Workforce participation a key for Turnbull's new plan

Now it's likely the Turnbull government will scrape back to office, what's next? What will it do to improve our economic prospects?

Malcolm Turnbull went to the election offering a "national plan for jobs and growth" that was supposed to secure our future.

Trouble is, it now looks unlikely he'll be able to implement the centrepiece of that plan, the phased reduction over 10 years of the rate of company tax, from 30 per cent to 25 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed cut in company tax did not impress the voters, who think companies are paying too little tax, not too much.

Labor opposed the cut, save for the immediate reduction to 27.5 per cent for genuinely small business.

With the government now facing an even more hostile Senate, it's unlikely Turnbull will get any more than that.

This would be no great loss in the quest for jobs and growth. The government's own modelling suggested the tax cut would do virtually nothing to create jobs, and the boost to growth in Australians' incomes would be tiny and come only after a decade or three.

But what about the other parts of Turnbull's "five-point plan"? It's a muddle of things that will be done, things already done and a point saying what the plan will achieve.

Point one is "an innovation and science program bringing Australian ideas to market". Already done; benefits likely to be modest.

Point two is "a new defence industry plan that will secure an advanced defence manufacturing industry in Australia". Or a highly protectionist and costly way of buying votes in South Australia, of debatable defence value.

Point three is "export trade deals that will generate more than 19,000 export opportunities". This refers to preferential trade deals already made with Japan, Korea and China.

As my colleague Peter Martin has demonstrated, this is one of the big lies of the campaign. Such trade deals usually add more to our imports than our exports (which, of itself, is no bad thing).

Point four is the company tax cut and point five is "a strong new economy with more than 200,000 jobs to be created in 2016-17". This is just Treasury's budget forecast for growth in employment. Few of those extra jobs would have been "created" by anything the government did.

Get it? The "plan for jobs and growth" is a (now-thwarted) plan to cut company tax, plus a lot of packaging. That is, Malcolm Turnbull has no plan.

And, as we've been reminded by noises coming from one of the credit rating agencies, nor does he have a plan to get the government's budget back to surplus anytime soon.

His projection of that happening in 2020-21 relies heavily on a host of forecasts and assumptions.

Many people conflate the need for action to get the budget back to surplus with the need for "reform" to hasten our rate of productivity improvement and economic growth.

The two are related, of course, but they're not the same thing and we should consider them separately.

Remember that whereas productivity improvement is what you could call a "positive" objective, leaving us clearly better off materially, fixing the budget is a "negative" objective – it would just reduce the risk of problems down the track.

Obviously the longer we take to get back to balance, the more our interest bill grows. If this arises from borrowing to cover recurrent spending at a time when the economy is back to growing at about its trend rate, this is a bad thing.

However, if the borrowing is needed to cover spending on infrastructure (as you discover is largely the case when you study the information buried on page 6.17 of the budget papers) this is no cause for concern – provided the money hasn't been spent wastefully.

The cost of any credit rating downgrade is overrated, but it is true that, if we've got the budget back to surplus by the time we're hit by the next recession, we'll feel freer to respond as we should: allowing the downturn to push us back into deficit and adding temporary stimulus spending on the top.

Getting the budget back to surplus will do nothing to create "jobs and growth". Indeed, if you go about it the wrong way, it could come at the expense of jobs and growth.

A lesser-known point is that improvements in our productivity performance do little to improve the budget balance.

That's because it does about as much to increase government spending (directly and indirectly) on public sector wages and wage-indexed welfare payments, as it does to increase economy-wide wages and profits and, hence, tax collections.

As he casts about for a real plan to implement in the coming term, Turnbull should remember the thing that does help both the budget and Jobson Grothe: increased participation in the workforce.

This truth was lost when Turnbull was led astray by the rent-seeking of the Liberals' generous big business supporters and their obsession with cutting their own taxes in the name of "reform".

So one obvious place for Turnbull to start is with women. The Abbott government made a good start with the reform of childcare subsidies, but this has been blocked in the Senate because of the insistence on linking it with a crazy attempt to save money on paid parental leave in a way that would discourage employers from offering paid leave at their own expense.

The government should ensure that lack of available childcare isn't limiting young mothers' participation and continuing progress in their careers.

It could do much more to reduce the amazingly high effective marginal tax rates that discourage "secondary earners" (aka married mothers) from moving from part-time to full-time.

And then it could take a more careful run at winning public support for raising the age pension age to 70. We can get on with a slow phase-in, or wait until it's unavoidable.

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Who really wins from Mediscare

The success of Labor's "Mediscare" in this election is worrying - but not for the reason you may imagine. Its greatest effect may be to fatten the incomes of medical specialists and corporate medical suppliers.

Scare campaigns are often effective politically, but they can impose a high price on the country's good government.

Tony Abbott's highly successful scare about depredations of the carbon tax at the last election has left us bereft of an effective and relatively low-cost means of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions at a time when climate change is worsening and we've been obliged by international pressure to agree to a tighter target.

Bill Shorten's claim that the Coalition is bent on privatising Medicare could leave us with politicians of all colours lacking the courage to do anything to restrain the rapid growth in federal and state spending on healthcare by insisting on greater efficiency and more realistic charges for medical services.

The people who work in the House with the Flag on Top take just a few days after an election to reach agreement on why the winners won and the losers lost.

Right or wrong, this conventional wisdom sticks in the minds of pollies on both sides for many years.

Should the politicians conclude that the wrath of voters will descend on any government caught making any change that could, by any stretch, be described as privatising Medicare, the people making excessive incomes out of healthcare will be laughing and the rest of us will be paying.

Labor's Mediscare was more subtle than Abbott's crude claims that the carbon tax would wipe out Whyalla and lift the price of a lamb roast to $100.

Its distortion and exaggeration was based on the meaning attached that emotive word "privatisation". We know from repeated polling that voters overwhelmingly disapprove of all privatisation.

The righteous indignation with which ministers condemned Labor's claim as "extraordinarily dishonest", an "absolute lie" and "some of the most systematic, well-funded lies ever peddled" rest on a narrow interpretation of the word.

Privatisation means taking a profitable government-owned business and selling it off to private interests. Since Medicare isn't a profitable business, the claim is absurd.

Labor, however, was using the word more broadly to mean any change that involves reducing the role of government and increasing the participation of private businesses.

Its pretext for making its claim was the Turnbull government's intention to save a little money by shifting the processing of Medicare's many bank transfers from its giant cheque-writing agency, the Department of Human Services, to a private provider.

We wouldn't even have noticed this back-office switch, but Malcolm Turnbull felt obliged to swear the proposal would be abandoned.

But the effectiveness of this scare - and the vehemence of the Coalition's denials - rests on its large element of truth.

Labor was relying on voters remembering Abbott's broken promise to leave Medicare untouched with his first budget's plan to impose a $7 co-payment on pathology tests and GP visits.

The outcry forced him to abandon that plan. In subsequent budgets, however, the government has sought to achieve savings by ending the extra bulk-billing incentives paid to providers of pathology tests and by continuing from 2014 until 2020 the freeze on increases on the schedule fees doctors receive under bulk-billing.

Here the doctors' union has been doing Labor's work by scaring their patients with claims this would force them to abandon bulk-billing and charge big co-payments.

This is untrue in the case of path tests (where the schedule fee far exceeds the costs incurred by the two big public companies that bulk-process three-quarters of our tests) and greatly exaggerated in the case of the continuing freeze on schedule fees.

But what does the public take the word Medicare to mean? I think we're mainly referring to bulk-billing and the federal grants for state government public hospitals, which are conditional on hospital services being free of direct charge.

The public loves bulk-billing because it provides the illusion of something for nothing. But the Coalition has decades of hostility to bulk-billing. The $7 co-payment was an attempt to break it down immediately and the continuing freeze on schedule fees will break it down slowly.

This was the element of truth in Mediscare. What's more, the Coalition still plans to press on with most of Abbott's cuts in grants for public hospitals of $57 billion over 10 years.

The public's attachment to bulk-billing may be irrational, but health economists have two rational reasons for wanting it to survive.

First, it adds to the overall efficiency of the healthcare system by reducing the amount doctors need to spend on billing and collecting money. This is why doctors' initial opposition to bulk-billing turned to support.

Second, because its continuation is so valuable to doctors, bulk-billing gives the government of the day the ability to limit the annual increase in GPs' and pathologists' fees - provided it doesn't push the doctors too far.

Ever-rising healthcare costs are the biggest single threat to combined federal and state budgets. There is scope for the removal of inefficiencies that do more to line medical pockets than benefit patients.

In every case, doctors will resist the removal of those inefficiencies by telling their patients it's an attack on Medicare, not the doctors' wallets. That's why the success of Mediscare is a worry.

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