No need to exaggerate Labor's failings

They say history is written by the victors, and already the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government's many critics are busy reshaping our memory of the recent past. But, though Labor's performance was poor in many respects, they shouldn't lay it on too thick.

Those who claim Labor Party governance led to "chaos" should look up the meaning of the word, while those who repeat Tony Abbott's claim that this was "the worst government ever" are too young to remember the Whitlam era.

What is true is that Labor's latest incarnation was far inferior to the 13-year Hawke-Keating government. In just the term of the Howard government, Labor seemed to lose its race memory of how to govern.

Rather than blame all its troubles on the three years of Rudd-Gillard infighting, or keep telling itself its policies were good, Labor needs to reflect deeply on why its execution of policy fell so far short of the Hawke-Keating example.

A fair bit of the reason is its failure to unceasingly explain and justify its policies and instead rely on wet-behind-the-ears spin doctors and dodgy taxpayer-funded ad campaigns.

Rather than explain and justify, ministers preferred to criticise their opponents, forgetting the punters are never edified or impressed by arguing pollies and inadvertently giving the opposition greater credibility. Labor forfeited most of the advantages of incumbency.

One big difference was the way Bob Hawke and Paul Keating maintained the confidence of business. Part of the explanation was that when you reveal yourself to be a soft touch for rent seekers - as Rudd did almost from the start - you incite envy and disaffection, not respect.

Another part of it was Gillard's resorting to the rhetoric of class conflict, which did much more to disenchant business than to energise complacent workers. Hawke and Keating did a lot to redistribute income, but didn't make speeches about it.

The more Abbott and Joe Hockey are forced by economic reality to back-pedal on their promises to "end the waste" and "repay the debt", the more they'll cover their retreat by exaggerating Labor's budgetary failings.

So let's set the record straight from the start. It's unimpressive enough without any need for hyperbole.

The standard critique of Labor governments is that they're "big-spending, big-taxing". This time the latter accusation is false, but the former is all too true.

If you measure the burden of federal taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product - as you should - it reached an all-time high of 24.2 per cent in the mid-noughties and was 23.7 per cent in Howard's last year.

Under Labor, and with much help from the recession we supposedly didn't have, it fell to 20 per cent in 2010-11 and is expected to have recovered only to 22.2 per cent in Labor's last year.

How could this be when Labor introduced two "big new taxes" on carbon and mining? The trick was that most of the expected revenue from these taxes was returned to taxpayers on the form of income tax cuts, business tax breaks and other "tax expenditures". This is why Abbott's unwinding of both tax packages will do so little to cut taxes overall.

Turn to the spending side, however, and you find spending was 23.1 per cent of GDP in Howard's last year and is expected to reach 25.3 per cent in Labor's last year. That represents average real growth of 3.9 per cent a year.

Both those calculations effectively abstract from Labor's clearly labelled fiscal stimulus spending after the global financial crisis, because it really was temporary.

And that average real growth rate of 3.9 per cent occurred even though, in the last four of its six budgets, Labor professed to be more than achieving its goal of limiting real spending growth to 2 per cent on average over the forward estimates.

How was this trick done? All the restraint was in the "out years", never the present. To be fair, real annual spending growth averaged 3.7 per cent in the 10 Howard years before the financial crisis.

The big areas of growth under Labor were public housing, education and health, not counting the biggest, interest on the public debt.

Treasury projected in its pre-election economic and fiscal outlook that, left to its own devices, spending will grow at the real rate of 3.5 per cent a year in the coming decade, spurred by health, the national disability scheme and the Gonski education reforms.

Labor's problem was that its appetite for increased spending on worthy causes knew no bounds but it lacked the courage to ask the electorate to pay more to cover this expansion.

We'll see how much more courageous Abbott and Hockey prove to be.

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What's driving our dollar

The clouds over our economy got a bit darker this week with the news that the US Federal Reserve was in no hurry to begin "tapering" its quantitative easing.

This underlined the reality now dawning on the new Abbott government that the outlook for the economy is quite uncertain and, unless we're lucky, quite weak. It's certainly not a time when you should shift to a contractionary stance of fiscal policy because of some misguided desire to force the pace in getting the budget back to surplus.

But let's start with the Americans and their quantitative easing. "QE" is a form of economic stimulus - the sort you resort to when you can't stimulate the economy the conventional way by cutting the official interest rate because it's already close to zero.

It involves the central bank buying government bonds or other securities in the marketplace and paying for them by just crediting money to the sellers' bank accounts (a trick only central banks, the creators of money, can do).

The intention is that increasing the money in circulation encourages demand (spending) at a time when aggregate (economy-wide) supply exceeds aggregate demand, with workers lying idle and firms operating well below full capacity.

Some people, remembering stuff their heard in the 1970s and '80s, worry that "printing money" causes inflation. It does if it causes demand to exceed supply - as would have been the case back then - but it doesn't when demand is a lot weaker than supply, as has been the case in the North Atlantic economies since the global financial crisis.

Even so, the Fed has been warning it will start cutting back (tapering) the amount of its continuing monthly purchases of bonds as it sees the economy strengthening, just to be on the safe side.

What happened this week was the Fed's decision that the economy wasn't yet strong enough to start the tapering. It was worried that recent figures for employment weren't as strong as expected.

It was also aware that the congressional deadlock over the budget was bringing about cuts in government spending and increases in taxes that exerted significant contractionary pressure on the economy. And another confidence-sapping battle between the President and Congress was brewing.

So how do our interests fit into this? Well, this is where it gets tricky. It's not bad news that, in the face of a weaker-than-expected economy, the Fed decided not to start withdrawing monetary stimulus. It's in our interests for the US economy to be as strong as possible.

What is bad news is that the US economy isn't strong enough for the tapering to begin. That's because one of the ways quantitative easing stimulates demand is by putting downward pressure on the country's exchange rate.

And anything that puts downward pressure on an important currency like the US dollar puts upward pressure on our dollar. What's stimulatory for them is thus contractionary for us.

As we've been reminded only too well in recent years, a high dollar reduces the international price competitiveness of our export and import-competing industries, causing us to produce less than we otherwise would.

From our perspective, our dollar has been high because of the resources boom: the high prices we were getting for our exports of mineral and energy and because of the foreign capital flowing in to finance all the investment in new mines and natural gas facilities.

With export prices having fallen a fair bit over the past two years, we expected to see our dollar come down and stimulate production in manufacturing and tourism.

For a long time nothing happened. It started falling in mid-April, but still hasn't fallen as far as it probably should given the size of the fall in export prices.

It took us too long to realise what the problem was: quantitative easing in other countries, particularly the US. Our dollar couldn't come down because it was being held up by the weak greenback.

This is a reminder that the exchange rate is a relative price: the value of our currency relative to the value of some other country's currency. So it's affected both by developments in our economy and developments in theirs.

It was when the Fed started making noises about tapering its quantitative easing that the currency market began anticipating this occurrence, pushing the greenback up and allowing our dollar to fall. Between mid-April and the end of July the Aussie had fallen about 14 per cent.

But this week's surprise announcement from the Fed saw the greenback drop against most currencies, including ours. Last time I checked, the fall since mid-April had narrowed to 10 per cent.

It's always dangerous to assume some change of direction that's just happened in financial markets will continue or even just not be reversed. But this week's events do suggest that the further fall in the Aussie dollar we've been hoping for is now less likely because the phasing out of America's quantitative easing is now further away.

Our present problem is familiar to you: with the resources boom's net contribution to growth now turning negative, we need the rest of the economy - particularly investment in new housing, and non-mining business investment - to take up the running. A decent fall in the dollar would do a lot to help stimulate the non-mining economy.

The other hope is for a turnaround in business and consumer confidence following the change of government.

The main indicators of confidence have improved since the election, with the Westpac-Melbourne Institute index of consumer sentiment jumping 4.7 per cent this month as Coalition voters' confidence leapt 19 per cent and Labor voters' fell 10 per cent.

But it's far too soon to say whether this improvement in the indicators of business and consumer confidence will translate into a significant improvement in actual economic activity and employment.

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The transformation of Tony: can you believe it?

On Classic FM last month they used to play an ad with just a second or two of arguing politicians before the kicker: "Election? What election?" Then on with the soothing music. It was a bit naughty for the ABC, but it was just what many people were thinking.

According to group discussions conducted in the last week of August by the Ipsos research firm for its Mind and Mood report, the consensus from participants' lounge rooms around the country was loud and clear: "We are sick of this election campaign and we just want it over with."

When the groups were invited to discuss what mattered most in people's lives, politics was barely mentioned. When the researchers did raise the election, participants often rolled their eyes or groaned.

Many thought this was "one of the worst elections we've ever had".

But I remember people complained a lot about the 2010 campaign. What doesn't seem to have occurred to people is that it's hard to get excited about a contest when you know who's going to win it. And with the media's incessant quoting of opinion polls, no one could have been in any doubt. If the media want their election coverage to excite interest, they're fouling their nest.

But "one of the main reasons participants felt disconnected from politics and the election was their dissatisfaction with both of the major parties' leaders," the report says. "Regardless of whether their values were more closely aligned with Liberal or Labor (or the Greens) few people had positive things to say about either Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott."

There was also disappointment with how the campaign had been run and, in particular, the lack of debate about policy, we're told. Many complained the Liberal and Labor campaigns focused on "slagging off" their competition instead of explaining policies.

Participants were tired of the mud-slinging and personal attacks launched directly by the major parties' leaders and felt that both lacked the charisma and vision required to inspire and help them connect with politics.

To this end, many hoped the election would bring an end to minority government, the constant bickering and lack of stability that has characterised the last few years of Australian politics, the report says.

But I say all the bickering and seeming lack of stability arose not from minority government as such, but from Abbott's reaction to it, which was to assume government could fall into his hands at any moment and maintain a stance of total opposition to everything.

The past three years have left a nasty taste partly because of Julia Gillard's unpopularity and Labor's constant feuding, but mainly because Abbott ran a three-year election campaign of politicians eternally at each other's throats.

But did you notice the way he transformed himself for the campaign proper? The man who'd run the highly effective but dishonest scare about the terrible effects of the carbon tax and - as we only now discover - a quite insincere scare about debt and deficit, became the man professing to be "embarrassed" by Rudd's scare campaigns on the Coalition's supposed plans to raise the GST and to "cut, cut, cut" government spending.

And by the campaign proper the man who wrote the book on negativity was accusing Rudd of being "so negative".

In government, the Transformation of Tony has continued. The bruiser and attack dog of opposition now promises a "stable and sensible" government that brings "stability and predictability" and is "methodical, measured, calm" in discharging its duties.

Huh? At one level he's a man who knows he has to mend his ways; that successful prime ministers don't act the way he did as opposition leader. He understands people's longing for greater stability and certainty than they experienced over the past three years.

At another level it's what every incoming Liberal PM says. Malcolm Fraser wanted to "get politics off the front page". John Howard wanted to make us "comfortable and relaxed". They dream of returning us to a Menzian torpor.

Historically, it's what the Liberals stand for. Labor is the eternally dissatisfied party of "reform" while the Libs are the conservatives, satisfied with the world as is and trying to stave off disruptive change as long as possible.

A truth our politicians too often forget is that most of us hate change. I confess Abbott's vision appeals to me enormously. Should the 24-hour media cycle slow down and politics become less thrill-a-minute I'm sure I could still find plenty to write about.

But can Abbott attain this degree of stability and tortoise-like approach to progress? He's always struck me as a man who makes plenty of new year resolutions but never keeps 'em for long.

The sad truth is steadiness is contrary to the spirit of our age. Things have sped up as technology and globalisation have opened us up to changing pressures originating anywhere in the world.

And the non-Labor side of politics has changed from conservative to radical. It's as much addicted to "reform" as Labor. Whereas once it resisted changes proposed by those lower on the ladder, today it wants to reclaim lost ground.

Abbott's promise of "no surprises, no excuses" will be the first he has no choice but to break. As Harold Macmillan apparently didn't say, "Events, dear boy, events".

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How business lobbies to block tax reform

There are a lot of people moving office in Canberra, thanks to the election. But not all of them are politicians. There is a parallel changing of the guard among the lobbyists - a change that will have far more effect on what happens to us in the next three years than most people realise.

As has been well reported by Matthew Knott, of Crikey.com.au, Liberal-aligned lobbying firms - full of former politicians and staffers - are expanding their presence, while Labor-aligned firms are downsizing.

These people are selling access and influence with the side of politics that happens to be in power.

Since businesses pay big money for the assistance of these people - many of them seeking to cash in on their former lives in politics - we must assume it makes a difference, that businesses represented by someone of the same persuasion as the government get a more sympathetic hearing.

If so, the formal lobbying process plays a bigger part in our governance than it suits the politicians to admit or the media to keep us informed about. Lobbyists prefer to practise their dark art without the glare of publicity and, for the most part, the other players respect their privacy. Most obliging of them.

Of course, there are two classes of lobbyists in Canberra: the firms of influence-pedlars we've been discussing, but also the national peak bodies representing business in general, particular industries, small business and even many non-government organisations.

The peak bodies' lobbying efforts - while they no doubt have their private, let's-not-talk-about-it side - are a lot more overt, with the outfits issuing an unending stream of press releases and submissions, and their spokespeople seeking airtime for their reactions to a Reserve Bank decision to raise interest rates, the budget, the election of a new government, or an absolutely crippling rise in the minimum wage.

My guess is that, when the peak bodies are engaged in a major campaign, they quietly enlist additional assistance from the professional lobbyists.

Much of the time the peak bodies are lobbying for their own "reforms": a cut in the rate of company tax, changes to Labor's Fair Work Act, a cut in the top rate of income tax and increase in indirect taxes, and so forth.

But I think they're at their most effective - and most insistent - when they're trying to block or seriously modify some change initiated by the government. Consider the chequered history of the departed Labor government.

We could start with the business lobbyers' success in getting Labor's original emissions trading scheme watered down and, for all we know, the success of some in egging on the Coalition's climate-change deniers, who persuaded the parties to ignore the "mandate" Labor had to introduce such a scheme. So much for mandates.

But the most spectacular blocking effort must surely be the success of three of the world's most profitable mining companies - acting under the cover of the Minerals Council of Australia - in knocking off the original resource super profits tax and getting it replaced by the badly designed minerals resource rent tax, which the Coalition is about to abolish not long before it starts raising significant amounts of revenue.

Labor's handling of the mining tax was abysmal, but much of the big miners' success (which also came at the expense of the small miners) is owed to Tony Abbott's willingness to oppose the tax for reasons of short-term political gain.

Non-mining businesses have yet to twig that the miners' success will come at their expense. With the miners soon to be so undertaxed, the scope for a further cut in company tax has gone. It's called opportunity cost.

More recently, we have the success of the financial services lobby in winning a multi-year exemption from further reforms to superannuation (achieved, it's said, because of the lobby's threat to launch an election advertising campaign against whichever side of politics failed to give it the exemption it was demanding).

This is not to mention the success of the medicos in getting a delay in the clampdown on abuse of the self-education tax deduction and the success of the novated leasing industry in getting Abbott to preserve the company car tax rort.

If you saw this sorry saga as a testament to Labor's political ineptitude you wouldn't be wrong. But there's another lesson to be learnt: the more business looks the other way while particular industries frustrate governments' efforts to reform the tax system, the less likely it becomes that business in general will get the changes it's seeking.

Tax reform doesn't grow on trees.

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Death of man who inspired the emissions trading scheme

The man who first thought that governments should auction off rather give away the rights to such things as broadcast spectrum or taxi licences, and who started the thinking that led to the invention of emission trading schemes, died last week at the age of 102.

He also inspired the joke economists tell each other as a warning against reading too much into statistics: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

He was British-American economist Ronald Coase (rhymes with rose), of the University of Chicago, who in 1991 was awarded the Nobel prize for his trouble.

The first of his discoveries came in 1937 and launched a whole sub-field of economics, but now seems pathetically obvious. He asked why firms exist. Why do capitalists employ people to make or do lots of things for them, when most of those things could be bought from the market?

Why are many of the things produced by a "market economy" actually produced inside firms - some of them employing many thousands of people - where employees have to do as they're told by the boss and the rules of the market don't apply?

His answer was that buying things from others in the marketplace involved hidden costs, which he dubbed "transaction costs" - the cost of finding the best deal, checking quality, negotiating a price, writing a watertight contract and then, if necessary, enforcing that contract.

Business people would do things "in house" whenever this was cheaper than incurring all the transaction costs involved in buying from the market. (But once you start thinking like that, it eventually occurs to you that there will be times when it's cheaper to "outsource" the provision of services you formerly provided in-house.)

In a paper on the US Federal Communications Commission, written in 1959, Coase argued that the transaction costs faced by the commission in deciding which of the many applicants for a broadcast licence would make the greatest contribution to the economy were impossibly high.

But this did not justify the commission continuing to give away licences to whomever it saw fit. It would be better to replicate market conditions by auctioning the licence to the highest bidder. This way, the licence would go to the firm most likely to put the licence to its "highest-valued use".

Do you see how this led to the invention of the tradeable permit? Say the government is trying to limit to a certain level the catching of a particular type of fish, or limit emissions that cause acid rain, or those that cause climate change.

It issues permits for firms to catch or emit up to that level. Because this level is lower than the market would otherwise produce, it has thereby increased the item's "scarcity value", allowing firms with permits to get away with charging a higher price.

If it gives the permits away to firms, it's effectively allowing them to levy a tax on their customers. If it auctions the permits, it's ensuring the proceeds of the disguised tax are collected by the taxman.

The firms that get the licences by bidding highest can be expected to pay no more than allows them to continue profitably producing whatever it is. They'll also have a monetary incentive to find ways to continue producing their product while generating fewer emissions.

And by allowing firms to trade their permits - say, to sell any they discover they don't need - you increase their incentive to find ways to reduce their emissions, as well as ensuring the burden of reducing emissions is shifted to those firms that can do so at the lowest cost.

But Coase's greatest claim to fame came from a paper he wrote in 1960, The Problem of Social Cost, which became the all-time most cited paper by other academic economists and made him the darling of libertarians and free-market conservatives.

Social costs - also known as "negative externalities" - are costs imposed on third parties by transactions between people in the marketplace. Say I run a factory that imposes a lot of noise on my neighbours, emits fumes and puts gunk into the local river. Since this polluting costs me nothing it represents costs borne by the community, not by me and my customers. It's a cost that's "external" to the market.

What should governments do about this problem? The traditional answer was for them to protect the victims of this action by imposing restrictions or obligations on the perpetrator.

But Coase argued that, simply by clarifying the property rights involved, governments could leave it to the affected parties to negotiate a satisfactory solution. Again, the solution could be left to the market.

What's more, this ability to reach a privately negotiated solution meant it didn't matter to which side the government awarded the property rights. The libertarians loved this so much they called it the "Coase theorem".

What they liked was that it appeared to justify a greatly reduced role for governments in solving environmental problems. That it would also favour the rich and powerful was, of course, purely coincidental.

Over the years, however, Coase made it clear the libertarians had taken him out of context. For one thing, he'd argued that to whom you awarded the property rights made no difference from the perspective of economic efficiency. Obviously, it made a big difference from an equity or fairness perspective.

And his theorem had been based on the explicit assumption that the transaction costs involved in negotiating a solution were negligible. Not surprisingly, the man who had discovered transaction costs thought that, in the real world, transaction costs would be significant and often prohibitive.

Is it easy for all the people affected by a factory's pollution to get together and negotiate a satisfactory solution with a rich factory owner? Sounds to me like a case for government intervention.

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MACRO MANAGEMENT AND THE SUPPLY SIDE

Management of the macro economy has moved to a more sophisticated and thus more medium-term approach, which has increased the focus on the supply side. I want to discuss some less familiar technical terms that have become part of the debate: ‘trend’ growth, the ‘potential’ growth rate, the ‘output gap’ and how macro policy and micro policy fit together.

The meaning of ‘trend’ growth

It has become common to hear the RBA or the treasurer saying the economy (or private consumption or some other key macro variable) is growing at, below or above ‘trend’ - and expecting people to know what this means.

It can be a bit confusing because the Bureau of Statistics uses the word ‘trend’ to mean something quite different. So let’s get that out of the way first. The bureau presents its estimates of key indicators on three bases: original, seasonally adjusted (which allows valid comparisons to be made between adjacent months or quarters) and ‘trend’, which would be better described as ‘smoothed seasonally adjusted’. To remove some of the ‘noise’ in the seasonally adjusted figures - and thus make their underlying direction more readily apparent - you subject the series of observations to an averaging process called a 5-term (for quarterly data) or 13-term (for monthly data) centred ‘Henderson’ moving average. The advantage of this statistical technique is that it makes the direction in which the variable is moving very clear without moving any turning-points. The disadvantage is that you don’t know the final value of an observation until two further quarters (or six further months) have passed. Until then, the estimate is subject to regular revision.

But as the term is used by macro economists (as opposed to the statisticians), ‘trend’ means an indicator’s medium-term to long-term average, with ‘medium-term’ meaning a period of more than two or three years, and long-term meaning maybe 10 or 20 years. For instance, the Rudd government’s economic statement before the 2013 election campaign showed the 30-year average growth rate for real GDP is 3.25 per cent a year.

But here’s where it gets a bit tricky. As well as using ‘trend’ to refer to this backward-looking historical average growth rate, the macro managers also use it to refer to the forward-looking average rate of growth over the future medium term. This forward-looking ‘trend’ is the same as the economy’s ‘potential’ rate of growth.

The meaning of the ‘potential’ growth rate

The potential rate of growth in production (output or real GDP) is the maximum average rate at which it can grow over the medium to longer term without worsening inflation. It thus has similarities to the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), which is the lowest rate to which unemployment can fall without worsening inflation. Both are measures of full employment or full capacity or the ‘sustainable’ rate of growth.

The three Ps of economic growth

A common way to examine economic growth is to decompose it into ‘the three Ps’: population, participation and the productivity of labour. It is, in fact, a labour-market oriented way of thinking about economic growth. Over the medium to longer term, the economy’s rate of growth can be seen as determined by the rate of growth in the population (in particular, the population of working age), any change in people’s participation in the workforce, and the rate at which the productivity of labour is growing.

Now, when economists treat the backward-looking medium-term ‘trend’ rate of growth as essentially the same as the forward-looking ‘potential’ growth rate they’re implicitly assuming there’s no reason to expect any of the three Ps to change in the coming decade or so from what they’ve been over the past few decades.

But that’s not a reasonable assumption, particularly at present. And this is why Treasury’s more forward-looking, potential-oriented approach to trend has led it to keep revising down its estimate for trend. We can make whatever guesses we like about whether the medium-term rate of improvement in labour productivity will be faster, slower or about the same as it’s been in the past. But the two other Ps - population of working age and the rate of participation - being demographic variables, can be projected with more confidence. And one thing that leaps out from the demography and the ageing of the population is that the great population bulge which is the baby-boomers (those born between 1946 and 1961) is rapidly entering an age cohort with a significantly lower rate of participation than the cohort they are leaving. (This remains true even if it’s also true that many baby-boomers are retiring later than had been expected). If you’ve noticed that Treasury has been revising down its estimate of trend growth, this is the main reason for it. Actually, this process has been occurring for some time. According to Treasury’s PEFO issued early in the 2013 election campaign, forward-looking trend growth was taken to be 3.5 per cent from 1998, then lowered to 3.25 per cent in 2005 and to 3 per cent in 2006. These downward revisions also reflected ‘lower projected productivity growth’. The trend rate is expected to be lowered further to 2.75 per cent some time ‘early next decade’.

The way to determine what Treasury’s estimates are for trend rates of growth in other key macro variables is to look at its annual mechanical ‘projections’ used for the last two years of the budget’s ‘forward estimates’. Trend growth in real GDP of 3 per cent is consistent with annual growth in total employment of 1.5 per cent and an unemployment rate steady at 5 per cent. This implies Treasury’s estimate of the NAIRU - full employment or unemployment’s ‘long-term sustainable level’ - is also 5 per cent. It further implies that, on average, employment needs to grow by 1.5 per cent just to hold the rate of unemployment steady. These estimates, in turn, fit with a CPI inflation rate of 2.5 per cent (ie the mid-point of the RBA’s medium-term target range) and annual growth in nominal GDP of 5.25 per cent (implying inflation as measured by the GDP deflator averages a fraction less than as measured by the CPI because, in the present environment, the terms of trade are assumed to trend down, which reduces growth in the GDP deflator but not the CPI).

While we’re on the three Ps, the charter of budget honesty requires Treasury to produce an ‘intergenerational report’ every five years. We’ve already seen three such reports. Treasury prepares projections of the major classes of government spending for the following 40 years (which always suggest massive growth in federal spending on health care), and estimates the size of the ‘fiscal gap’ if the growth in tax collections is to be capped as a percentage of GDP. But just as interesting are Treasury’s underlying estimates of the three Ps, past and future. In the 2010 IGR, the average annual rate of growth in real GDP over the past 40 years was 3.3 per cent, with growth in the population of working age contributing 1.7 percentage points, change in participation (broadly defined - see below) contributing minus 0.2 points and productivity improvement 1.8 points. Treasury projected that, over the coming 40 years, real GDP will grow at a slower average rate of 2.7 per cent a year, with growth in the working-age population contributing 1.3 percentage points, change in participation contributing minus 0.2 points and productivity improvement contributing 1.6 points. So most of the slowing in growth is explained by slower population growth and the rest by slower productivity growth. Of course, the reason we want to see the economy growing strongly is to increase our material standard of living, which is simply measured as growth in real GDP per person. Treasury estimates that the growth in GDP per person will slow by a smaller gap: 1.9 per cent over the past 40 years versus 1.5 per cent over the coming 40. In this case, the gap is explained equally by slower growth in the population of working age and slower growth in productivity.

Note that the expected slowdown in productivity improvement is no more than Treasury’s best guess. In both 40-year periods the working-age population grew a fraction faster than the population over all, but the difference between working-age and overall growth is expected to change sign in the coming 40 years because of the ageing of the population. It shouldn’t surprise you that participation is expected to fall and thus make a negative contribution to growth in the coming 40 years. But it may surprise you that participation also made a negative contribution in the past 40 years, at a time when we know the participation of women grew strongly. The explanation is that this improvement was more than offset by the higher rate of unemployment during the period and by a decline in average hours worked per worker as the proportion of part-time workers increased.

Speed limits and the ‘output gap’

One term you may be more familiar with is the ‘output gap’. This is the difference between the actual level (not the growth rate) of GDP and the level of potential GDP. In any particular year, actual growth is determined by the strength of aggregate demand, whereas the potential growth rate is the maximum sustainable rate of growth over the medium-term, set by the growth in aggregate supply.

So if in any particular year actual growth exceeds the trend (potential) growth rate this could be taken to mean that aggregate demand is growing faster than aggregate supply, and so is known as an ‘inflationary gap’. But it’s not that simple. Whether or not growth in excess of trend is inflationary depends on whether the economy is already operating at full employment (of all resources, not just labour) or full capacity. If it is then, yes, such growth will be inflationary (and will involve attempting to drive the unemployment rate below the NAIRU). If, however, the economy is operating well below full capacity (with factories and workers not fully employed) then short-term growth in excess of trend will not be inflationary. Indeed, the usual pattern in the first few years after a recession - in which, of course, actually capacity falls to levels way below full capacity - is for growth to far exceed trend. This is not a problem, it’s desirable.

So trend should be thought of as setting a ‘speed limit’ for the rate at which the economy should be growing only after the economy has returned to full capacity. Remember, too, that full capacity is not a fixed point. It grows every year. By how much? On average, by the trend rate of growth - this is what trend measures: the average rate at which the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services expands every year.

Factors leading to growth in the economy’s productive capacity

What factors cause the economy’s supply side - its capacity to produce goods and services - to grow each year? That’s easy: growth in the three Ps. Aggregate supply grows in line with the growth in the labour force, new business investment and public infrastructure, gains in the human capital of the workforce (education and training) and productivity gains arising from economies of scale and advances in technology.

Governments can exert some influence over the growth in the labour force by their policy on immigration and by reforming policies that have the effect of discouraging participation in the labour force. Government policies can also have an influence on the NAIRU. As well, governments can exert some influence over productivity improvement by the incentives and disincentives they create affecting primary research, research and development, and the tax and transfer system generally. They also exert influence by the size and effectiveness of their spending on education and training, as well as on economic infrastructure.

The Gillard government’s budget of May 2011 provided an interesting example of a government using its budget not just to influence aggregate demand but also to influence aggregate supply. It sought to add to supply, especially the supply of labour, particularly skilled labour. It involved a modest expansion of the immigration of skilled workers, the reform and expansion of vocational education and training (TAFE), and the use of sticks and carrots to encourage greater participation in the labour force by disadvantage workers (the long-term unemployed, sole parents and the disabled) and by wives in single-income couples who were under 40 and had no children to look after.

How macro and micro policy fit together

On the surface, the traditional instruments of macroeconomic management - monetary policy and fiscal policy - are very different to the relatively new idea of ‘microeconomic policy’. The traditional instruments are aimed at demand, whereas micro reform is aimed at supply; they work in the short term, whereas micro policies generally effect change only over the medium term. But despite appearances, microeconomic policy is actual an instrument of macro management.

Historically, the macro managers focused solely on managing demand, trying to get it up to the potential growth rate in the recovery phase after recessions, and trying to hold it down to the potential growth rate during booms. The era of micro-economic reform, however, represents the realisation by the economic managers that they can increase the economy’s rate of growth (rather than just keeping it as stable as possible) by improving the flexibility and efficiency of the supply side and also by actually increasing supply.

So the traditional macro instruments are aimed at achieving a stable rate of growth whereas micro policy aims at achieving a higher rate of growth over the medium term, at raising trend. Another way to think of it is this: if avoiding inflation means keeping demand and supply growing at the same rate, one solution (the traditional solution) is to ensure demand doesn’t grow too fast. But another, more creative solution is to do what you can to hasten the growth of supply. To the extent you can do this, you can get faster growth without inflation problems.

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A lot of politics is unconscious pre-judgment

At last. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. The rightful rulers of this country are back in charge, so now things can only get better. You think I'm joking? I'm not.

There's an American psychological test called the implicit association test which asks people to divide nice words and nasty words, black faces and white faces, into two categories and do it as fast as they can.

When journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, tried the test he was so dissatisfied with his score he did it over and over, trying to improve his results. Why? Because he's half Jamaican - with a fabulous afro haircut - but the test revealed him to be unconsciously prejudiced against black people.

It turns out more than 80 per cent of all those who have taken the test were found to have "pro-white associations".

Gladwell explains our attitudes towards race and gender operate on two levels. We have conscious attitudes, things we choose to believe, which we use to direct our behaviour consciously. But the test measures our unconscious attitudes, "the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think". Such unconscious attitudes affect our behaviour without us realising it.

I believe something similar operates in our unconscious attitudes towards the two main political parties. We see the Liberals - the party of the bosses - as the party best suited to run the country.

Sometimes enough of us feel sufficiently rebellious to install Labor - the party of the workers - but this leaves many of us uncomfortable and yearning for the return of the masters. And when, sooner or later, it becomes clear Labor isn't doing well, no one is terribly surprised and we rush back to the security of our pater familias.

You don't understand anything about the underlying forces of Australian politics until you understand that.

It applies particularly to the economy. For decades pollsters have asked people which side of politics is better suited at managing the economy. And for decades the almost invariable answer is the Coalition.

There was a time during the term of the Hawke-Keating government when the economy was doing well and Labor was ahead on this question. But such times are the exception. Normally, Labor judges its success just by the extent to which it has narrowed the gap with the Libs.

It follows that the more the economy is seen as the dominant issue of federal politics - as it has been since Gough Whitlam's day - the more the Libs are seen as the natural party of government.

No one believes this more fervently than business people, of course. Business is always uncomfortable with a Labor government, but the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government proved much less adept at maintaining good relations with business than the Hawke-Keating government.

So much so that the economist Saul Eslake has noted "the extent and depth of antipathy among the business community towards the present [Labor] government - which goes way beyond the normal inclination of most business executives or owners towards centre-right governments".

A big part of the problem was Labor's resort to the language of class conflict, starting with its decision to rename the original mining resources rent tax as the resource "super profits" tax.

New governments always enjoy a honeymoon with the electorate and a lift in business and consumer confidence. But this time it's hoped the turnaround in business confidence will be big enough to lead to a recovery in non-mining business investment, which has been weak for several years.

The resources boom and its high dollar, the end of the housing credit boom and the return of the more prudent consumer, and the continuing digital revolution mean that, although the economy has been travelling well enough overall, various industries have been hard hit by "structural change".

Most of these structural pressures are beyond the influence of government policy. That's particularly true of retailing, which includes a lot of small businesses and has been doing it especially tough.

The temptation for hard-pressed business people to blame their troubles on a Labor government has been irresistible. The change of government will make them a lot happier. And the more confident business is about the future, the better it's likely to do. The test will come when businesses realise their underlying problems haven't gone away.

Business people are usually highly critical of anyone seen to be "talking down the economy". But, we've learnt, this ethic applies only when the Coalition is in government. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey were talking the economy down for at least three years, and many business people were publicly agreeing with them.

Of course, the assumption that Liberal governments always manage the economy well - that, in Abbott's revealing phrase, it's in their DNA - is wrong, just as the assumption that Labor governments are always bad at it is wrong.

The hope that all our problems will evaporate now the good guys are back in charge is wishful thinking.

But that doesn't stop our deeply held assumption to the contrary - an assumption shared by both Liberal and Labor politicians - from having real effects on our behaviour. One of the surprising truths of economics is that, to some extent, our expectations are self-fulfilling.

And already the budget and boat-people crises are over.

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Big change in party, little in policy

Coalition supporters rejoice! The evil incompetents have been banished and the good guys are back in charge. But don't get too excited because by the time we reached polling day many illusions about the difference a change of government would make had been shattered.

A standard delusion of election campaigns is that the Coalition portrays itself as standing for lower taxes, higher spending and lower budget deficits.

And Tony Abbott seemed to be cutting taxes big time, abolishing the carbon tax and the mining tax and cutting the company tax rate to 28.5 per cent.

But now we finally have the Coalition's full costings we see how far the reality falls short of the headline.

Its tax cuts will cost about $20 billion over four years (in cash terms), but its offsetting levy on big companies and reversal of Labor tax breaks - mainly on superannuation and small business - will claw back about $14 billion over four years.

And that's before you count the unlegislated Labor tax increases Abbott will put into law - including the increases in the Medicare levy and cigarette duty, and the new tax on bank accounts - worth about $28 million over four years.

Don't sound like lower taxes to me.

But surely the most disillusioning thing for Liberal true believers is the way five years of railing against Labor's utterly wasteful spending, never-ending budget deficits and soaring debt levels was simply cast aside over the course of a five-week campaign.

When, just before the campaign began, Labor was forced to reveal the deficit would be worse before we returned to surplus in another four years' time, the Libs proclaimed this a ''budget emergency''.

But then, just two days before polling day, they revealed their response to this emergency, which turned out to involve a net reduction in the cash deficit of just $6 billion over four years. On Treasury's projections, cumulative future deficits of a further $55 billion will now be a mere $49 billion and the return to surplus not a day earlier. Yippee.

Let me be clear: I wholeheartedly agree with the Liberals' last minute pull-back from resort to fiscal austerity. But then I was never taken in by their five years of frightening the fiscally illiterate.

What's supposed to be next on the agenda of a new government is a first look at the books, the amazed discovery it's all much worse than their predecessors let on, and the regretful announcement that this fiscal crisis necessitates a huge round of cost-cutting and the breaking of ''non-core'' promises.

Sorry, this ain't gunna happen, either. Why not? Mainly because Peter Costello's charter of budget honesty and, in particular, his instigation of the econocrats' pre-election economic and fiscal outlook statement was specifically designed to ensure he was the last treasurer able to pull that stunt.

If you've read the PEFO you've already seen the books.

But Abbott is further locked in by his repeated resolutions not to break his promises. He's even promised to let the deficit blow out rather than break a spending promise.

Labor claimed the planned ''commission of audit'' will be used as the vehicle for big spending cuts, but this was just its retaliatory scare campaign.

All past Coalition audits have been performed by purist economic rationalists who make radical recommendations no government would dream of accepting.

These and other promised inquiries (44 in Abbott's case) are just a device to get party hard-liners off a Coalition leader's back before elections.

There are just three main respects in which Abbott's policies are significantly different to Labor's.

First, the redistribution of the burden of taxation and the benefit of government spending against the Labor (and, for that matter, National Party) heartland and in favour of the Liberal heartland.

Second, the move from a market-based response to climate change to a pretend response. The campaign revealed a cap on ''direct action'' spending that means Abbott's professed bipartisan commitment to a 5 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 is a sham.

Third, a marked improvement in business confidence now the socialist hordes have been vanquished.

This is the one delusion that remains from the rubble of an election campaign by the Liberals' most populist and least rationalist leader in a generation.

Fortunately, its delusory nature shouldn't stop it giving the economy a genuine boost as business ends its three-year-long dummy spit.

Today's return to real life will end one more illusion that accompanies every campaign: that it's governments who do most to manage the economy not the unchanging econocrats of the Reserve Bank.

There could be no more powerful reason why the change of government will change surprisingly little.

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Little progress in economy's transition

With the election campaign supposedly fought mainly on economic management, it's surprising this week's figures for growth in the June quarter got so little attention. So what shape is the economy in as it looks like being handed over to a new government?


According to the Bureau of Statistics' national accounts, it's not doing well, but nor is it doing particularly badly. Real gross domestic product grew just 0.6 per cent in the quarter and 2.6 per cent over the year to June.

This is a touch better than many economists were expecting, but it's well short of our ''trend'' growth rate of 3 per cent a year. According to the figuring of Paul Bloxham, of the HSBC bank, we've slowed from an annualised rate of 3 per cent in the second half of last year to an annualised 2.3 per cent in the first half of this year.

This is too slow to generate sufficient additional jobs to employ the growing labour force and prevent unemployment from rising. Unemployment's gone from 5.4 per cent to 5.7 per cent of the labour force over the seven months to July.

The problem - as everyone must know by now - is that we're engaged in a difficult shift from growth led by mining to growth led by the rest of the economy as the resources boom goes through a ''phase shift''.

And, as Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has reminded us, the transition is being made more difficult by the end of the long-running housing credit boom, which has prompted households to return to their relatively high rate of saving and therefore allow their consumption spending to grow no faster than their incomes.

This week's accounts show little sign we've got far with the transition, making it fortunate we're still getting some support from the resources boom as it moves from its investment phase to its production and export phase.

Investment spending by the mining sector looks to have fallen about 3 per cent in the quarter, but increased mineral exports do most to account for the 1.3 per cent growth in the volume of exports in the quarter.

With reducing mining investment also meaning fewer imports of mining equipment, this was sufficient to mean ''net exports'' (exports minus imports) had no net effect on growth during the quarter. (Over the financial year, export volume growth of 6.4 per cent and a fall of 1.8 per cent in import volumes meant net exports contributed a huge 1 percentage point to the overall growth of 2.6 per cent.)

Note that increased stockpiles of minerals did most to account for a rise in the levels of business inventories, which contributed 0.2 percentage points to growth during the quarter.

Note, too, that our terms of trade were steady in the quarter, implying no further fall in mining export prices.

The story on growth in the non-mining economy isn't as good. Consumer spending grew by 0.4 per cent for the quarter, which contributed 0.2 percentage points to overall growth. (Over the financial year, consumer spending grew 1.8 per cent, contributing 1 percentage point to overall growth.)

This growth is better than implied by the very weak monthly figures for retail sales (which account for only about a third of total consumer spending), mainly because of strong growth in purchases of services and, particularly, new cars.

Even so, its growth is well below trend consumption growth, which should be about 3 per cent a year.

With the household saving ratio roughly stable at a little more than 10 per cent of household disposable income, this tells us disposable income must also be growing at well below trend.

Why? Because its growth is not being bolstered by a lot more people getting jobs and because wage increases aren't as high as they were.

Is slower wage growth a bad thing? It may not sound wonderful, but it is giving the Reserve Bank confidence inflation will stay low notwithstanding the likely rise in import prices following the fall in the dollar. So it has permitted the Reserve to cut interest rates further.

Turning to the other main components of non-mining growth, home building and alterations fell by a surprising 0.6 per cent in the quarter.

But though the housing market is hardly rip-roaring in response to the present very low interest rates (another consequence of the prudence that's followed the end of the credit boom), it is recovering, and home building grew by a reasonably healthy 4 per cent over the year to June.

Non-mining business investment seems to have shown no growth during the quarter, which is a disappointment. We must hope the expected change of government will give business a bit more confidence to take advantage of low interest rates and the still-low cost of imported capital equipment.

Despite all the talk of cuts, Kieran Davies, of Barclays bank, calculates the public sector grew by 1.2 per cent in the quarter.

Though GDP per hour worked improved by just 0.2 per cent in the quarter, it's up by 1.8 per cent over the year. That's pretty much in line with trend - a far cry from the earlier talk of a productivity crisis.

Since much of the earlier apparent weakness was explained by the investment phase of the mining boom (many workers employed building new mines and facilities from which nothing was being produced), the more recent improvement is no doubt partly explained by more of the mines coming on line.

The trade-exposed sector's difficulty coping with the high dollar - which does much to explain the weak growth of the non-mining economy - probably helps explain a bit more of the improvement.

People have trouble understanding that productivity gains tend to come from pain rather than pleasure.

But let's not worry about that. Provided government changes hands this weekend, all our economic problems will evaporate within days.

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Why Abbott wouldn't be a great cost cutter

If Tony Abbott wins the election would he "cut, cut, cut" to fill the "$70 billion black hole" needed to cover the cost of his election promises, as Labor repeatedly claims? Would he follow the Europeans in adopting austerity policies, as others claim?

No. Why not? Because the man who'd be his treasurer, Joe Hockey, isn't that stupid and Abbott isn't that committed.

Let me make a fearless prediction: should the Coalition win the election, we'll hear precious little more about the evils of "debt and deficit".

While Labor was in power, Abbott and his colleagues exaggerated the significance of the size of the budget deficit and the level of the public debt because this was the only way to disparage the economic record of a government that had - with much help from the Reserve Bank - done surprisingly well.

But once the Coalition was back in power its need for fear-mongering about debt and deficit would disappear and it would face the same struggle to get the budget back to surplus that Labor faced.

Whenever it was challenged about its slow progress it would blame Labor but, apart from that, it would prefer to talk of other things.

How can I be sure? Mainly because Abbott's been backing off already. He used to say he'd get the budget back to surplus in "year one". Now his promise is merely that "by the end of a Coalition government's first term, the budget will be on track to a believable surplus" and "within a decade" the budget surplus will be 1 per cent of gross domestic product.

Only "on track" after three years? And "within a decade"? That's three elections away.

But also because the Libs have form on this sort of scare campaign. While John Howard and Peter Costello were in opposition in 1996, they drove a "debt truck" around Australia to ensure every "man, woman and child" knew how much they owed as their share of the nation's foreign debt. In government, however, they never mentioned the foreign debt again.

But can they get away with going cold after having made so much fuss? Well, the Republicans in America have been doing it for years. Their attitude is simple: budget deficits aren't a worry when they're being incurred by Ronald Reagan or the George Bushes, but they're a terrible worry when they're being racked up by Democrats like Barack Obama.

My guess is that, for the most part, those who've been most concerned about our supposedly soaring debt are those who'd naturally vote Liberal. They're really saying: "I'd feel a lot more comfortable about the budget if only the Libs were in charge of it."

Well, if Abbott wins, they would be. And that would be a signal to many people to stop worrying and leave everything to that nice Mr Hockey.

Hockey, by the way, has said several times that they wouldn't risk worsening unemployment at a time when the economy is fragile by pursuing policies of austerity - that is, by cutting spending or raising taxes by a lot more than is needed to cover the cost of their promises, in an attempt to reduce the budget deficit faster than would happen automatically as the economy strengthens.

As the Europeans have demonstrated, trying to force the pace while the economy is weak is counterproductive. It pushes the economy back into recession, actually making the deficit worse rather than better. So I don't have any trouble believing Hockey when he says he wouldn't be so foolish as to try it here.

Labor's claim that Abbott's election promises have created a $70 billion black hole he will need to fill with spending cuts is a wild exaggeration. It's been debunked by several fact-checking outfits.

But Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and Chris Bowen haven't skipped a beat in repeating this false claim.

So don't for a minute imagine all the scare campaigns, dishonesty and dissembling is limited to one side. If you're tempted by such thoughts you've allowed partisanship to cloud your thinking.

The fact remains, however, that the Coalition is delaying until almost the last moment before revealing the full list of spending cuts needed to pay for its promises.

What's it got to hide? Well, maybe it has a few nasties it's hoping won't get too much attention before the poll, but it's just as likely it's worried about making some mistake in its figuring - in this area oppositions are at a huge disadvantage relative to governments - that Labor could use to damage its credibility.

An Abbott government would be looking for budget savings - just as Labor has been for several years - and would probably be more inclined to cut spending than end tax breaks.

Its first budget, in particular, would be a tough one, including various unpleasant measures that weren't contrary to its promises but many people weren't expecting. Its primary purpose would be to replace Labor's pet programs with the Coalition's pet programs.

But Abbott has made so much fuss about restoring our trust in politicians that I don't expect he'd follow Howard in using his first budget to break a lot of "non-core" promises.

He'd end up breaking many promises, of course - because "no surprises, no excuses" is a promise no honest politician would make - but not at first. And, like Howard, he doesn't have the stomach for genuinely smaller government.

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