Productivity improves, but no one notices

You could call it the mystery of the disappearing productivity crisis. Last week's national accounts for the December quarter confirmed that, if we ever really had an underlying problem with weak productivity improvement, we don't have one now. By now, that's not such a mystery. No, the puzzle is why the people who made so much noise about the supposed productivity crisis show little sign of having noticed its evaporation.

For months we had big business arguing the seemingly weak rate of improvement in the productivity of labour during the noughties needed to be corrected by restoring the Howard government's WorkChoices biasing of industrial relations law in favour of employers. Some even went so far as to claim it was Labor's Fair Work changes that caused the weak productivity improvement.

Another line we kept hearing was that a big cut in the rate of company tax was needed to get productivity up. No one prosecuted this campaign more enthusiastically than the national dailies; they were always fretting about productivity. Yet in their extensive reporting of the national accounts, neither found space to note what those accounts told us about such a crucial issue. Even the media's exaggerated preference for bad news over good isn't sufficient to explain that omission.

Call me cynical, but it makes me suspect all the tears shed over productivity were little more than cover for an exercise in big-business rent-seeking. Shift the rules in my favour and it'll do wonders for the economy.

In case you're wondering, the national accounts showed that, on the simplest measure - gross domestic product per hour worked - the productivity of labour improved by a roaring 3.5 per cent over the year to December.

But I think the best way to see what's been happening is this: using the trend (smoothed seasonally adjusted) figures for labour productivity in the market sector, it's been improving at the rate of 0.5 per cent or better for seven quarters in a row.

Obviously, 0.5 per cent a quarter represents an annualised rate of 2 per cent, which compares with the average rate of 1.8 per cent a year achieved over the past 40 years (and the 1.6 per cent Treasury is projecting for the next 40).

To be sure, the Bureau of Statistics warns against taking short-term movements in productivity too literally, preferring to do its measurement in completed "productivity cycles" that run for four or five years.

But the improvement we've seen over the past year or two isn't hard to credit. After all, the volume of production (real GDP) grew by 3.1 per cent over the year to December, whereas total employment grew by only 1.1 per cent and average monthly hours worked grew by just 0.2 per cent.

Nor is it hard to see how the few industries whose special circumstances did so much to make the economy-wide productivity figures look so bad are moving on from those circumstances. The mining investment boom shot the mining industry's productivity figures to pieces by adding inputs without yet adding much to outputs.

But the strong growth in the volume of coal and iron ore exports in the December quarter tells us the expanded production capacity is at last starting to come online. And we know the water utilities haven't undertaken a second round of building, then mothballing, desalination plants.

Big business is wedded to the happy notion that productivity improves when governments do things to make business's life easier. If these guys were a bit better versed in economics [as opposed to rent-seeking] they'd know the truth is roughly the opposite: productivity improves when governments either do things, or allow things to happen, that make life tougher for business.

What the Gillard government did was do nothing to lower the high dollar - not that there was anything sensible or effective it could have done - and limit the budgetary handouts to only part of manufacturing industry.

The result was a lot of pressure on export-and import-competing industries to raise their efficiency (or, at the very least, cut costs) or go under. As well, a lot of other industries, including retailers and much of the media, have been subject to pressure on sales and profits coming from the digital revolution and structural change.

These are just the tough times you'd expect would oblige firms to lift their game. As Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said recently: "In several sectors of the economy a combination of factors is putting pressure on business models, and firms have been responding with an emphasis on lifting productivity and paring back costs. This process, while unavoidable, feeds into measures of sentiment ..."

As we go through a period of transition from mining-led growth to stronger growth in the rest of the economy, he said, "the pressures to adapt business models, contain costs, increase productivity and innovate will remain. But such adjustments are actually positive for longer-run economic performance."

Moral: Don't get your economics from overpaid chief executives - or crusading newspapers.

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Underneath, the economy is slowing

THE world is a complicated place - and the Bureau of Statistics' national accounts are more so. Sometimes they're better than they look, but the figures we got this week aren't as good as they look. On their face, they say real gross domestic product grew by 3.1 per cent over the year to December.

Since the economy's trend (medium-term average) rate of growth is about 3.25 per cent a year, that doesn't look too bad. The worry is, a lot more than half that growth occurred in the first half of the year, with growth in the last quarter of just 0.6 per cent - suggesting the economy is slowing.

The figures are unlikely to prompt the Reserve Bank to make much change to its forecasts last month of growth of just 2.5 per cent over the year to June, and probably not much better by the end of this year.

Looking into the detail, although consumer spending has generally held up better in recent years than many people suppose, it grew by a weak 0.2 per cent in the December quarter, and no better the quarter before.

Just why consumption has been so weak of late is a puzzle. The problem hasn't been weak growth in household incomes, nor a rise in the rate of household saving, which has been roughly steady at 10 per cent of household disposable income. It's the "disposable" bit that has been the problem: an unexplained increase in tax payments.

There was strong growth in the quarter in purchases of food and motor vehicles (for the year, up a remarkable 23 per cent), but a fall in spending at hotels, cafes and restaurants.

Probably the best news is that home building activity increased 2.1 per cent in the quarter, its best growth since early 2011, following a pick-up in the September quarter.

This suggests housing is finally starting to grow again, stimulated by lower interest rates and slowly rising house prices. But no one's expecting the recovery to be strong.

On the face of it, business investment spending contracted in the quarter, whereas public sector spending grew surprisingly strongly. But both results were distorted by the sale of an existing asset from the private sector to a state public corporation. Kieran Davies, of Barclays Bank, believes this is the Victorian government's purchase of a desalination plant for up to $4 billion.

As best he can untangle the figures, business investment rose 1 per cent during the quarter, while public sector spending was pretty flat. The latter's not surprising since governments at all levels are struggling to get their budgets back to surplus.

Within the overall growth in business investment, spending by the mining industries continued very strong, whereas spending by all other industries was weak.

According to the latest estimate by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, the pipeline of committed resource projects is a record $268 billion. This suggests the peak in mining investment remains some quarters off and that, even when it arrives, it may be more of a plateau than the start of a dive.

While we're on the resources boom, the next notable feature of the accounts was that the volume (quantity) of exports grew 3.3 per cent during the quarter, whereas import volumes grew just 0.7 per cent. This means "net exports" (exports minus imports) made a contribution to overall GDP growth of 0.6 percentage points. By far the strongest growth came from coal and iron ore exports.

But a slowing in the rate of inventory accumulation made a negative contribution of 0.4 percentage points and, as Dr Chris Caton of BT Financial Group has calculated, almost all of this came from a sharp decline in mining inventories. It thus makes sense to say mining exports made a net contribution to growth of 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points.

So it's a mistake to say, as some have, that mining accounted for all the growth in the quarter. Small contributions came from consumer spending and housing. And it's good to see signs of the third phase of the resources boom getting started: there's a lot more growth in the volume of our mineral exports to come.

This is the time to be clear on the distinction between export volumes and export prices. Even as export volumes are growing, export prices are falling. Indeed, prices are falling mainly because volumes are growing. That is, prices are falling as supply catches up with demand.

The fall in export prices relative to import prices caused our "terms of trade" to deteriorate by 2.7 per cent during the quarter (and by 12.9 per cent during the year). This explains why, though real gross domestic production grew 3.1 per cent over the year, real gross domestic income rose by just 0.2 per cent.

This weaker growth in national income feeds through to business profits and household incomes, thus acting as a dampener on spending. And this, plus the coming peak in mining investment (and despite the income we'll get from growing mining export volumes) explains why what we need to see now is a transition from mining-led growth to growth in the rest of the economy: consumption, housing and non-mining business investment spending.

That's what's disappointing about this week's seemingly OK national accounts: as yet, not much evidence the transition is occurring. It's being spurred on by the fall in interest rates over the past year or more, but held back by the continuing high dollar.

Even so, Wayne Swan is right to remind us that, whatever our troubles, they pale into insignificance compared with the troubles of most of the rest of the developed economies.

Our growth of 3.1 per cent is faster than almost all the other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and more than four times the average. Of the 27 advanced economies, 15 actually contracted in the December quarter.

Our real GDP has grown by 13 per cent in the five years since December 2007. Among the seven biggest advanced economies, only Germany, the US and Canada can claim to have grown in that time. And the best of them - Canada - has grown much less than half as much as we have.

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Labor first out of blocks in race to mislead

I guess you've heard the news: the Gillard government has obtained new analysis of data from the Bureau of Statistics showing that Tony Abbott's election commitments inflict brutal damage on working families, particularly those in western Sydney, increasing taxes and cutting support to families.

According to Treasurer Wayne Swan, Abbott's commitments include scrapping the tripling of the tax-free threshold, axing the new schoolkids' bonus and abolishing family payments from the household assistance package introduced in June last year.

The government tripled the tax-free threshold from $6000 to $18,200 a year from July last year, we're told, delivering tax cuts to all taxpayers earning up to $80,000 a year. Most of these people received savings of at least $300 a year, with many part-time workers receiving up to $600.

The schoolkids' bonus is worth $410 a year for primary school students and $820 a year for secondary school students to families who receive family tax benefit part A.

The household assistance package increased payments to families who receive benefit part A by up to $110 per child and by $70 per family for those receiving benefit part B. The median family income in Fairfield is $106,000. This family, with two children both in primary school, father working full-time on $86,000 a year and mother working part-time on $20,000 will be almost $1500 a year worse off, we're told. The mother will pay $600 more in tax and they will lose $820 in schoolkids' bonus and $72 in other benefits.

The median family income in Penrith is $118,000. This family, with two primary and one high school student, the father earning $70,000 and the mother on $48,000, will be $2300 a year worse off, we're told. The father will pay $250 more in tax, the mother will pay $300 more, and they'll lose $1640 in schoolkids' bonus and $108 in other benefits.

Terrible, eh? There's just one small problem. This stuff is so misleading as to be quite dishonest.

For a start, this is just politically inspired figuring, which doesn't deserve the aura of authority the government has sought to give it by having it released by the Treasurer with a reference to "new analysis of Bureau of Statistics data" and allowing the media to refer to it as "modelling".

It's true you'd have to look up the bureau's census figures to get the details of the median family in a particular suburb, but after that the "modelling" could be done on the back of an envelope.

There's a key omission from Labor's description of its wonderfully generous household assistance package: why it was necessary. Its purpose was to compensate low and middle-income families for the cost of the carbon tax. Since the Coalition promises to abolish the carbon tax, Abbott has said that all the compensation for the tax will also go. (Strictly speaking, the schoolkids' bonus is linked to the mining tax, but the Coalition is also promising to abolish this tax, and Abbott has said the bonus, too, will go.)

The trick is that Abbott has yet to give any details of how or when these concessions would go and what they'd be replaced with. But this hasn't inhibited Labor. It has happily assumed what the Coalition intends and is presenting its assumptions as hard facts.

The most glaring omission from Labor's calculation of the hip-pocket effect of all this is its failure to acknowledge the saving households would make from the abolition of the carbon tax.

Based on Treasury's original calculations, this should be worth about $515 a year per household, including $172 a year from lower electricity prices and $78 a year from lower gas prices.

Some Labor supporters argue that even if the carbon tax is abolished, prices won't fall. This is highly unlikely. The state government tribunals that regulate electricity and gas prices would insist on it. And a Coalition government would no doubt instruct the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to police the wider price decrease.

Labor's repeated claim to have tripled the tax-free threshold from $6000 to $18,200 a year has always been literally true, but highly misleading. That's because it conveniently ignores the complex operation of the low-income tax offset.

When you allow for this offset, which Labor has reduced and changed without removing, the effective tax-free threshold has increased by a much smaller $4500-odd from $16,000 to $20,542. This explains why the tax cut arising from the seemingly huge increase in the threshold is so modest (for many, $5.80 a week) and also why the move yields no saving to anyone earning more than $80,000 a year. For them, the threshold increase has been "clawed back".

The idea of a Coalition government bringing about an actual increase in income tax is hard to imagine. Labor omits to mention Abbott has promised a modest tax cut, though he hasn't said when it would happen.

Labor also omits to mention that the generous schoolkids' bonus replaced its earlier 50 per cent education tax refund, which offered savings of up to almost $400 a year on the eligible expenses of primary school students and up to almost $800 for secondary students.

Labor has assumed that Abbott would merely abolish the schoolkids' bonus without reinstating the education tax refund. Maybe he would; maybe he wouldn't - he hasn't yet said. But only a one-eyed Labor supporter would trust Labor to read Abbott's mind.

It didn't take the announcement of an election date to ensure the informal election campaign would begin as soon as we were back at work in January. It's a daunting thought.

But at least it gives people like me plenty of time to demonstrate the dishonesty of the claims being made.

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Hockey would be no soft touch as treasurer

If the Liberals take over the management of the economy in September - as seems likely - one advantage should be that big business becomes more realistic about the extent to which it imagines the government can solve its problems. And just to make sure, Joe Hockey, the opposition's treasury spokesman, gave business his first pep talk along those lines last week.

Hockey is much underestimated. If you've been watching you've seen him progressively donning the onerous responsibilities of the treasurership, the greatest of which is making it all add up.

He has used his - now less considerable - weight to avoid raising unrealistic expectations and to tone down overly generous promises. You can see him thinking: "I'm the guy who'll have to find a way to pay for all these commitments. We've made a huge fuss about the need to get the budget back to surplus and it'll be down to me to ensure it happens."

In opposition the temptation is to espouse populist solutions that sound good but don't work. As a former cabinet minister, Hockey knows it's hard for governments to get away with such wishful thinking. If you've been listening carefully you'll have noticed Hockey quietly taking an economic rationalist approach while others demonstrated their lack of economic nous.

Those who doubt the strength of Tony Abbott's economics team should note that Hockey would be backed by Senator Arthur Sinodinos, a former senior Treasury officer. I believe Sinodinos played a key part in formulating the "medium-term fiscal strategy" - "to maintain budget balance, on average, over the course of the economic cycle" - which the Libs developed when last in opposition.

If so, Sinodinos deserves induction to the fiscal hall of fame. There have been few more important or wiser contributions to good macro-management of our economy.

One of the greatest failings of the Rudd-Gillard government was the way, in an attempt to keep in with big business, it yielded to the temptation to modify its policies in response to lobbying from particular industries. The consequence was to annoy other industries and incite them to get in for their cut. But the more concessions business extracted from Labor, the more business lost respect for its judgment and self-discipline.

This generation of Labor doesn't seem to have learnt from its Hawke-Keating predecessor which, with some lapses, stuck to the line that the days of industry rent-seeking were over and that, in a well-functioning market economy, the main responsibility for solving an industry's problems rests with the industry.

Judging by his speech to a business audience last week, I suspect Hockey has learnt the lesson. He outlined the many ways in which he believed the Coalition's policies would be better for business than Labor's, but stopped well short of promising business everything its heart desired.

For instance, he discussed the case of "a significant manufacturer with similar operations in Australia and the United States", who complained that labour costs were much higher in Australia.

"Australian labour is expensive," Hockey said. "Is that a bad thing? No, not at all. We can compete with higher wages provided our output per worker is globally competitive.

"Higher household income means that our people have higher spending power. That provides a high standard of living and facilitates strong household consumption. And it benefits businesses because it provides a strong and expanding domestic market."

Australia's standard of living must not go backwards, he said. There was no national benefit in cutting wages. "What we do need to do is to ensure that our workers have the skills and knowledge that our industry needs. Education, training and retraining is a key step to unlock labour productivity gains. And we need to ensure that employment conditions can meet the varied and changing requirements of Australian workers and Australian businesses."

This was why, within the framework of the Fair Work Act, a Coalition government would look at "cautious, careful and responsible improvements to labour market regulation".

Hockey noted that part of the reason Australian wages seemed high relative to US wages was our high dollar, which "is impeding the competitiveness of Australian exporters and making life difficult for Australian producers.

"But on the other side of the coin," he said, "the high Australian dollar brings benefits for businesses which rely on imported goods, and for consumers who purchase cheaper imported products. So what could or should be done?"

He made two points in reply. First, there's no "correct" value for the dollar. Second, all movements in the currency create losers as well as winners. "Those who argue for a lower dollar are effectively arguing in favour of higher prices for consumers," he said.

A Coalition government "would need to be extremely cautious in tinkering with such a successful policy measure" as the freely floating dollar. "We would encourage businesses to view the high dollar as an opportunity. A high dollar means imports are cheap. Business should be utilising this period to import cutting-edge equipment and world-class technology."

Hockey is already sounding like a more forthright treasurer than the incumbent.

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How Reserve Bank retains control of interest rates

When the banks began moving their mortgage and other lending rates at variance with the Reserve Bank's changes in its official interest rate, many people took this as a sign the Reserve had lost its ability to control market interest rates, making its monetary policy ineffective.

Fortunately for all of us, this impression was wrong. That so many people came to this conclusion showed their grasp on the mechanics of monetary policy (the central bank's manipulation of interest rates to influence the strength of demand in the economy) was shaky.

But this week one of the Reserve's assistant governors, Dr Guy Debelle, gave us all a little tutorial in a speech to a business school breakfast.

On Tuesday (and on the first Tuesday of every month bar January), the board of the Reserve meets to determine the appropriate "stance" (setting) of monetary policy. The decision takes the form of a target for the official rate (known in the trade as the "cash" rate). Sometimes the target is moved down a little, sometimes up a little, but mainly it's left where it is.

How does the Reserve unfailingly achieve the target? Settle back. The cash rate is the interest rate the banks charge each other to borrow and lend funds overnight.

Every bank has an account with the Reserve called its "exchange settlement account". Just about every monetary transaction in the economy goes through these accounts. As Debelle explains, when you pay your electricity bill by direct debit, the funds are effectively transferred from your bank account, across the exchange settlement account of your bank to that of your electricity company's bank and into the electricity company's account.

All these transactions mean the balance in each bank's exchange settlement account goes up and down throughout the day. But the Reserve requires each bank to ensure its account always has a positive balance. Banks that leave funds in their account overnight are paid interest at a rate 0.25 percentage points below the cash rate, whereas banks that look like having a negative balance may borrow the difference from the Reserve overnight at a rate 0.25 percentage points above the cash rate.

Get it? These penalties are designed to encourage the banks to borrow and lend to each other overnight at the (more attractive) cash rate.

The Reserve's ability to control the cash rate arises because it has complete control over the supply of funds in this market. It ensures there is just sufficient supply to meet the demand for funds at the interest rate it is targeting.

Where an increase in demand threatens to push the interest rate up, it will use its "open market operations" to increase the supply of funds just sufficiently to keep the rate where it wants it. Where a fall in demand for funds threatens to push the rate down, the Reserve will reduce the supply to ensure the rate doesn't change.

Historically, the Reserve would increase the supply of cash by buying second-hand government bonds from the banks and paying for them with cash. (Note that in this context, "cash" doesn't mean notes and coins, it's a nickname for the funds in exchange settlement accounts.)

Conversely, it would reduce the supply of funds by selling bonds to the banks, which they had to pay for from their exchange settlement accounts. These days, however, the Reserve achieves the same effect using repurchase agreements ("repos").

The main reason for fluctuations in the overall daily demand for exchange settlement funds is transactions involving the Reserve's one big banking customer, the federal government. Demand will rise on days when the government's receipts from taxation exceed its payments of pensions and all the rest. Demand for cash will fall on days when the government's payments exceed its receipts.

All this ensures the Reserve has a vicelike grip on the cash rate. And this gives it the ability to influence all the other interest rates in the economy. Why? Because the cash rate is, in effect, the anchor point for all other rates.

Banks fund only a very small part of their operations in the cash market, Debelle explains, but all their funding could be done from that market if they wanted to. The rate at which they're prepared to borrow for periods longer than overnight is the averaged expected path of the cash rate over the life of the loan plus various margins for risk.

If this were not the case, a bank would be better off borrowing all the funds it needed in the overnight cash market and rolling them over every day.

The reason banks borrow and lend at rates higher or lower than the average expected cash rate over the life of the loan is the need to allow for the various risks involved (the risk of not being repaid, the risk in agreeing to lend your money for a longer time, and so forth) and, of course, profit margins along the way.

For several years leading up to the global financial crisis, these various margins (known as "spreads" or "premia") didn't change much, meaning a change in the cash rate brought about an identical change in mortgage and other bank lending rates.

Since the crisis, however, margins have been changing a lot, as a result of people realising they weren't charging enough to cover the risks they were running, and our banks realising they needed more domestic, retail and longer-term funding to protect them against future crises, leading to intense competition between them to attract term deposits.

The net effect has been that the banks' borrowing costs have risen more (or fallen less) than the cash rate has, causing changes in, say, the mortgage rate, to be less generous than changes in the cash rate and thus widening the margin between the cash rate and the mortgage rate.

The Reserve has allowed for this shift in margins, cutting the cash rate by more than it would have so as to ensure market interest rates - the rates people actually pay - are where it wants them to be.

Its influence over market rates thus remains undiminished. And that's because the cash rate remains by far the most powerful influence over other interest rates - though, as we've seen, not the only influence.

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Cons and pros of the mobile revolution

I confess to a having an old fogey's ambivalence towards mobile phones. There are times when it suits me to keep in touch, but most of the time I don't want a phone taking over my life - or even interrupting it. And I figure I'm old and odd enough to get away with rarely using one.

But of all the amazing things going on in the digital revolution - the spread of computers, the internet, the declining cost of telecommunications - nothing is more remarkable than the growing ubiquity of the mobile.

According to a report by Ric Simes and John O'Mahony of Deloitte Access Economics, "it is undeniable that mobile telecommunications are altering the way the world conducts business".

The report, prepared for the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, points to the way the mobile has changed from a device for making phone calls to a platform - for emails and the internet, for transferring data, for conducting commercial transactions and for accessing the media (including this newspaper).

Now, the report says, everything digital is going mobile: software, the internet, the cloud and social media.

What are young people doing when you see them incessantly fiddling with their phones? They may be playing games, but they're more likely to be checking emails or reviewing their "twitter feed".

Do you realise that we 23 million Australians now use more than 30 million mobile services? As well as phones, this would include tablets such as iPads and the dongles that link laptop computers to the internet.

Because the sales of the mobile telecommunications industry have largely been driven by increasing subscriptions, this penetration rate of well over 100 per cent means the industry's sales are faltering. Last financial year they actually fell by 1.5 per cent. The report predicts no sales growth in real terms this year, with a modest recovery in 2013-14.

But just because sales revenue has stagnated doesn't mean the use of mobiles isn't continuing to balloon. In 2011, mobile broadband traffic averaged 8.8 petabytes a month. Cisco Systems predict this will grow by 68 per cent a year until 2016.

It's worth noting that if industry revenue is stagnant while usage continues to explode, the use of mobiles is becoming cheaper.

It may help make sense of all this to know that, according to Ericsson, voice calls now make up only a quarter of the time people spend on their mobile devices. In June 2009, less than 10 per cent of people used the internet via a handset; three years later, almost a third did.

Old fogeys like me think email and mobiles are a very mixed blessing in terms of the efficient use of our time, but the report argues valiantly that they increase the productivity of businesses.

Mobile technology can improve the productivity of employees by allowing communication on the go. Workers who are travelling can be in touch with others in the office by making calls as well as by sending and receiving emails. They can use their mobiles to access information on the internet.

Mobiles allow workers to make more productive use of down time. Time previously underutilised because of lack of access to a desktop computer is no longer so. Smartphones and tablets can be used to review documents and make changes without being in the office.

Some applications (or apps) can increase productivity. "Voice notes" allow people to store audio information, calendar apps help with time management and various apps allow you to streamline repetitive tasks. And as well as increasing the productivity of labour, mobiles can make capital equipment more productive. Desktop computers can be replaced by laptops or sometimes smartphones. Employees can be allowed to bring their own laptops or mobiles.

If mobiles and laptops allow more people to work at home, businesses can save on office space. Retailers who sell more over the internet can save on the cost of bricks and mortar, or store more of their stock in warehouses rather than city shops.

According to Deloitte Access Economics's calculations (which I wouldn't take too literally), the productivity benefits from mobile technologies added almost $500 million to gross domestic product in 2011, and this will increase to $1.3 billion a year in 2016.

But what about the social implications of all this?

To its credit, the report considers those implications rather than ignoring them, as economists and business people tend to. On the plus side, it notes that, for the individual, mobile devices offer not just communication but "rich digital experiences on the go" - photos, music, games, location-based services (such as getting directions to a place), maps, the internet and the millions of features offered by apps. And all this fits in your pocket.

But being always contactable can make you feel "always on". And Hugh Mackay, the social researcher, offers a more sceptical perspective: "You have this sense of continuous connection; it's like being in a strand of a web which is continually vibrating. Part of this feeling of being in a 'cyber crowd' is illusory, but some of it is real; it is important to note that some of this tribalism is purely cyber ...

"The richness of interpersonal encounters is largely lost if you rely on a mobile connection."

All of the audio-visual elements of a personal encounter are necessary in order to communicate fully, with feedback and subtlety.

Higher levels of interconnectivity may lead to overstimulation and a lack of silence, making it difficult for people to find time to reflect.

"The effect of this incessant stimulation on the brain is unknown, but likely to be detrimental," Mackay concludes.

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Swan tries to legislate for budget honesty

It's too much to hope this year's election campaign will be a "contest of ideas" or even a debate over the pros and cons of the parties' rival policies. But one thing I confidently predict: there'll be endless arguing over the cost of promises and where the money will come from.

For maybe 30 years the people who worry most about maintaining budget discipline - the econocrats in Treasury and Finance - have striven to discourage politicians from engaging in election bidding wars they don't know how they'll pay for. Last week this unending struggle took another lurch forward.

The econocrats have tightened things up by persuading their political masters to impose restrictions on their own freedom of action. They've had more success in this than you'd expect, mainly because, when it comes to being fiscally cavalier, governments are at a disadvantage to their opponents.

It's a rare case of the disadvantages of incumbency. Governments' actions are scrutinised more closely than oppositions' are, and they can escape neither the higher obligations of office nor the sober counsel of their bureaucratic advisers.

At present, the need for fiscal responsibility weighs heavily on the Gillard government, with its hugely expensive plans for a National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski education reforms but, as yet, no indication of how they'll be paid for. But Julia Gillard has already accepted she has no choice but to spell out in the May budget a longer-term plan for funding them.

That being so, the new measures to increase budgetary "transparency" Wayne Swan announced on Friday are no doubt aimed at turning up the heat on Tony Abbott, who has his own list of expensive promises he hasn't yet said how he'd pay for, and may have been hoping he'd be able to skid through the campaign without revealing much.

The econocrats' long campaign to discourage irresponsible election promises began early in the term of the Hawke government, which was persuaded to add to the published budget figures for the coming financial year the "forward estimates" for the following three years. Surely this would be long enough to reveal any plans that could lumber the budget down the track? As it's turned out, it wasn't. In Swan's last few budgets he's been using a kind of fiscal bulldozer to push his ever-mounting spending commitments off into the invisible years beyond the forward estimates.

The next advance came with Peter Costello's charter of budget honesty in 1998. In the election campaign of March 1996, the Keating government failed to disclose how much the budget balance had deteriorated since the previous May. It also sought to conceal the size of its deficit by counting the proceeds from asset sales.

Costello made much of the "black hole" he discovered on coming to government and used it to justify breaking a lot of spending promises retrospectively declared to be "non-core". (In this he was using the same device Paul Keating used against the Fraser government when Labor came to power in 1983.)

As well as seeming to outlaw the use of asset sales to fudge the budget balance (while actually leaving a few loopholes Swan happily jumped through in this year's budget), the honesty charter sought to end for ever the possibility of black holes by instituting the "pre-election fiscal and economic outlook" document.

Whenever an election is called and the writs issued, the secretaries of Treasury and Finance have up to 10 days to issue, in their own names, updated economic forecasts and budget estimates. That's fine - though successive oppositions have used it as a reason to delay issuing any policy costings until they know what it says.

The honesty charter also sought to improve the costing of election promises by permitting both the government and the opposition to submit their policies for costing by Treasury and Finance during the campaign.

But this arrangement was biased in favour of the government of the day (which can get its policies costed by the same people before the campaign starts, thus minimising the chance of embarrassment).

Oppositions have refused to play by these rules. But, under its agreement with the independents, the Gillard government has established the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide all parties with Treasury-quality costing advice any time up to the election campaign.

Even so, it's not clear the Abbott opposition will use the office's services to make its costings public in good time before the election. Which brings us to the latest effort to tighten up on parties attempting to get through the campaign without adequate disclosure of where the money's coming from.

Labor will seek legislative approval for the budget office to conduct a post-election audit of each political party, publishing within 30 days of the election full costings of their election promises and their budget bottom line.

So, should any party make it through the campaign without honestly disclosing the cost of their commitments, their dishonesty or incompetence would soon be revealed. It's not hard to see this measure is aimed at forcing the opposition to be more forthcoming than it was in the 2010 election, when its unchecked costings proved to have a hole of up to $11 billion.

And, should Labor lose the election, the audit would prevent the new government from exaggerating the size of any "black hole" it left. To all but the politically one-eyed, Labor's ulterior motives don't stop such audits being a good move. The noose is tightening on irresponsible vote-buying.

But with competition between the parties becoming ever more intense - and voters ever more easily distracted by election trivia - it's hard to believe audits would eradicate budget dishonesty.

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Economy's 'fast lane' bigger than you think

THE biggest thing that worries many people about the resources boom is that word ''boom''. Booms are cyclical, and thus temporary. So it's not surprising so many people worry about what we'll be left with when the boom's over.

This week, two economists at the Reserve Bank, Vanessa Rayner and James Bishop, published a research paper neatly answering that concern. In short, what we'll be left with is a very much bigger mining sector.

The trick is that this boom is actually as much structural (lasting) as cyclical. Australia has had commodity booms in the past, and almost all of those were transitory.

From about 2004, the prices of coal and iron ore began rising strongly until they'd taken Australia's terms of trade - the prices we receive for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports - to their most favourable level in 200 years.

The main thing making this price boom so different (apart from it lasting a lot longer) is that it precipitated a second boom: investment in the expansion of existing mines and the building of new mines and natural gas facilities.

Now, the boom in prices ended more than a year ago and it seems the boom in mining investment is close to its peak. That is, the amount of money being spent on expanding our mining production capacity will stop growing each quarter and start declining.

Even so, we'll still be investing a lot more on mining each quarter than we usually do. So we're far from reaching the point where our mining production capacity stops expanding.

And that still leaves this play with a third act that's only just started: a huge increase in our production and export of minerals and energy as we take up the newly expanded capacity.

Thus you see why this ''boom'' is as much structural as cyclical. It represents a historic and lasting change in the industry structure of our economy, achieved over a relatively short period.

But just how big is mining after all this expansion? The miners' critics - particularly the Greens - make it seem the industry is pathetically small, whereas the industry itself tries to exaggerate its size and importance.

The Reserve Bank researchers adopt a wider definition of mining than that used by the Bureau of Statistics, partly because they're trying to get a more realistic estimate of the size of the part of the economy that's been the primary beneficiary of the boom and the size of the ''fast lane'' of the two-speed economy.

They establish the size of the ''resource extraction sector'', starting with the standard six components: coal, oil and gas, iron ore, non-ferrous metals, non-metallic minerals, and exploration and mining services.

But then they add those industries involved in smelting and refining the minerals before export - iron smelting, oil refining and liquefying of natural gas, and the refining of bauxite to form alumina and the smelting of other non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead and zinc - which the bureau class as part of manufacturing.

According to the researchers' estimates, in the eight years between 2003-04 and 2011-12, the resource extraction sector's share of nominal ''gross value-added'' (essentially, gross domestic product) grew from less than 7 per cent to 11.5 per cent. Of this 11.5 percentage points, the narrowly defined mining industry accounts for 9.75 points, with the processing and refining part of manufacturing accounting for 1.75 points.

Most of this growth is explained by the higher export prices being received. That's mainly because the strong growth in the volume of iron ore production to date has been offset by a fall in the production of some other minerals, particularly oil.

Next the researchers estimate the size of ''resource-related activity''. This includes the investment spending on expanding the future production of minerals, as well as the provision of ''intermediate inputs'' used in the present production of minerals.

''In other words,'' they say, ''it captures activities that are directly connected to resource extraction, such as constructing mines and associated infrastructure, and transporting inputs to, and taking extracted resources away from, mines. It also captures some activities less obviously connected to resource extraction, such as engineering and other professional services (legal and accounting work, for example).''

Over the eight years to 2011-12, this resource-related activity has more than doubled as a share of GDP, from less than 3 per cent to 6.5 per cent. Within that 6.5 percentage points, business services account for 2.25 points, construction for 1.25 points, manufacturing for 1 point and transport for 0.75 points.

Note, this inclusion of the inputs provided to the mining industry isn't the same thing as the usual shonky attempts to put a figure on an industry's ''multiplier effect''. For one thing, it takes no account of the effect on other industries of the spending of income earned by mining employees or shareholders. For another, the researchers take care that the inclusion of inputs provided by other industries involves no double counting.

Put the resource extraction sector together with the resource-related activity and you find the size of the ''resource economy'' doubled to 18 per cent of GDP over the eight years to 2011-12.

According to the researchers' estimates, this 18 per cent of total production of goods and services includes well over 16 per cent of manufacturing's output, 16 per cent of construction activity and 15 per cent of transport activity.

Since 2004-05, this fast-lane ''resource economy'' has grown in real terms at an average rate of 7.5 per cent a year, whereas the rest of the economy has grown 2.25 per cent a year - a smaller gap than some imagine.

Because mining is so capital intensive, one way to denigrate it and minimise the significance of its expansion is to note that its share of total employment (as opposed to total production) is a mere 2.3 per cent. But according to the researchers' estimates, when you include minerals processing with mining proper, its share of total employment rises to 3.25 per cent. And when you add the more labour-intensive resource-related sector, it accounts for about 6.75 per cent of total employment, taking the share of the ''resource economy'' to just less than 10 per cent of total employment.

Don't let anyone tell you the resources boom is no big deal.

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How to cut crime and the cost of crime

Although many types of crime have been declining over the past decade, there's still far too much of it. It's costing us too much, not only in losses to life, limb and property but also in worry that we may become victims.

Then there's the cost of all the insurance we need to take out and the cost of making our homes burglar-proof. Finally, there's the rapidly growing cost to the taxpayer of policing ($9.5 billion a year across Australia), the criminal courts (getting on for $1 billion a year) and the prison system (more than $3 billion a year).

You get the feeling all our efforts aren't acting as much of a deterrent. The more police we employ, the more arrests we get, and the more we increase punishments, the more people we have in overcrowded prisons.

Is there a way we can improve the effectiveness of our efforts so we have less crime and could spend less on crime control? Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes there is. He will expound his views at a conference on applied research in crime and justice in Sydney next week but, in the meantime, I can give you a preview.

Kleiman says we should be aiming for the minimum amount of punishment necessary to achieve the desired amount of crime control. Why? Because punishment is a cost, not a benefit. The benefit we're seeking is reduced crime, whereas punishment is a cost of achieving that benefit. Punishment comes at the expense of innocent taxpayers.

Putting it another way, we should keep clear in our minds that the objective of punishment isn't retribution, it's deterrence.

So how can we make our punishment more effective in deterring crime? Kleiman's thesis is that increasing the severity of punishment isn't cost-effective but making it swift and certain is.

"Theory and evidence agree: swift and certain punishment, even if not severe, will control the vast bulk of offending behaviour," he says.

Severity is not only a poor substitute for swiftness and certainty, he says, but also their enemy. That's because the more severe a sanction is, the less frequently it can be administered (prison cells are scarce) and the less quickly it tends to arrive.

It shouldn't be hard for any parent to believe that threats of punishment are more effective if the child knows an offence will be punished and that the punishment will be immediate. The trouble with our crime control efforts is that many crimes go undetected and so unpunished - you have a pretty high chance of getting away with it - and, even when offences are punished, the punishment comes months or years later.

Kleiman reminds us of the goal we should aim for: "the perfect threat never needs to be carried out". Achieve that effective deterrence and you've got the benefit of reduced crime without the cost of punishment. We could never reach that ideal but the closer we come the better.

Kleiman's analysis, influenced by the insights of behavioural economics, is an advance on conventional economics, which assumes severity is an adequate substitute for the certainty of being caught and ignores the question of swiftness.

All very logical but how do you put it into practice? Clearly, it would be impossible to make punishment of all offences swift and certain. But Kleiman observes our resources are spread very thinly. Instead, we should concentrate them, starting somewhere with a geographic region, a set of offences or a set of offenders.

You borrow resources from elsewhere and raise the certainty and swiftness of punishment until you reach the tipping point where offenders get the message and the rate of violation tips from being high to low.

Because offending is subject to positive feedback - a violation rate that's high will tend to stay high, whereas one that's low will tend to stay low - you can then move the resources to the next priority area. The reduction in offences will have increased the resources available.

Kleiman recommends focusing on those offenders subject to supervision in the community: people given community service orders rather than being sent to prison and prisoners let out on parole before their sentence is complete.

"As things stand, the community corrections system reproduces the flaws of the larger criminal justice system, having more rules than can be reliably enforced and imposing sporadic but sometimes severe sanctions," he says.

A small set of rules, each clearly linked to the goal of reducing re-offending, adequate capacity to monitor whether those rules are being observed and a system of swift, reliable and proportionate penalties to back up those rules would perform much better.

"If we can make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration - in other words, if we can learn how to punish people and control their behaviour when not paying for their room and board - we can have less crime and less incarceration, to the benefit of victims and offenders alike," Kleiman says.

For property and violence offenders who use drugs (a mighty lot of them), drug testing with swift and certain punishment can reduce their drug use, their reoffending and their time behind bars far more effectively and more cheaply than any drug treatment program or rehabilitation program, Kleiman argues.

The bad news is that present policies leave us with unnecessarily high levels of crime and incarceration, he says.

The good news is that just by making effective use of things we already know how to do, we could reasonably expect to have half as much crime and half as many people behind bars 10 years from now.

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Mining tax message: no bipartisanship, no reform

WHEN governments stuff up in a democracy we think the solution is obvious: toss 'em out and give the other lot a go. But if you want a democracy that also delivers good government, it ain't that simple.

For too long, the private partisanship of those who want to see good economic policy lead to good economic outcomes has blinded us to an obvious truth: if you look back at the reform we've implemented, you find almost all of it happened because it had the support of both sides.

It's been too easily forgotten that all the potentially hugely controversial reforms of the Hawke-Keating government - deregulating the financial system, floating the dollar, phasing out protection and moving to enterprise bargaining - were supported by the Coalition.

Amazingly, the last big move to slash protection came during the depths of the recession of the early 1990s, when unemployment was on its way to 11 per cent. Dr John Hewson's big criticism was that Labor should have been bolder.

How did Labor have the courage to do such things? It's simple: it knew any adversely affected vested interests would get no sympathy from its political opponents.

Most Australians - even those who follow politics closely - don't realise how obsessed politicians are by the likely reaction of their opponents to anything they do; how much the policies of the opposition affect the policies of the government.

After Paul Keating failed to win his party's support for a broad-based consumption tax in 1985, he set his face against a goods and services tax. His scaremongering over Hewson's proposed GST was the main reason he won the unwinnable election of 1993.

After Keating's demise at the following election, the Labor opposition abandoned all bipartisanship on economic reform, running another scare campaign against John Howard's GST plan at the 1998 election and going close to defeating him.

This makes the GST the honourable exception to the rule: the only major economic reform we've seen survive without bipartisan support.

And it brings us to the mining tax. Let me be crystal clear about this: Labor has made an almighty hash of the minerals resource rent tax, revealing an abysmal level of political nous, moral courage and administrative competence.

It failed to release the Henry tax reform report for discussion well before announcing its decisions (thereby catching the miners unawares), failed to explain an utterly mystifying tax measure (and, before that, press Treasury to come up with something more intuitive).

It failed to stop the entire business community joining the miners' crusade against the tax, failed to counter the economic nonsense the miners peddled in their TV ad campaign, and failed to hold its own in the negotiations with the big three miners, allowing them to turn the tax into a policy dog's breakfast that, at least in its early years, would raise next to nothing.

In all this Kevin Rudd has to take much of the blame (for lacking the courage to release the Henry report early), Wayne Swan has to take much of the blame (for not putting Treasury through its paces and being so weak at explaining the tax) and Julia Gillard has to take much of the blame (for decapitating Rudd and then being so desperate to rush to an election she was prepared to agree to anything the miners demanded, without proper Treasury scrutiny).

After all that, Labor deserves no mercy. But the truth is Tony Abbott also played a part in lumbering the nation with a bad tax.

The case for requiring the miners to pay a higher price for their use of the public's mineral reserves at a time of exceptionally high world prices (even now) is strong.

Remembering the miners are largely foreign-owned, a well-designed tax on above-normal profits is a good way to ensure Australians are left with something to show for all the holes in the ground.

Similarly, the argument that a tax on "economic rent" (above-normal profit) is more efficient than royalty payments based on volume or price is strong, as is the argument that taxing economic rent should have no adverse effect on the level of mining activity. Relative to royalties, quite the reverse.

But Abbott cared about none of that. His response was utterly opportunistic. He would have opposed the tax whether it was good, bad or indifferent.

He saw an opportunity for a scare campaign and he took it, particularly when it became clear the big three miners were out to defeat the tax by bringing down the government and so would have bankrolled his election campaign.

It was fear of what Abbott would say that prompted Labor to delay the release of the Henry report until it could rule out most of its controversial recommendations.

It was the success of Abbott and the miners' joint campaign against the tax that, added to his loss of nerve on the emissions trading scheme, made Rudd vulnerable to his enemies within Labor.

And it was Abbott's strength in the polls that made Gillard so anxious to square away the miners at any cost and rush to an election while her (as it turned out, non-existent) honeymoon lasted.

But noting Abbott's share of the blame isn't the point. The lesson for people hoping for economic reform is that unless they're willing to use what influence they have to urge bipartisanship on their own side, they should expect precious few further advances.

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