb, and with it a lot of heroin-related crime.

Between 1973 and 2001, rates of theft and robbery soared. Property crime spread from working-class suburbs such as Redfern, Footscray and Fortitude Valley to middle-class suburbs as well. By 1983, nearly one in 10 Australian households had been victims of some form of household property crime in just the past 12 months.

The public got fed up. Led by the shock jocks, the media jumped on the bandwagon and state politicians competed with each other to prove they were tougher on crime than thou.

Australians became prison-happy. Got a problem? Whack some people in jail. Problem doesn't seem to be easing? Lengthen their sentences. Still not happy? Keep getting tougher, without ever checking to see if it's working.

But now crime rates have been falling since 2000, the time when the heroin problem suddenly went away. The national robbery rate is down by two-thirds, as is the burglary rate. Motor vehicle theft is down by more than 70 per cent and all other forms of theft by more than 40 per cent.

Even the rate of assault seems at last to be coming down in NSW and Victoria.

You could, if you were of a mind to, argue that crime is down precisely because more baddies are locked up. But this ignores all the other factors that may have changed.

Careful analysis by criminologists finds that a higher rate of incarceration does reduce crime, but only to a small extent, too small to explain much of the extent of the fall.

Of course, the nigglers – economists and suchlike – would point out that all this imprisonment is costing taxpayers a lot. In the 12 years to 1994-95, national spending on corrective services almost doubled to $880 million a year.

By now it's almost trebled to $2.6 billion a year. And if it continues its present rate of growth it will be up to $3.5 billion in three years' time.

We're spending a fortune to keep people locked up for ages even though it's not a very effective – and thus a very expensive – way to reduce crime.

But what about what about all the "growth and jobs" we're generating? You won't hear this from politicians, but those niggling economists will tell you we don't need growth for growth's sake, nor even jobs for jobs sake.

The fact is that all spending – by households, businesses or governments – creates jobs, so it's not enough to say this project or that will create jobs. That's why, if we've got any sense, we'll ensure that what we spend on brings us the most of those things we most want.

To give you an idea, the $2.6 billion a year we're spending keeping so many people banged up is the same as the cost of employing about 2800 probation and parole officers for 10 years, or putting more than 100,000 students through university.

At a time when governments – federal and state – profess to have no money to spare for worthy causes, perhaps we should be looking for ways to punish offenders that are more effective in reducing crime and aren't so expensive.

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