The economy: old dog shows signs of life

With bad news this week from the March quarter survey of business capital expenditure, we need cheering up. Fortunately, budget statement No. 2 shows Treasury has been looking under every rock to find some good news.

It kicks off its annual assessment of the economic outlook by reminding all us worriers that the economy is entering its 25th consecutive year of growth, which is the second longest continuous period of growth of any advanced economy in the world.

And, we're reminded, though the economy has grown by less than its medium-term average ("trend") rate of 3 per cent-odd for five of the past six financial years, and is now forecast to grow by just 2.5 per cent in the financial year soon to end and 2.75 per cent in the coming year, this still leaves us as "one of the fastest growing economies in the advanced world".

Treasury gives us an update on the story we've become so familiar with in the past few years: the boom in investment in new mines and natural gas facilities is fast subsiding, leaving a big vacuum in economic activity that needs to be filled by faster growth in the rest of the economy.

To encourage such growth, the Reserve Bank has resumed cutting the official interest rate, such that it's now fallen 2.75 percentage points since its peak in late 2011, to a record low of 2 per cent. And, despite all the complaints about spending cuts, Joe Hockey has ensured his budget is only a minor drag on economic activity.

In response, we're now getting quite strong growth in new home building, and consumer spending is stronger than it was.

Fine. But that brings us to the crux of our continuing sub-par performance: business investment spending. Treasury expects mining investment to fall by more than 15 per cent this financial year, then by 25 per cent in the coming year and a further 30 per cent in 2016-17.

Yipes that's precipitous. And Treasury fears non-mining investment will show only modest growth until 2016-17 when it should increase by 7.5 per cent.

Put mining and non-mining together and you see business investment spending is the economy's continuing weak spot. After falling by 5 per cent last financial year, total business investment is expected to fall by another 5 per cent in the year just ending, then by 7 per cent in the coming year and even by a further 3.5 per cent in 2016-17.

Now you see why this week's figures for business "cap-ex" were such a downer. They really confirmed Treasury's dismal outlook. They showed a weak outcome for the March quarter and an unexpected deterioration in how much non-mining businesses expect they'll be spending in the coming financial year.

Moving right along, Treasury reminds us the economy does have a couple of things going for it apart from rock-bottom interest rates: one is lower petrol and oil prices and another is lower electricity prices (with more falls to come in some states).

And then, of course, there's the lower dollar, down mainly because the prices of our mineral exports are down, but perhaps also because our interest rates are lower than they were relative to those of other countries.

Our "real" exchange rate – that is, after adjusting the nominal exchange rate for our inflation rate relative to those of our trading partners – appreciated by about 30 per cent during the mining prices boom, but since September 2011 it has depreciated by about 13 per cent.

That's bad news for businesses and households buying imports, of course, but good news for Australian firms competing against imports in the domestic market. It's also good news for Australian exporters, who now get more Aussie cents for every US dollar they earn.

Treasury is forecasting strong growth of 5 or 6 per cent a year in the volume (quantity) of our exports over the next few years. Most of that is increased exports of minerals and energy as new mines come on line, but some of it comes from faster growth in non-mining exports.

On the other side, Treasury's expecting the volume of our imports to fall by 3 per cent in the year just ending and by a further 1.5 per cent in the coming year, before growing moderately by 2.5 per cent in 2016-17.

Why? Mainly because of fewer imports of heavy mining equipment, but also because the lower dollar will allow local firms to recapture market share from imports.

Such as? A classic exporting and import-competing industry is tourism. Real travel spending by international visitors to Oz has grown by 11 per cent since the start of 2012, whereas real travel spending by Aussies travelling abroad has decreased by 11 per cent.

The combined effect has been to turn our balance of trade in tourism services from a small deficit to a much bigger surplus. The increased inflow of tourists has been shared by all states.

Remember how much our leaders bang on about the big bucks to be made from China's rapidly growing middle class? Tourists from China accounted for more than a quarter of the growth in tourist spending in Oz last financial year.

The more than three-quarters of a million Chinese visitors that year spent an average of $8600 per person with our businesses.

Now get this: the volume of our exports of medium-skilled and technology-intensive manufactures has grown almost continuously over the past 30 years, as have our exports of high-skilled and technology-intensive manufactures, with the latter now bigger than the former.

It's really only the low-skilled and labour-intensive manufactures that have fallen back. The starring industries make goods such as pharmaceuticals, professional and scientific equipment, and machinery and transport equipment.

Strikes me we're not dead yet.

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It's skilless men, not mothers, we should get into jobs

One of the main things I've concluded after years in this job is that, although the economic dimension of our lives – the earning and spending of income – is vitally important, it's far from being the only important aspect. And we disregard those other dimensions – the relational, the social, the cultural and the spiritual – at our peril.

In this age of hyper-materialism, we're in constant danger of forgetting that. It's true of both sides of politics, but was well illustrated by Tony Abbott's changes to paid parental leave and childcare in the budget.

The nation's economists are worried that, between the ageing of the population and the end of the resources boom, we face much slower growth in our material standard of living than we've become used to.

Their solution – as advocated in the government's recent intergenerational report – is to get more of us participating in the paid workforce and to raise the average worker's productiveness (by working smarter, not harder).

During the years Abbott was pushing his far more generous paid parental leave, one of his key arguments was that it would increase young mothers' participation in the workforce.

But a report by the Productivity Commission seems finally to have convinced the government that if increasing women's participation was its main objective, raising the subsidy to childcare would do more than more generous parental leave would (though it wouldn't all that much).

Thus was the announcement of yet another broken election promise hidden behind the announcement of more generous childcare subsidies. Predictably, the media missed the sleight of hand.

But having lost its enthusiasm for paid leave, the government took its Labor predecessors' scheme – whose parsimony it had repeatedly criticised – and made it more inadequate by removing the ability of some mothers to supplement the government's 18 weeks of paid leave with further weeks paid for by their employer.

This saved the taxpayer about $1 billion, as well as having the presumably intended effect of encouraging the mothers of babies to get back to work earlier.

Oh yes, cried the feminists, what about the rights of the child? What about the official recommendation that new mothers not return to work for at least six months, something Abbott had previously harped on when criticising Labor's mean scheme?

Whoops. A classic case of (male) politicians putting "the economy" – actually, our material prosperity – ahead of such lesser matters as a mother's bonding with her child and the crucial early mental development of the next generation.

Let's hope the newly more reasonable Abbott will correct this simple misstep. But let's also consider the views of Dr Mike Keating, a retired super-senior econocrat, whose contributions to the public debate are often greatly enlightening, especially relative to the official obfuscation.

The Other Keating makes two important points. His first is that there's a lot more to be gained from paid employment than just money. "Being employed creates many of the social contacts and sense of self-esteem that are vital to our individual wellbeing," he says.

"Increasing employment participation is most important if governments want to improve living standards, individual wellbeing and equality."

His second point is that, contrary to what some argue, the weak point in our participation isn't married women. Our overall rate of "employment participation" as he calls it – the proportion of the working-age population with a paid job – is just under 61 per cent, which breaks down into averages of 67 per cent for men and 55 per cent for women.

Surprisingly, this overall 61 per cent is the same as it was 50 years ago. But its composition has changed markedly. Male employment participation is as much as 18 percentage points lower than it was in 1966, whereas the female rate is 15 percentage points higher.

The decline for men is explained mainly by the decline in blue-collar jobs, as computerisation has eliminated many unskilled jobs. The rise for women reflects changing social attitudes and women's greater suitability for filling jobs in the ever-growing services sector.

Here's the point. Almost all the long-term decline in employment participation by men aged 25 to 55 was accounted for by those who didn't complete secondary school and have no further qualifications.

What's more, in that age range, employment participation is much lower for those who didn't complete year 12 and have no further qualifications – 71 per cent for men and 60 per cent for women – than it is for those who did complete schooling and may have further qualifications: almost 18 percentage points higher for men and 22 points for women.

Keating notes that the overall rate of employment participation for Australian women is only a little lower than for women in comparable countries, and for women with tertiary qualifications there's virtually no difference.

Get it? It's not women who are causing our employment participation to be lower than we'd like, it's the less skilled.

"It is people whose educational qualifications are poor and who lack skills who have most scope to increase their employment participation." So "the focus should be on policies to improve the job prospects of low-skilled and disadvantaged people".

For Keating's more specific proposals, you'll have to see my little video on the website.

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Blame pollies and media for low political standards

As intensified personal ambition has heightened competition between the parties, unwritten rules that certain subjects were off limits to the political contest have gone by the board.

The obvious example is immigration, Asian immigration in particular, and boat people.

For many years, both sides knew there was an ugly, xenophobic side of the Australian character and tacitly agreed not to do or say anything that would give it air.

Howard was part of the breakdown of that taboo, but perhaps a bigger cause was the arrival of radio shock-jocks who didn't care what demons they unleashed.

As politics has become more of a job for life, it's also become more of a science and less of an art, as parties have made more use of sample-based polling and the techniques of marketing, including sophisticated advertising and focus groups.

There was a time when politicians relied on their own contact with voters and their gut feelings to assess how their policies and performance were being received by the electorate.

These days, their polling and reports of focus group discussions leave them in no doubt about what voters are thinking on all topics.

Or, at least, leave them imagining there's no doubt. In truth, even quantitative polling can be misunderstood and qualitative  research from focus groups is so subjective it's notorious for the bum steers it can give.

Even so, it does seem the parties get very similar messages from their rival efforts.

When focus groups were introduced, the rationale was they would inform the parties on how to frame the policies they wanted to pursue in ways that made them more attractive to voters.

But when you are – or imagine yourself to be – fully informed on what the punters like and dislike, the temptation to let those preferences determine what policies you pursue must be almost irresistible.

What this seemingly less amateur and more scientific approach to politicking overlooks is the often paradoxical quality of human nature.

Tell me only what I want to hear and I begin to wonder whether I can trust you.

What exactly do you believe? Keep it wishy-washy and I wonder if you really believe anything.

Only ever tell me nice stuff and I wonder whether you're tough enough for the job.

Become a slave of focus group approval and you risk forgetting that, though I don't like the sound of your plan, I could be persuaded it's what the country needs.

In the old days, a politician like Fraser won elections because he was seen as a stern father the times called for, not because he was popular.

Another drawback of the more calculated approach to politics is governments' ever-increasing superficiality.

If, as all politicians believe, "the perception is the reality", why not focus on perceptions and appearances and let reality slide?

If the trains aren't running on time or people are waiting too long for elective surgery, why not measure these things in ways that are more favourable?

Why not favour responses to problems that are flashy or emotionally gratifying rather than boring but effective?

Why waste scarce resources on repairs and maintenance or renovation when you can build something new and be seen cutting the ribbon and making great progress?

When the number of problems or worthy causes far exceeds the revenue you've got to spend, why concentrate on those where your spending is likely to be most effective rather than slinging an inadequate sum to as many as possible and so mollify as many potential critics as possible?

Why give much to people such as the unemployed or single mothers for whom there's so little public sympathy?

When the public takes an irrational set against outsiders such as boat people, why not gratify their prejudices rather than defend the needy?

When people convince themselves they're struggling to keep up with the cost of living but the objective indicators say wages are rising faster than prices, why try to set them straight when it's so much easier to pretend to be sympathetic?

In short, why not reinforce prejudices and misperceptions rather than educate?

Why not follow the voters rather than lead them?

"There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader." When memories and political terms are so short and punters so ungrateful, why not be short-sighted and risk averse?

All those temptations are reinforced by the media. It's the media that are overly preoccupied with and impressed by the new rather than the old, by the flashy and the emotionally gratifying, by what's on the surface rather than what's underneath, by the immediate rather than the prospective, by the irrational rather than the rational, by the sympathy-rousing case study rather than the systemic failure.

Politics has changed over the years but so, too, have the media. And they've both changed in ways that are mutually supportive. The two institutions have become more symbiotic.

There's no doubt the speeding up of the 24-hour news cycle is essentially the product of the media's ever-shortening attention span as part of the intensifying competition between the media's ever-proliferating mediums, including the advent of 24-hour news radio and TV channels.

But a lot of the dumbing down has been initiated by the politicians and their party machines for their own reasons. There is plenty of blame to be shared between the two institutions.

This edited extract from Gittins by Ross Gittins, published by Allen & Unwin, is out this week.

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GITTINS the book: sneak preview II

Why did an accountant who'd forgotten most of the economics he was supposed to have learnt at uni and never really learnt to be a reporter, go from cadet journalist to economics editor in four years?

Because he had the immense good fortune to be in the right place at the right time.

I joined the Herald just as the startling policies of the Whitlam government and the global economic disruption of the first OPEC oil price shock were convincing the nation's editors that the biggest part of politics was economics, and that they needed to run a lot more stories about the economy and needed more journalists proficient in economics to do it.

The oil price shock of December 1973 happened to make my first year at the Herald, 1974, a watershed in the global economic history of the 20th century.

It proved to be the last year of the almost 30-year postwar Golden Age of strong and steady growth in all the developed countries, with low inflation, full employment and ever-rising living standards and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.

The oil shock wrong-footed Western governments and brought to light the hitherto unknown problem of "stagflation" – simultaneously high unemployment and inflation.

The advent of stagflation caused a loss of confidence in traditional Keynesian macro-economic management, which could deal with either high inflation or high unemployment, but not both at the same time. In the search for an alternative, many turned to "monetarism" - controlling the growth in the supply of money.

I became an economic journalist when the battle between Keynesians and monetarists was at its height. It turned out that through much of the monetarist criticism of Keynesianism had merit – money did matter, as the monetarists had argued – the rest was mumbo jumbo.

Money-supply targeting wasn't the magic answer promised. It didn't even work. Even so, the main instrument for managing the ups and downs of the economy was switched from fiscal policy (the budget) to monetary policy (interest rates).

Another solution to stagflation was "incomes policy" – direct control over wages, other incomes and prices. Its Australian version came late in the form of the Hawke-Keating government's "accord" with the union movement.

It took until the mid-1990s to get inflation down to the 2 or 3 per cent that had pertained during the Golden Age.

Dr Don Stammer, a veteran business economist, says you need to have seen four recessions before you're fully qualified. I thought the global financial crisis of 2008-09 would bring my fourth, but if you don't count that – I count it as a potentially severe recession turned into a mild one by remarkably skilful management – I've seen three big ones.

The recession of 1974-5 would by the itself have caused the Whitlam government's defeat had there not been more than enough other reasons.

The severe recession of the early 1980s brought the Fraser government's reign to an end after just seven years and the severe recession we didn't have to have in the early 1990s – in the sense that all recessions happen by accident rather than design – finally did for the perpetrator of that bravado in 1996, although Paul Keating's execution was delayed three years by the inexperience of a former economics professor, Dr John Hewson.

Feel free to write this on my tombstone: "he never fell for the line that economists had finally conquered the business cycle". You only had to live through the Keynesians' humiliation in the world recession of 1974-75 to be permanently cured of such hubris. I soon formed the view that recessions occurred roughly every seven years.

I know from the three recessions that have occurred so far "on my watch" – each of them accurately branded "the worst since the Great Depression" - how terrible recessions are: the fear and pain they cause to small business people, workers who lose their jobs and young people who have the misfortune to be leaving school or university at the time.

In 40 years I've been around for 13 federal treasurers. The Whitlam government's Frank Crean was my first. I was too junior to get to know him, which was a pity. I liked him because he reminded me of my father. I had little to do with Dr Jim Cairns and didn't get to know Bill Hayden until he was in opposition.

After the Fraser government arrived I didn't get to know rubbery Phil Lynch, but John Howard was a different matter.

Keating was an assiduous worker of gallery journalists, who learnt much of his economics from [former Australian Financial Review editor] Max Walsh until Treasury took over. I was seen as to partial to him and his policies, but that was because I invariably agreed with them – rationalism with a human face. Our greatest treasurer, with daylight second.

His successor, John Kerin, did a more-Keating-than-Keating impression. With a degree in agricultural economics, Kerin was far better qualified than most treasurers, so I thought it terribly unjust when the TV news bulletins hounded him from office by repeatedly playing a clip of him forgetting that GOS stood for gross operating surplus. None of his righteous accusers would have known that.

John Dawkins was competent but tetchy. Ralph Willis was well qualified academically, but terribly reserved.

Peter Costello had two counts against me: I was from Sydney and, like virtually all journos, I was biased against him politically. It's true I criticised him on more issues than I supported him.

But though I backed him vigorously on some unpopular measures, it would never have crossed his mind that my criticism arose from our differing values, not from partisanship.

Once, his press secretary decided to give me the treatment regularly dished out to gallery reporters who'd incurred his displeasure by inviting all economic journalists to some function except me.

I couldn't believe he could be so incompetent. Gallery reporters had no choice but to cop such treatment in silence, but as a columnist in Sydney, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making it public. Normally I resist the temptation to go for cheap cheers, but this time I opted for a little self-publicity.

I kept it up for two weeks until the call came through from Costello. "I'm sorry to shock you, Ross, but I didn't actually read the column you say I took offence at." Etcetera. It was as close to a conciliatory call as Costello could get, so I too was conciliatory.

People kept telling me Costello was bright but lazy, but a treasurer who didn't read my columns? I believed him.

Costello's greatest achievements were his carriage of the goods and services tax and his reform of the prudential supervision of the financial system, which kept our banks out of trouble in the GFC. The notion that he's up there with Keating as a reformer is partisan propaganda.

Wayne Swan fell short of either of them. The truth is I feel a bit guilty about Swan. I let my liking for the man stop me from writing what I thought: that he was too weak to be treasurer. He wasn't brave enough on the reform front nor tough enough in controlling government spending and he couldn't sell ice-creams on a hot day at the beach.

When he was succeeded by Chris Bowen my first thought was regret that I'd neglected to take up opportunities to get to know Bowen better. But thinking about my problem with Swan I decided I was better off not getting to like these guys and so being freer to judge them on their merits.

I know Joe Hockey well enough to know he's a likable guy – and to expect him to see more easily than Costello that, with me, he'll win some and lose some – so that's close enough.

My experience watching the bad, indifferent and good management of our economy over the past 40 years has left me sure of one thing: Malcolm Fraser may have lacked the resolve to live up to it, but his slogan "Fight Inflation First" is dead right.

Part of the policy debate between Keynesians and their opponents rested on the belief that Keynesians cared most about unemployment because they worried about people at the bottom, whereas conservatives carried most about inflation because it diminished the wealth of the rich.

In one of his first speeches as [Reserve Bank] governor Bernie Fraser demolished that neat dichotomy by pointing out inflation actually hurt the poor more than the rich because the poor were unable to afford the expert advice needed to protect themselves from – even benefit from – the effects of inflation. Negatively geared investment in property or shares is a classic instance of benefiting from inflation.

If you force me to choose which is the greater evil, inflation or unemployment, there's no shadow of doubt in my mind: unemployment wins. But the choice we have to make – and the relationship between those two evils – is more subtle than that.

To me, if you care about achieving low unemployment in anything but the short term, you start by fixing inflation and keep it fixed, so you can then grow the economy at a steady but healthy rate and thus grind down unemployment and keep it low for as long as possible.

That describes how we've managed our economy over the past 20 years. In the preceding 20 years governments pursuing the alternative strategy of fighting unemployment first would rev up the economy after ever recession, soon bringing inflation back up and thus sowing the seeds of the next bust.

Edited extract from Gittins, by Ross Gittins (Allen & Unwin), out this week.

Ten reforms that transformed Australia

1. Floating the dollar

2. Deregulating the banks

3. New taxes on capital gains and fringe benefits

4. Removing import protection

5. Privatising government businesses

6. Enterprise bargaining

7. National competition policy

8. Central bank independence

9. Goods and services tax

10. Taxes on mining and carbon


My five worst predictions

1. Expecting the severe recession of the early 1990s to be a "soft landing".

2. Doubting the move from centralised wage-fixing to enterprise bargaining would be an improvement

3. Saying the US authorities were right to allow Lehman Brothers to fail in September 2008

4. Expecting Australia to be caught up in the subsequent Great Recession

5. Failing to foresee the adverse social effects of micro-economic reform


The best of 13 treasurers

1. Paul Keating. By a country mile. He instigated the sweeping reforms that transformed the economy and laid the groundwork for better day-to-day management of it. He made the economy less inflation-prone and more flexible, thus able to reduce unemployment faster.

2. Peter Costello. Greatest achievement was to free the Reserve Bank to change interest rates as it saw necessary, meaning the economy is now  managed more by econocrats than politicians. He also ensured our banks were tightly supervised while the Americans were letting theirs create so much havoc.

3. Wayne Swan. Despite his failings he deserves a spot on the treasurers' honour board purely for his surprisingly deft handling of stimulus spending and human confidence in the wake of the global financial crisis, ensuring we suffered only the mildest of recessions.

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GITTINS the Book: Sneak preview I

I was an "OK" - an officers' kid. Both my father and my mother were officers (ministers) in the Salvation Army and, until I left home at 21, the Army and its strange way of life dominated mine.

For 45 years my father was in charge of a succession of small corps, or churches, around Queensland and NSW. This meant our family moved every two years, sometimes every year.

I ended up attending five primary schools and three high schools. All that moving meant I have few friends from school days, but it was the only life I knew and I've yet to meet an OK who felt it did them any harm.

Especially for a corps officers' kid, the Army was an all-consuming religion. The whole of every Sunday was taken up attending prayer meetings ("knee drill"), open-air meetings on street corners, holiness meetings in the morning and salvation meetings in the evening, plus, for "junior soldiers", directory meetings in the morning and company meetings (Sunday school) in the afternoon.

At all of these meetings I'd wear the appropriate uniform, of course. On week nights there'd be "legion", a bit like Boys' Brigade, and as I grew older, band practice and choir practice.

The Gittinses are an Army family. Of my father's 13 siblings, three of his brothers and three of his sisters also became officers. An aunt and an uncle of my father's were officers, and six of my cousins are officers, plus a couple of their kids, making four generations in all.

My parents were strict, but never stern or preachy. They did their duty to God faithfully (my father's favourite word and highest ambition) and cheerfully, never questioning their superiors' arbitrary decisions to shift them hither and yon.

But they lived for their children and though, as products of their age, they were undemonstrative, I was never in any doubt that I was loved. I was, in any case, the baby of the family.

Even among other Salvationists, my parents were rather old-fashioned in their disapproval of "worldliness". Like all Sallies, they disapproved of drinking, smoking and any form of gambling (we were allowed to play Happy Families or snap, but never with ordinary playing cards for fear people might think we were betting), but they also disapproved of make-up, jewellery, dancing and doing anything much on Sundays bar attending meetings. Even going to the pictures was frowned upon.

This last one pinched a little with me. I remember wandering the streets alone on Saturday afternoons while my mates were at the matinee, rolling Jaffas down the aisle and watching serials and such exciting flicks as Smiley.

But no one in my family was rebellious, and nor was I. It wasn't until I was a full-time student at Newcastle University in 1967 that I began sneaking off on Wednesday afternoons to see a movie in Hunter Street.

I suspect the experience has left me with an addiction to cinema-going. People will tell you little has changed except the day: I now sneak off to the movies on Tuesday afternoons, and I usually see three films in a row.

My parents' objection to worldliness had as much to do with conservatism as spirituality. Their views had been formed long before the advent of television, so it escaped their strictures.

When TV arrived in 1956, their problem with it was purely the prohibitive cost of buying a set. I was never discouraged from joining the throng on the footpath watching telly in the windows of department stores and often went down to see the latest episode of Robin Hood outside the electrical store near our house in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Leichhardt.

When my parents retired, my sisters bought them their first telly, on which they happily watched reruns of all the movies they had disapproved of for so long.

All this may help explain why my own kids were deprived of television throughout their school years. My wife, Claudia, rang me at work one day when our first child was still very young to say our house in Redfern had been broken into and our TV stolen. Don't worry, I said, I'll pick up another set on my way home. Don't bother, she said, let's try life without it.

I explained to my son, Sandy, that we no longer had a television because someone had stolen it, and he accepted that.

We let our kids watch TV at their friends' houses, I took care to buy them the books or toys associated with TV crazes, gave them an unlimited book-buying budget and occasionally rented a telly so Sandy could watch the Rugby World Cup, but we didn't buy another set until the day our second child, Katie, finished her last Higher School Certificate exam.

Our lack of TV was something I kept dark during the two years I was on a huge, part-time retainer to the Ten Network, but I never felt my inability to watch current affairs TV left me at any disadvantage professionally. I got on with my work most nights. As for Claudia, it was her idea. And I doubt it did the kids any harm and may have meant they read and studied more.

At this late stage I'm proud of my Army heritage, proud of my father's contribution, proud of the mark the Army and my parents have left on my values and happy to talk about it - though when I do I quickly become emotional, a trait I inherited from my dad.

But growing up as an officers' kid in such a small, strangely behaved and attired sect does make you feel a bit of an oddity and an outsider - not one of the gang. Whenever my kids were embarrassed by the doings of their parents, I'd say, "Until your father turns up at your school wearing a uniform from the Crimean War, you don't have anything to complain about."

Leaving aside the "social work" of the Army that so many people know and admire, as a church it's just another Protestant denomination, formed when William Booth broke away from the Methodists in London in 1865.

The Army is very musical. I was taught to play a brass instrument at the late age of 13 and I played in successive small Army bands until not long before I became a journalist.

Although I've long been what the Army would call a backslider, all those tunes, songs and choruses have stayed part of me. I often listen to Army music as I sit writing at night and the words can move me almost to tears. On the census I still put myself down as Army.

Like my father, my mother left school at 12. She worked for a tailoress and for the rest of her life was an accomplished dressmaker, making all our uniforms, with their intricate braid and piping.

Her aunt was a Salvationist and it was at an Army meeting that my mother met young Lieutenant Gittins. She, too, travelled to the Army's training college at Petersham and in due course was commissioned as an officer.

My mother was highly intelligent but painfully shy, with no sense of direction. She left all the grocery shopping to my father (which suited him because he wanted to patronise the shopkeepers who made weekly contributions to the Army's "shop league"), and when she needed to shop for clothes, or more likely clothing material, he'd take her.

My father was a simple, trusting, hard-working, gentle man. He was the most saintly man I ever expect to meet simply because, unlike the rest of us, he never harboured an uncharitable thought about anyone.

And despite his limited schooling, my father never used bad grammar. My mother had long ago beaten it out of him.

When we were appointed back to the Newcastle area, my father's name would occasionally appear on a roster of ministers whose sermon the previous day would be reported in the Newcastle Herald's Monday morning "From the Pulpit" column. The minister was required to submit his sermon notes, which (presumably) the most junior cadet reporter would cut down for the column.

The first time my father submitted his sermon, what appeared in the Herald bore no resemblance to anything he had said, nor to anything any minister would have thought made sense. So my mother stepped in and, on future occasions, she would write out a sermon, giving one copy to the paper and another to my father.

He would preach an approximate version of it, but what appeared in the Herald would be virtually unchanged. That's how I know any skill of mine as a journalist comes from my mother.

Edited extract from Gittins by Ross Gittins (Allen & Unwin), out next week.

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Very low rates are more worrying than you think

Never thought I'd see the day when Treasury willingly surrendered the leadership of the nation's economists to the Reserve Bank, but it happened this week.

The new Treasury secretary, John Fraser, has broken a tradition lasting more than two decades to speak about the budget at a luncheon of the Australian Business Economists on the following Tuesday.

This follows the absence of Budget Statement No. 4 from last week's budget papers. It's the statement I call Treasury's sermon, but a disappointed Saul Eslake, of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, calls Treasury's "thought leadership essay".

But Dr Philip Lowe, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, personfully stepped into the breach with a ground-breaking speech about "what seems to be a transition to a world in which global interest rates are lower, at least for an extended period, than we had previously become used to".

Does that sound like a good problem to have? Don't be so sure. Interest rates are two-edged: a cost to borrowers, but income to lenders. No one enjoys suffering a drop in their income, as many oldies have been reminding us lately.

The central banks of the US, the euro zone and Japan have for some years had their official (overnight) interest rates set at or near zero. At the other extreme, the yields (interest rates) on 10-year government bonds in these countries are at "extraordinary low levels".

These very low nominal rates mean savers investing in risk-free assets (government bonds) are earning negative real rates of return – because nominal rates are lower than the rate of inflation. "They also mean the time value of money is negative," Lowe says.

Huh? Say you win $10,000 in a lottery, but are offered the choice of receiving the money now or in three years time. Which would you pick?

Most people would want the money now. If you've got it now you can either use it to buy something and enjoy what you've bought for three years, or you can lend the money to someone else for three years and be rewarded by the interest you charge them.

When you think about all that, you realise the truth of the economists' saying that "a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow". That's the time value of money. The actual amount of that value is determined by the interest rate you could earn if you had the dollar today, or the rate you'd avoid having to pay to be able to spend today a dollar you didn't have.

This analysis isn't about the effects of inflation, but about the value of the use of money over time. So the time value of money is the real interest rate (the nominal interest rate minus the expected inflation rate).

Time value means that if I had to pay you $10,000 in three years time, the amount I'd have to set aside today would be less than that because the money I set aside could be earning interest between now and then.

If I knew the interest rate was, say, 4.5 per cent, I could work out how much I had to set aside today to have $10,000 in three years time. The process of working this out is called "discounting". It's compound interest in reverse.

The initial amount you'd need turns out to be $8763, which is called the "present value" of $10,000 in three years.

All this is standard stuff for economists and business people evaluating investment projects or managing invested funds. It's deeply ingrained in the way they've been taught to think.

That's why it's quite shocking for Lowe to say the time value of money is now negative. He's saying that, for goodness knows how long, a dollar today is worth less than a dollar tomorrow.

Another implication is that there's now no compensation for postponing consumption to tomorrow – which, of course, is what savers are doing.

How do we find ourselves in this remarkable situation? The "proximate" (most obvious) cause is the actions of the big central banks and their "quantitative easing" (creation of money). But, Lowe says, central banks don't act in a vacuum, they respond to the world they find themselves in.

That world is one where more people want to save, but fewer people want to invest in new physical assets. In such a world, the interest rate, which is what "equilibrates" saving and investment, falls.

If this situation is long-lasting, Lowe says, it poses "new questions and challenges". It changes a lot of our unconscious rules about how the world works.

For a start, for people seeking to fund future liabilities – such as employers with defined-benefit pension schemes, or even just people saving to amass an adequate lump sum to retire on – it just got a lot harder. The present value of future liabilities is now higher, meaning you have to put more in to reach your target.

Second, lower rates mean the present (that is, discounted) value of a stream of future income from an asset is now higher. This, in turn, means the asset is worth more and so will now have a higher price.

This is brought about by savers, dissatisfied with the low returns on risk-free assets (government bonds), seeking the higher returns from riskier assets (say, shares of companies with high dividend rates) and thereby pushing up their prices.

Third, if the cost of (financial) capital has fallen but firms don't lower their "hurdle rates" – the expected rate of return required before potential physical investment projects get the go-ahead – then we don't get the growth in business investment spending needed to get the economy moving (and don't have increased demand for the use of savings working to get interest rates back up).

We just have to hope businesses eventually learn how the rules have changed and adjust accordingly.

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Lower taxes both a delusion and an illusion

I wish I'd been the first to say that last week's was the Don't Worry, Be Happy budget. Last year it was unrelieved cuts in government spending and earnest talk about facing up to the "budget emergency" and "debt crisis".

This year it's all good news for families and small businesspeople, with hardly a mention of deficits and debt – even though the outlook for both has worsened in the intervening period.

But if you always felt that Don't Worry, Be Happy was a slightly unreal attitude to take towards life, the same applies to the government's budgeting.

I fear the voters' much warmer response to this year's budget means we'll never see another tough budget from the Abbott government, no matter how long it survives. Which probably means the man who told us he could return the budget to surplus no sweat and vowed to "repay the debt" will never get it out of deficit.

Think of it from Tony Abbott's perspective: you try to do the right thing by making painful cuts and you get kicked in the teeth by the voters and almost lose your job. But throw the punters a few lollies at the expense of your spending restraint and avoid any noticeable nasties and suddenly you're back to being a good guy.

What conclusion would you draw? (As with all pollies, this reasoning is just a little self-serving, though we'll let it pass.)

But if that's bad, there's worse. This budget and last year's are built on a delusion. And if, between us – between the voters and the two sides that take turns to govern us – we really do end up with an uncontrollable budget and ever-growing public debt, it will be this delusion that's at the heart of the problem.

It's that an increase in taxes is unthinkable, because the Coalition stands for lower taxes, not higher. What makes this delusion so destructive is the way it strikes fear into the heart of Labor, the party that doesn't believe in lower taxes, but lacks the courage to say so.

There is an obvious and sensible conclusion to be drawn from our radically different reactions to Joe Hockey's two budgets. It's that voters' willingness to tolerate cuts in government spending is strictly limited.

That spending goes on plenty of particular programs, from which particular voters (and sometimes, powerful business interest groups) benefit. The really expensive programs benefit literally millions of voters: the Medicare subsidy on visits to doctors, the subsidies on prescription drugs, the provision of public hospitals and schools (including heavy subsidies to private schools), the pensions for the aged and invalids, and the pittances going to hundreds of thousands of unemployed and sole parents.

Seen in this light, it's hardly surprising the voters' tolerance of spending cuts is limited. And get this: there's no good reason it shouldn't be.

What is objectionable and ought to be condemned from every political pulpit in the country is the voter attitude that says don't stop government spending from growing, but don't ask us to pay more tax.

(Remember that when the media talk of spending "cuts" they rarely mean this year's spending will be less than last year's, just that spending will grow more slowly than it would have, being driven by inflation, population growth and promises to make programs more generous.)

If our politicians were honest, that's what they'd keep telling us: if you want it, sure, you can have it – but you'll have to pay for it. But our politics – particularly our election campaigns – have long been utterly dishonest, with pollies on both sides pretending to be able do the arithmetically impossible.

The main reason Abbott's efforts last year to get the budget heading back to surplus were so unfair was his insistence that all savings come from reduced spending, not increased tax collections (with the exception of the return to indexing the excise on petrol).

This is because most low and middle income-earners get their benefit from the government via the budget's spending side, whereas most high income-earners get their benefit via tax breaks on such things as superannuation, capital gains, negative gearing and family trusts.

Before last week, it seemed the government was learning the hard way what every expert had tried to tell it: that successful efforts to restore the budget in the past have always involved both spending cuts and tax increases.

In the context of the nation's "conversation" about tax reform, Hockey appealed for a bipartisan approach to the reform of super tax concessions, saying he had measures under active consideration. Labor responded by putting some modest reforms on the table.

But last week Abbott rejected any possibility of adverse super changes, preparing the way for an election fought on the claim that Labor stood for higher taxes while the Coalition stood for lower taxes. Caught with his guard down, Bill Shorten hit back by claiming Labor would cut the company tax rate for small businesses by 5 percentage points, not the government's 1.5 points.

Great. Tax as a political football. That will fix the deficit.

But for Abbott, lower taxes aren't just a delusion, they're an illusion. This budget and its claim to be heading back towards surplus are based on a huge unannounced increase in income tax caused by unabated bracket creep between now and 2020.

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Don't trust the knockers of Treasury forecasts

People keep asking me whether the budget's forecasts for the economy are "credible". Of course they are. But that's not saying much. And here's a tip: don't believe those saying that Treasury's forecasts are way too optimistic or way too pessimistic. They wouldn't know.

Treasury and the Reserve Bank – whose forecasts are essentially a joint exercise – put an enormous amount of time and expertise into their forecasts, far more than any other outfit you could name.

That doesn't mean their forecasts are likely to be right, of course. Far from it. But it does mean that, on average over time, they're likely to be less wrong than their critics.

On any particular forecast, any individual has a chance of being right while the official forecasters are wrong, just by luck. You can only remove the luck factor by comparing people's forecasting record over time.

And yet at this time every year we have smarties popping up to confidently assert that the budget forecasts are wildly optimistic or "built on artificial assumptions". They do so knowing no one will check how right their prediction proved to be.

They're entitled to their opinion. But you're entitled to say to yourself, what would they know? Some of these people have done no more than run their eye over a row of forecasts and thought, I don't believe it.

Some are sceptical because they don't know as much as they should about the standard dynamics as the economy moves through the ups and downs of the business cycle.

They forget that, when finally the economy picks up after growing below "trend" (the medium-term average rate of growth) for a number of years, it's likely to grow at rates well above trend for a year or two as it takes advantage of all the accumulated idle capacity. The hard part is picking the timing of the turning point.

The I-know-better brigade rarely claim the forecasts are wildly pessimistic – which they sometime prove to be – because they're pessimists and knockers, often with their own axe to grind.

The smarties never preface their pronouncements by admitting that their own forecasting record is just as bad as Treasury's, probably worse. No, they just assert that Treasury's wrong and they're right.

That's why I'll always fly to the defence of the official forecasters. They're the only honest players in this game. They regularly measure the accuracy of their forecasts and publish the results. They regularly remind users that, given their poor record, their forecasts are little more than an educated guess.

To make the point even clearer, in this year's budget papers Treasury has collected its usual warnings, qualifications, disclosures and "sensitivity analysis" into a single new section of the budget papers. It starts by admitting that "the forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty".

For these purposes, Treasury has combined its forecasts for the financial year just ending and the coming year to give a forecast average annual growth rate of "around 2.5 per cent". On the basis of its record of forecasting errors, it says there's a 70 per cent probability that the actual growth rate will be somewhere between 1.75 per cent and 3.5 per cent. Wow.

The critics tell us that Treasury's forecasts are based on many assumptions. That's true. But it's always true and is just as true of its critics' forecasting models (assuming they bothered to do any modelling before shooting from lip). Assumptions are inescapable.

Some key assumptions are for the exchange rate, interest rates and world oil prices. Treasury takes their average in the period before its forecasts were finalised in April, and assumes this will be their average over the forecast year.

Last week the smarties noted that some of those prices had already moved away from the assumption and concluded that the budget's forecasts had been invalidated already. Nonsense. Who can be sure how those prices will have moved – and thus averaged – by this time next year?

In any case, just because some assumptions prove lower than expected doesn't mean others won't prove higher than expected and thus cancel them out.

Though it's human nature to pretend otherwise, the simple truth is that no one knows what the future holds for the economy: it may be about to take off, about to collapse or about to stay as it has been. We can all have our opinions, but no one can say I'm right and you're wrong.

Point is, we can't be sure Treasury's forecasts will be right, but nor can we be sure they'll be wrong. They may be no more than educated guesses, but they're as plausible as anyone else's.

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Media get budget wrong

As an exercise in media manipulation, this week's budget scores top marks. The government's spin doctors managed to convince the media it was a "stimulatory budget" when it was actually mildly contractionary.

With financial markets trading virtually continuously, the old need to lock the media up on budget day until the markets had closed disappeared decades ago. The only reason for continuing the practice is to maximise the government's ability to influence the media's initial reaction to its budget.

It does this by keeping journalists locked up for six hours, during which time the only experts they can approach for opinion and clarification are Treasury and Finance officers. Then you let the journos out just before deadline, when it's too late to contact independent experts.

The theory is that influencing the media's initial reaction is half the battle in influencing the electorate's ultimate reaction. Didn't work last year, of course.

If you wonder why governments habitually leak or announce so many of the budget's measures ahead of time, it's all part of the media manipulation. You announce measures you know will be popular so they get more attention than they would if you announced them all together on budget night.

You announce unpopular measures ahead of time to soften voters up and also so the media will regard them as old news on budget night and thus won't say much about them.

This year, the good news announced early was the changes to childcare subsidies, plus the decisions to make savings in the cost of pensions and Medicare in much less painful ways than had been proposed in last year's budget.

But you always save a bit of good news to act as the "cherry", taking care not to breathe a word of it in advance. Making this the only measure the media regards as "new" ensures they make it the centrepiece of their coverage. And, of course, you've made sure it's good news.

This week the cherry was the "Growing Jobs and Small Business package". And, boy, didn't the media go to town. The cut in the rate of tax imposed on small business was terrific, but the plan to allow multiple asset purchases of up to $20,000 each to be "written off against tax" was mind-blowing.

The next day's headlines showed how easily the media were manipulated: Joe's Jumpstart, Kickstarter, and Road to Recovery?

Don't be misled. The 1.5 percentage-point cut in the company tax rate for small businesses is itself small. The equivalent cut for unincorporated businesses will yield a maximum saving of less than $20 a week.

And the two-year offer of an immediate 100 per cent write-off for newly purchased business assets costing less than $20,000 each is nothing like the rort-inducing "bonanza" imagined by innumerate journos and economists who don't know as much accounting as they should.

You don't get up to $20,000 a pop taken off your tax bill - making the asset essentially free - you get it taken off your taxable income, meaning the taxman picks up 30 or 40 per cent of the cost, leaving you to pay the rest.

In any case, the cost of assets purchased for business purposes has always been 100 per cent deductible. The difference is that usually this "depreciation allowance" is spread over five years or so, whereas this special deal accelerates the full deduction to the end of the first year.

So it will probably induce a noticeable increase in small business investment spending, but that's unlikely to be big enough to make much difference to the economy's rate of growth.

It's a classic example of the things governments do when they're trying to apply fiscal stimulus, being similar to a measure in Kevin Rudd's stimulus package of 2009 after the global financial crisis.

But note the measure's downside: because it's temporary, its main effect will be to draw forward into the next two financial years spending that would otherwise have occurred in subsequent years, leaving a vacuum in those years. And because most motor vehicles and business equipment are imported, much of the increased investment spending will "leak" into imports.

Another part of the hype is the government's claim that small businesses are "the engine room of the economy". Nonsense. Big business is. As the budget's fine print admits, small business accounts for only about 38 per cent of the workforce and about a third of production.

The most important point, however, is that just because a budget contains a few small but sexy measures doesn't make it a "stimulatory budget" to anyone but a journo after a good headline.

To an economist, you have to put the few stimulatory measures into the context of the net effect of all the new measures taken in the budget.

When you do that you find they are expected to add $2.2 billion (or 0.13 per cent of gross domestic product) to the budget deficit in the coming financial year, but subtract $1.6 billion from the deficit over the five years to 2018-19.

Either way, the expected net effect of the budget's measures is too tiny to matter. That's the old, strict Keynesian way to determine the "stance" of fiscal policy adopted in the budget.

The Reserve Bank's way of determining the budget's overall effect on the economy (which adds to the above change in the discretionary or "structural" component of the deficit the expected change in the "cyclical" component caused by the operation of the budget's "automatic stabilisers") shows that, measured as a proportion of GPD, the coming year's deficit is expected to be 0.5 percentage points lower than for the financial year just ending, with expected falls of 0.6 points, 0.7 points and 0.4 points in the following years.

In my book, a change of 0.5 percentage points is right on the border between insignificant and significant. That makes the budget only mildly contractionary.

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Budget has reverse weaknesses, strengths to last year's

This is the budget of a badly rattled government that has put self-preservation ahead of economic responsibility. It will do much to restore Tony Abbott's political fortunes, but next to nothing to return the budget to surplus or hasten the economy's return to strong growth.

What it's not is "dull". Turns out, when Abbott promised a dull budget what he meant was one that was the opposite of last year's.

This budget will be incessantly compared with Joe Hockey's first attempt because that is its almost sole objective: to have the reverse effect of last year's.

Last year, the budget's overriding goal was to chart a path back to eventual budget surplus. By delaying the cuts in the deficit until after the economy was expected to have recovered, it won high marks for its management of the economy.

It was a budget designed to please the (big) Business Council.

Its big problem was that most of the measures taken to effect that objective were judged by voters to be blatantly unfair, hitting low and middle income-earners but not the well-off. And it broke a host of election promises.

This was why so much of it failed to get through the Senate.

Another problem was the crudeness of its measures. They did little to make government spending more efficient, but simply shifted a lot of the cost off onto pensioners, the unemployed, patients, university students and state governments.

Last year's budget had no giveaways. Its only "winners" were people who weren't hit. This budget will leave many low and middle-income families better off - although most of its key measures won't take effect until 2017.

Its big measures are reworkings of cuts proposed last year. The planned GP co-payment has been replaced by savings to be imposed on drug companies and chemists, with reform of overgenerous fees to doctors to follow.

The planned move to less-generous indexing of the age pension has been replaced by a tighter assets test, which will leave some pensioners better off, but prevent others from receiving a part-pension.

The promised more generous paid parental leave scheme has been abandoned, with the savings used to pay part of the cost of a reform of childcare subsidies, which leaves low and middle-income families better off. Some high-income parents will get less.

Despite some serious flaws in the parental leave and childcare arrangements, the various reworked measures are not only fairer, but of much higher quality and careful design. This is a big improvement on last year.

But the reworked measures will do a lot less to reduce the budget deficit over time. Overall, the budget's measures actually slow the return to surplus by more than $9 billion over four years..

More seriously, this budget does far too little to bolster spending on infrastructure while tightening up on recurrent spending.

Last year's timid "asset recycling initiative" has not been supplemented adequately at a time when the Reserve Bank's ever-more ineffective efforts to use cuts in interest rates to resuscitate the economy need all the help they can get.

The increased money for infrastructure in Western Australia and Northern Australia and other bits and pieces won't make a big enough difference.

The announced crackdown on profit-shifting by foreign multinational companies sounds impressive, but how much tax it actually raises remains to be seen.

If last year's budget was intended to please big business, this one purports to do wonders for small business. But its various new concessions are likely to do more to please small businesses than to transform their investment spending.

Don't be misled by all the happy talk of an improving economy and all the jobs to be created. We can always hope, but there is little reason to believe the budget will do much to improve business confidence.

From the perspective of economic management, this budget represents dereliction of duty.

And there's one respect in which nothing has changed: the tax perks of the well-off - superannuation concessions, negative gearing, discounted tax on capital gains, family trusts - remain untouched.

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