We've slowed a lot, but we're not about to go backwards

There's no denying the economy has slowed down, by far more than we were expecting. But don't conclude it's likely to subside into recession any time soon.

This week's national accounts for the March quarter, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, show real gross domestic product grew by a pathetic 0.3 per cent during the quarter, and by just 1.7 per cent over the year to March. This compares with its "potential" annual growth rate of 2.75 per cent.

This time last year, the government's budget forecast was for growth averaging 2.5 per cent in the financial year just ending, accelerating to 3 per cent in the coming year.

So what's gone wrong? And why is it unlikely get a lot worse?

First point: don't think the economy's running down like a battery-powered toy. Looking back over the past four quarters, we see OK growth of 0.7 per cent in the June quarter of last year, then a contraction of 0.4 per cent, then super-strong growth of 1.1 per cent and now weak growth of 0.3 per cent.

This unnatural, saw-tooth pattern says some transactions may have been recognised in the wrong quarter. For instance, investment spending by federal and state public corporations leapt by 37.8 per cent in the December quarter, but then contracted by 20.9 per cent in the March quarter.

Neither figure should be taken literally.

Two major drivers of activity at present are home building and exports of coal and iron ore. Both have been disrupted by unusual weather that's not been smoothed away by normal seasonal adjustment. Climate change?

Home building has been growing strongly for several years, but it contracted by 1.2 per cent in September quarter and by 4.4 per cent in the March quarter. Most of this is explained by unusually wet weather in some parts of the country.

The volume (quantity) of exports was up 2 per cent in the June quarter, then slowed to growth of 1.4 per cent, then leapt by 3.7 per cent and now has actually fallen by 1.6 per cent.

Much of this volatility is explained by extreme weather disrupting shipping carrying coal from Queensland or iron ore from Western Australia.

We could expect the figures for the present quarter to be boosted by a catch-up from the weak March quarter – were it not for the further disruption in April and May we know has been caused by Cyclone Debbie.

Note that a sudden build-up in business inventories contributed 0.4 percentage points to growth in the March quarter. Much of this was a jump in mining industry stockpiles, suggesting a lot of coal was produced, but couldn't be shipped.

But to explain much of the quarter-to-quarter volatility in GDP growth in terms of misallocation and wild weather doesn't alter the fact that, when you add up the four quarters, you get only to utterly weak annual growth of 1.7 per cent.

One major component of growth that's unlikely to be affected by either factor is consumer spending. It's been unusually weak in all quarters bar December, growing by a pathetic 1.3 per cent over the year to March.

And this despite households cutting back their rate of saving from 6.9 per cent of household income to 4.7 per cent over the year.

This weakness in consumption ain't hard to explain: growth in household income has been held back by weak growth in employment and, more particularly, negligible growth in real wages, notwithstanding a 1.2 per cent improvement in the productivity of labour over the year.

Real labour costs per unit – a measure of the race between real wages and labour productivity – fell 1.7 per cent in the quarter and 6.3 per cent over the year to March.

Wanna know why the economy's growth is so weak? You won't find a more powerful explanation than that.

Remember, however, that the weakness isn't spread equally across the country.

State final demand is a poor substitute for gross state product, but the best we get each quarter. Across the whole economy, domestic final demand also grew by 1.7 per cent over the year to March.

But state final demand grew by 4.5 per cent in Victoria, 3.3 per cent in South Australia and Tassie, an above-par 1.9 per cent in NSW, and a below-par 1.6 per cent in Queensland.

Now get this: in Western Australia, final demand contracted by 6.6 per cent. So the West is still bearing the brunt of the bust in the mining construction boom. This explains a fair bit of the weakness in the national average.

The West's contraction in the March quarter was just 0.2 per cent, however, suggesting the inevitable end to its contraction phase isn't far off. That's the first reason things won't continue weakening nationwide.

As part of that, the long-running fall in mining investment spending must also be within a few quarters of ending. You need to be good at arithmetic to see that, when our focus is on rates of growth, "the removal of a negative is a positive".

The housing construction boom has a few more quarters to run, and strong grow in infrastructure spending is in the pipeline.

But much depends on what happens to real wages. Certainly, the government's forecast of economic growth returning to our potential growth rate of 2.75 per cent in 2017-18 as a whole, rests heavily on a resumption of real growth in wages.

To the extent the present weakness in wage growth is merely cyclical, wages will recover soon enough. This is hardly the wildly optimistic expectation that some, who've forgotten the economy moves in cycles, have claimed.

But to the presently unknown extent that the weakness in wage growth has deeper, structural causes, we won't get back to a decent rate of growth until the government acts to fix the problem.

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Turnbull must act on climate if he's not to be a Trumpette

We are trying – admittedly, without much success so far – to make our home a Tr*mp-free zone. It's just too depressing. Watching a great nation disgrace itself before the rest of the world.

The former proudly self-proclaimed leader of the free world suffering a loss of confidence and applying for early retirement.

A nation that every year scoops the pool of Nobel prizes, electing a crazy, ignorant, wilful old man, not so much Trump as Chump.

His latest stroke of genius – reneging on America's commitment to the Paris climate agreement – has been almost universally condemned, including by a great number of Americans, especially many business leaders.

But, congenital optimist that I am, I see some perverse comfort in all this. The American people are being brought face-to-face with what it means for their future when the world's second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases decides that the minor disruption of doing something to protect itself from the huge disruption of continuing global warming just isn't worth it.

This rational self-interest?

I'm prepared to bet that the next elected president will have climate protection at the top of his to-do list. Indeed, Donald Trump's becoming such an embarrassment to his compatriots I'd bet the next president's platform will be to do the opposite to Trump on 'most everything.

Then there's the band of American state governments – led by the two most powerful, California and New York – willing to step into the leadership vacuum their federal government has left. And the mayors of many cities.

Of course, as we know from earlier this year – when our federal government sought to use South Australia's blackouts for political point-scoring rather than a cue for policy correction, thus obliging the SA Premier to step in with expensive local interventions to a national problem – having states try to make up for a federal government's refusal to accept responsibility is far from ideal.

Which bring us to Malcolm Turnbull, whose statements and actions as Prime Minister contrast markedly with what every voter knows are his long-held views on climate change.

One thing to be said for Trump is that at least he's made an honest man of himself. He has no concern about global warming and isn't willing to do anything to combat it, but doesn't pretend otherwise.

Here, Turnbull professes eternal loyalty to the Paris Agreement and reaffirms our (inadequate) target to achieve a 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels, without having any credible policy by which to achieve it.

Actually, we haven't had a credible policy to reduce emissions since Tony Abbott abolished Julia Gillard's carbon tax-cum-emissions trading scheme in July 2014.

Abbott's professed reason for doing so was the claimed huge increase in the price of electricity and gas the scheme caused, and the massive economic damage this would lead to.

Prices did come down a bit, but soon continued on their upward way. Truth is, the carbon tax – and the renewable energy target – were never a major part of the reason for the big increases in energy prices since the turn of the century.

Even so, concerns about climate change are at the heart of the problems we're having maintaining an energy system that avoids blackouts without costing the earth (in the earlier sense of that phrase).

That, plus the various problems that have emerged with that finest flower of micro-economic reform, the national electricity market (the greatest source of price increases).

Ancient coal-fired power stations are being closed down, while no business in its right mind would invest in new coal-fired stations that are unlikely to be used for much of their 30 to 50-year potential working lives.

At the same time, however, businesses are reluctant to invest in industrial-scale renewable energy when the Coalition government has displayed such hostility to renewables and created such uncertainty about their future.

Have you noticed how our response to climate change and our problems with electricity have morphed into the same issue?

There's little concern to limit emissions except from the generation of electricity. And there's no solution to reliable, reasonably priced power that doesn't involve controlling emissions.

On Friday the chief scientist, Professor Alan Finkel, will deliver his long-awaited report on "the future energy security of the national electricity market".

What's needed is a mechanism to regulate the transition from fossil fuels to renewables in a way that reduces emissions while providing certainty to both kinds of energy providers.

Last year all the key players agreed the best approach would be an "emissions intensity scheme". All bar the Turnbull government, which ruled it out the moment its climate-change denying backbenchers objected.

So now, we're told, Finkel has come up with a compromise, a "low emissions target", or LET, which sets the proportion of electricity production that must come from low-emission sources.

It's similar to the present RET – renewable energy target – except the list of low-emission sources would be expanded to include gas-fired power and "clean" coal-fired power with carbon capture and storage (should such a thing ever exist).

This compromise has been widely canvassed, and has a lot of support in business. Even the Labor opposition has indicated its willingness to accept some form of mechanism rather than continuing inaction.

The heat will now be on Turnbull to get his Trumpettes across the line.

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