Don't believe all you're told about bracket creep

Beware of treasurers promising to protect you from the ravages of bracket creep. They're like Mafia bosses promising to protect you from robbers and thieves. Maybe they're offering something nice, or maybe they're working some kind of con.

Joe Hockey's speech about tax reform on Monday was more an advert than a policy announcement. He said the government would have to do something about the evil of bracket creep, but didn't say what or when, nor how it would be paid for.

The firmest we got was a hint that the Abbott government would go to the election next year promising a tax reform package involving a cut in income tax.

Hockey explained that "bracket creep occurs when people are pushed into higher tax brackets as a result of inflation and rising wages". Not quite right, but near enough.

Hockey warned that the average income earner on about $77,000 a year is just below the second highest tax bracket of 37¢ in the dollar, which kicks in above $80,000.

He estimates that, if nothing is done in the next two years, about 300,000 people will move into that bracket. And if nothing were done in the next 10 years, more than 40 per cent of taxpayers would be in the top two tax brackets. (Remember that the rate you pay on the last part of your income is much higher than the average rate you pay on all your income. Those on just over $80,000 pay an average rate of 22¢ in the dollar.)

The truth is, all treasurers have form when it comes to bracket creep. It can be prevented easily by increasing the four bracket limits once a year in line with the inflation rate. Malcolm Fraser and John Howard tried this in the late 1970s, but soon gave up.

Why? Because it delivered annual tax cuts that were too small and too mechanical for voters to notice and be grateful for. Much better to let bracket creep rip for three years or so, then have a bigger tax cut just before or after an election.

Every year that bracket limits aren't raised, the treasurer is knowingly letting brackets creep up, unless he (or one day, she) grants discretionary tax cuts. With help from Wayne Swan, Peter Costello delivered eight such tax cuts in a row between 2003 and 2010.

Those discretionary cuts cut a lot deeper and cost a lot more than eight years of "tax indexation" as we called it. They were part of the excesses of the resources boom and turned out to be far more generous than we could afford – as we realised after falling coal and iron ore prices started slashing company tax collections.

This is why, since 2010, successive governments have let bracket creep rip. They're trying to increase income tax collections so they play their part in getting the budget back into surplus. We've had our fun, now we're suffering the hangover.

This means the man who now professes to be so concerned to end bracket creep is the same man who used projections of years of further creep in this year's budget to prove he was getting on top of the deficit.

If you think that sounds a bit sus, try this. The low and middle-income earners suffering most from bracket creep at present, weren't the taxpayers who gained most from the eight tax cuts – those were the high income-earners (such as yours truly).

If alleviating bracket creep was Hockey's true motivation for wanting tax cuts, his response would be simple: leave the rates of income tax unchanged, just raise the bracket limits by as much as you could afford.

But in his next breath Hockey was arguing that the top tax rate – 45¢ in the dollar – which cuts in when incomes hit $180,000 a year, was far too high and needed cutting.

See the scope for trickery? Justify tax cuts by telling the majority of voters on low and middle incomes how tough they're doing it, then give most relief to high-income earners again. Lawyers call it "bait and switch".

Hockey is right in arguing that (thanks mainly to the bias in the eight tax cuts), bracket creep hits low and middle-income earners proportionately harder that it hits high-income earners, thus making bracket creep "regressive".

But this raises an obvious question: how would the tax cuts be paid for? Could we be sure the cure wasn't worse than the disease? Assuming Hockey wouldn't have the effrontery to allow them simply to add to the budget deficit, one way would be for their cost to be covered by (massive) cuts in government spending.

We know from his first budget that this would rebound on the very low and middle-income earners he was purporting to help.

But it's a reasonable bet Hockey is hoping for a deal in which the cost of the cuts in income tax is covered by an increase in the rate of the goods and services tax.

Trouble is, the GST is also regressive. And a recent paper by Professor Patricia Apps, of the University of Sydney, demonstrates that an increase in the GST would be more regressive than the bracket creep it corrected. Why? Because it would hit all those people whose incomes were below the income tax threshold.

Beware of treasurers promising to protect you from bracket creep.

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Libs deserve share of reform credit

I am a career-long admirer of Paul Keating. He opened our economy to the world, dragging us into the era of globalisation. Of the 13 treasurers I've observed in my career, I judge him to be far and away the best – though he did have his failings.

But last week Keating came out fighting when John Howard argued that the Coalition opposition of the time also deserved praise "because it gave bipartisan support to so many of [Keating's] reforms".

Keating objected to "a creeping part of the orthodoxy of late that the reformation of Australia's financial, product and labour markets . . . was not executed by the Hawke and Keating governments but was some kind of project undertaken with the active co-operation of the then Liberal-National opposition".

"Nothing could be further from the truth."

Sorry, but Howard has a point.

It's true there was no overt co-operation between Labor and the Coalition, nor any atmosphere of sweetness and light. The Liberals never said anything good about Labor and always found plenty to criticise and oppose. To the casual observer, it was adversarial politics as usual.

In particular, the Libs vigorously opposed almost all of Labor's tax reforms, particularly the taxes on fringe benefits and capital gains, the compulsory superannuation levy and even the restoration of the assets test for the age pension.

They also vigorously opposed Medicare and Labor's Accord with the union movement.

Howard may be happy to praise the Hawke and Keating reforms at this late stage, but he didn't at the time, nor during the almost 12 years he was prime minister. This is an old trick: praising long departed opponents as a way of criticising the present incumbents.

I don't doubt that, had a Howard-led government been elected in 1983, it wouldn't have instigated all the reforms Keating made in the following 13 years. It would have lacked the vision, drive, courage and sense of urgency Keating had – not to mention the support of its Labor opposition.

Keating is no doubt right in saying his biggest problem in pushing reform was getting the Labor caucus and the unions lined up behind him. In this the Accord was a great help, meaning ACTU secretary Bill Kelty deserves his share of the reform credit.

The Labor faithful may regard Keating as a saint up there with Whitlam today, but at the time they thought of him as a turncoat.

But the fact is Howard is right in listing all the reforms the Coalition, under the influence particularly of him and his former adviser, Professor John Hewson, did not oppose: privatisation of Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, deregulation of bank lending rates, floating the dollar, admitting foreign banks, ending import quotas and virtual phasing out of tariffs, and introducing the HECS scheme for university fees.

Urged on by Hewson, Howard instigated the whole financial deregulation project by commissioning the Campbell report. He implemented as many of its recommendations as Malcolm Fraser would let him, before the Fraser government was swept from office.

It's noteworthy that nothing Keating went on to do was mentioned in the 1983 election campaign. In opposition, Keating joined the rest of Labor in vigorously attacking financial deregulation.

In office, he changed his tune, used a quickie report by the banker Vic Martin to sanctify the Campbell proposals, and proceeded to implement them all.

Howard is right in saying the most politically courageous reform was ending the protection of manufacturing. Until then, protectionism had been a bipartisan policy for decades, strongly supported by business and the unions. It remains supported by the public to this day.

It was usual for protection to be stepped up during recessions. But in the depths of the recession of the early '90s – our worst since the Depression – Keating actually instigated the second stage of its removal.

Never was there a better opportunity for the Libs to rally the nation against this monstrous act of folly. By then they were being led by Hewson and his criticism remains burnt on my brain: Labor should have gone further.

Keating says he never worried about the Libs, never even spoke to them about things. I believe him. What I don't believe is his implication that, had they opposed his reforms, nothing would have been any different.

In the key areas Howard listed, Keating knew his opponents would not attempt to score points against him, that the interest groups and voters adversely affected would have no political flag to rally under. This hugely strengthened his hand.

It was a unique period in our economic history, for which the Libs deserve their share of credit.

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More to infrastructure than just spending more

Everyone knows our federal and state governments haven't been spending nearly as much as they should on public infrastructure. But, sorry, the full story isn't nearly that simple.

Adequate and well-functioning infrastructure has an important role to play in the efficiency of the economy by raising the productivity (productiveness) of our labour.

According to figures quoted by Adrian Hart, of BIS Shrapnel, we went through much of the 1980s and '90s with little increase in annual federal and state spending on infrastructure. This, no doubt, is how we got it into our heads that we have a huge "backlog" of investment in infrastructure.

Over the noughties, however, annual spending just about doubled, reaching a peak of $76 billion in 2009-10. So don't think we haven't been spending a lot – we have.

Since then, however, annual spending has actually fallen in real terms. By 12 per cent to 2013-14 and, according to Hart's estimates, by another 10 per cent in 2014-15.

Now, the macro-economic commentators are right when they say this is crazy at a time when the mining construction boom is coming to an end and leaving a vacuum in the heavy engineering construction industry and the long-term interest rates paid by governments are at record lows.

But this is where the story gets interesting. As the Productivity Commission says in a recent report, "not all public infrastructure supports productivity and generates economic growth and wellbeing". Poorly selected projects may actually make things worse.

As the Grattan Institute put it more bluntly, "the capacity to waste money is a serious risk for infrastructure, given the very large amounts of money involved".

Get it? If we take the attitude that more is always better, and more is never enough, the pollies will happily spend more of our money, but much of it will be wasted.

So just as important as making sure our infrastructure spending is adequate is making sure what we do spend is spent wisely. But how?

First point, at a time when budgets are tight, governments face a temptation to underspend on maintenance. This can shorten the useful life of existing infrastructure, bringing forward the need to spend a fortune building a new one.

The trouble here is that maintenance spending is politically invisible, whereas opening a new facility offers visible, concrete proof of progress on the pollies' watch, gives them a ribbon-cutting photo op and leaves their name on the plaque for decades to come.

Next, consumers and businesses often have to pay a price for the services of infrastructure – for power and water, for instance. Where no price is charged – road use, for instance – it often should be.

If you undercharge you get excessive demand for the service, which prompts you to build more infrastructure than you really need. Overcharge, however, and you get suppressed demand and don't build as much infrastructure as would be in our interests.

The correct price will incorporate the "social" costs involved in the activity, such as the cost its users impose on the rest of the community arising from its adverse effect on the environment.

So get infrastructure pricing right before you rush off and build more stuff.

Case in point: part of the reason for the recent fall in infrastructure spending is the fall in spending by the electricity poles-and-wires businesses now the regulation of their prices has been tightened up.

Before that, they were being granted big price rises to allow them to gold-plate their networks to cope with imagined future peak-load problems, which weren't going to happen and, in any case, should have been solved by the use of smart meters. This stuff-up was brought to you by the nation's economic reformers.

Finally, pick your projects carefully by undertaking rigorous, published comparisons of each project's benefits and costs. The commission says it "found numerous examples of poor value for money arising from inadequate project selection and prioritisation".

To ensure you pick projects with the highest return to the community as a whole, you need to assess social benefits and costs. That is, you also take account of benefits other than the revenue stream the project would generate so as to include any positive or negative effects on economic activity, social activities and the environment.

The point is to analyse information in a logical, consistent way and encourage decision-makers to consider all the costs and benefits of a project rather than focusing on just a few. You should be evaluating the other ways of achieving the same objective – recycling water rather than building a desalination plant, for instance.

Some important costs or benefits may be hard to quantify. You should quantify as much as you can, then compare this result with the unquantifiable factors, so they don't get overlooked.

As a general rule, you should rank all potential projects according to the extent to which their benefits exceed their costs, then implement the most beneficial until you've hit your budget limit.

The experience of the feds' review body, Infrastructure Australia, is that smaller projects (such as fixing rail crossings or traffic hotspots) tend to have much higher benefit-cost ratios than big projects (such as expressways), many of which have benefits only marginally exceeding costs.

But the commission finds that governments prefer the bigger projects because the private firms participating in public-private partnerships need bigger projects to cover their fixed costs.

Unfortunately, there can be ulterior motives: to get the debt associated with the project off the government's balance sheet and onto the private sector's. Or because fixing traffic lights doesn't impress the punters the way opening a new expressway does.

The commission doesn't say it, but what we need is to take an outfit like Infrastructure Australia and give it the statutory independence to conduct rigorous evaluations and make them public, so all of us can know whenever the pollies are planning to do something crazy.

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We can't divorce the economy from the environment

In case you haven't noticed, a lot of economists are very concerned about Tony Abbott's choice of target for the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, to be taken to the international climate change conference at Paris in December.

But if you think that means they believe Abbott's target is too tough and will do too much damage to the economy, you've got the wrong end of the stick.

Most would be likely to believe the target should be more ambitious, and few would be concerned that such a target would do significant economic harm. Conventional economic modelling almost invariably shows the loss of economic growth would be surprisingly small, almost trivial.

They'd be more concerned to ensure the instruments used to achieve the target were those likely to do so at the lowest cost in terms of economic growth forgone. That's why few would have approved of Abbott's decision to abandon Julia Gillard's hybrid carbon tax/emissions trading scheme and replace it with "direct action" payments from the budget.

I'm not claiming every economist thinks this way, of course; just the great majority. There are a few exceptions, naturally, just as you can find the odd scientist who disagrees with the overwhelming majority view that global warming is real and caused by humans.

If you hadn't noticed, consider the leading part played by economists in urging that Australia be at the forefront of international efforts to reduce emissions. First, the various reports by Professor Ross Garnaut​, then the chairman of the independent Climate Change Authority, Bernie Fraser – former Reserve Bank governor and former secretary of the Treasury – then leading non-government experts such as Professor Frank Jotzo​ and Professor Warwick McKibbin, both of the Australian National University.

Note, too, the role of Dr Martin Parkinson, who worked first on John Howard's emissions trading scheme, then on Labor's as the first head of the Department of Climate Change. When Parkinson moved on to become head of Treasury, he was succeeded by another Treasury chap, Blair Comley​.

In fact, there were so many senior Treasury people at the top of the Climate Change department, it was a virtual outpost of Treasury. Both Parkinson and Comley were sacked as one of Abbott's first acts on becoming Prime Minister. Presumably, they were punished for caring too much about global warming.

Remember too that, internationally, both the emissions trading scheme and the carbon and other pollution taxes are inventions of economists. A trading scheme was used with great effect by the Americans in their efforts to reduce acid rain.

Two characteristics of economists stand out when it comes to climate change. First, they accept what the scientists are telling us without argument. Unlike some, they're not disposed to explain to the experts where they're getting it wrong.

Second, they don't believe we can go on thinking "the economy" can be kept in a separate box to "the environment". There are major interactions between the two that can't be ignored.

But, as a journalist, I'm not a member of the economists' union, so to speak, so let me stop describing their majority views and give you mine. My thinking has been influenced by the more radical opinions of yet another economist, Professor Herman Daly, of the University of Maryland.

In defending his latest target, Abbott pledged he'd never put the environment ahead of the economy and jobs. This separate-box thinking is like saying you'd never put staying alive ahead of going to work. Lose your life and whether you get to work or not hardly matters.

Daly says the economy is a "wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". Whether at a national or global level, the economy exists inside the environment – the ecosystem. It's a box inside a circle, if you like.

The point is, all human activity – all our producing and consuming – depends directly on the natural environment. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the shelters we build and the energy we use all come from the ecosystem that surrounds us.

Much of our economic activity involves misusing, overusing and abusing the natural environment. We've done great damage to our soil, rivers and aquifers, we've destroyed much habitat and many species, and now the world's overuse of fossil fuels is playing havoc with the climate.

We can be divided into those who want to do what we can to stop the destruction and start on the clean-up, and those who want to put it out of mind and keep on as we are, leaving the bill to be picked up by the next generation.

The latter group will always justify their insouciance by claiming to be putting jobs first. Yeah, sure. For the next few years, at least.

Let me be honest with you. I don't believe those modelling exercises seeming to prove that the economic costs of acting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be minor. Such results are a product of the assumptions built into all conventional economic models that, whatever shock the economy is hit by, after 20 years or so, everything will be back to where it would have been.

So, the cost in terms of growth and jobs forgone might be greater than we're being told. But of one thing I'm sure: the longer we leave it, the higher those costs will be.

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Shift to services is boosting exports and jobs

For economy watchers, the most fascinating game in town is the continuing effort to explain why employment and unemployment are performing better than you'd expect while growth in the economy has been so modest.

Despite the Bureau of Statistics' latest national accounts showing that real gross domestic product grew by just 2.3 per cent over the year to March, its smoothed seasonally adjusted labour force figures show employment growing by 2.1 per cent – or 240,000 jobs – over the year to July, with the rate of unemployment seeming to have stabilised at about 6 per cent.

So far in the Reserve Bank's efforts to explain this puzzle, we've heard that it's probably a consequence of slower than expected population growth, helped by surprisingly weak growth in wage rates.

But now an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Christopher Kent, has used a speech to the Economic Society in Brisbane to add a third factor: the employment consequences of the economy's accelerated shift from goods to services.

Recent figures show that total population growth has slowed from 1.8 per cent in 2012 to 1.4 per cent in 2014. This slowdown is mainly the result of a decline in the rate of net immigration as skilled workers on temporary 457 visas attracted by the resources boom leave for home when their jobs end, and Kiwi workers go home or stay home.

Slower population growth means slower growth in demand but, equally, slower growth in the population of working age and thus in the economy's supply-side potential or "trend" rate of growth.

This has prompted the Reserve to lower its growth forecasts for 2016 a fraction but eliminate its earlier forecast of rising unemployment, leaving it little changed over the next 18 months.

Since the working population hasn't grown as fast as had been expected, this implies the improvement in the productivity of labour has been a fraction greater than first thought.

Last week's figures from the bureau show wage rates rising just 2.3 per cent over the year to June. Wage growth has slowed to a similar extent as happened in the recession of the early 1990s, even though unemployment has risen by much less than it did then.

Kent says wages may have become more flexible over time and there may have been some general decline in the bargaining power of labour.

Whatever, "low wage growth across the economy has enabled firms to employ more labour than would otherwise have been the case".

But Kent says his sense is that "low wage growth only goes some way to explaining the recent pick-up in labour demand".

Now the likely role of a change in the composition of economic activity. Consumer spending, home building and net exports of services (that is, exports of services minus imports of services) have grown reasonably strongly over the past year, even though overall GDP growth has slowed a fraction.

Surveys suggest that business conditions for firms providing services to households have improved greatly since mid-2013. Conditions for firms providing services to businesses are above average. But those for firms producing or distributing goods remain below average.

These survey results line up reasonably well with employment growth in the three sectors. They also fit with the continuing weakness in business investment spending.

Kent's figuring shows, on average, each worker in the household services sector requires the backing of only about $100,000 worth of capital equipment, whereas each worker in the goods sector (including mining) requires capital equipment of almost $400,000.

Get it? If the fastest-growing parts of the economy are labour-intensive, they can grow and create more jobs without this requiring the same degree of increase in business investment spending and, hence, the same degree of overall growth in the economy.

This compositional change in demand from goods to services – from capital-intensive to labour-intensive industries – is a long-term trend.

But Kent argues there is also a cyclical element to it, as mining investment unwinds and growth in housing construction and consumption – which is increasingly dominated by services – picks up.

Another part of it is that the fall in the dollar has encouraged Australians and foreigners to direct more of their spending to Australian tourism, education and business services.

Over the past three years, the extra workers employed in service industries have outnumbered the extra workers employed in the goods sector by five to one.

It adds up to two things. With slower population growth, we can grow more slowly without being worse off materially. And we don't need to grow as fast to get unemployment falling.

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Micro reform: what Treasury wants to change

Under its newish secretary, John Fraser, Treasury has a new slogan. It is proud to be "fiscally conservative, market-oriented and reform-driven". So just what reform does Treasury advocate?

Well, in a speech last week Fraser spelt it out. But first he noted that the key element of market-oriented reform is that it almost always involves heightening competition. He illustrated the point by summarising what happened during the golden age of micro-economic reform in the 1980s and '90s.

When business speaks of the need for Australian firms to be more competitive, it usually means  the government should do something that makes it easier for firms to compete with their foreign rivals.

But this is the opposite of what economists mean when they see heightened competition as the key driver of improved economic performance. They mean Australian firms should be forced to improve their own performance by exposing them to greater competition with other Aussie firms and by making it easier for foreign firms to compete with them.

As Fraser explains, competition is at the heart of how market economies are organised. "Competitive markets generally deliver benefits for all Australians in a way that sheltered markets fail to do so," he says.

"Effective competition in our economy is a key part of its strength and dynamism. Competitive markets benefit consumers by putting downward pressure on prices.

"And over time, competitive pressures drive innovation and investment in new technologies and the development of new products and quality services that meet the needs of consumers. This process of innovation is what drives economic growth and improvements in living standards in the long term."

The modern era of opening Australia to greater pressure from the world economy began when Gough Whitlam cut import tariffs in 1973, he says.

Successive tariff cuts in the '80s and '90s "put Australian manufacturing under increased competitive pressure but, behind the border, changes gave manufacturers flexibility to respond".

Significant among these changes were financial market deregulation and the move to enterprise bargaining, as well as the oft-forgotten reductions to the top personal marginal tax rate from a 60 per cent in 1985-86, to 47 per cent in 1990-91, Fraser says.

The process of reform culminated with the agreement across all levels of government to form the "national competition policy" that began in 1995 and ran through to 2005.

Government businesses were restructured to make them more commercially focused. The electricity, gas, water and rail sectors were transformed.

Legislation was reviewed so it enhanced rather than restricted competition. And a national access regime was established for essential infrastructure. That is, the public or private owners of monopoly networks were obliged to make them available to competitors at reasonable prices.

"Where creativity was once stifled by regulation, competition in product and service markets drove management to change work practices. A liberalised financial sector and a sound macro-economic environment supported strong investment."

Fraser says this era of huge changes offers three lessons on how to get policy reforms accepted.

"First, it was a holistic set of structural reforms. This is important because winners and losers differed and all Australians benefited from at least some of these reforms.

Second, in order to achieve reform we built a political consensus and, more importantly, a community consensus that things had to change and that a delay would make matters worse.

Third, the business community – both large and small – was a big part of this changing culture.
"Managers, no longer distracted by currying [for] government protection, were better able to focus outwards on new markets and inwards on cost savings."

So what's on Treasury's latest reform to-do list? Tax reform, for one. Then there's the financial system. Australia's banking system is relatively concentrated by international standards and the Murray financial system inquiry recommended that regulators increase the emphasis on competition relative to their other objectives.

Then, labour market reform. "I am heartened by Peter Harris and the Productivity Commission's report on workplace relations. Genuine reform  ... can be expected to have positive effects on employment and productivity and to reduce business compliance costs."

Next, competition laws. "It is important that firms that have market power are not able to use that position to exclude competitors and potential competitors. This is why we have competition laws."

The review of competition  by Professor Ian Harper found that current  laws need to be overhauled to make them fit for purpose.

"There remain substantial restrictions on who can supply goods and services, including: professional licensing requirements, liquor and gambling regulation, media and broadcasting restrictions , and the well-known issues of pharmacies and taxis," Fraser says.

"There are restrictions on what can be supplied through product standards, agricultural marketing boards, parallel import restrictions and intellectual property protections. And restrictions on where and when supply can occur: air service agreements, retail trading hours restrictions, and planning and zoning rules."

Fraser concedes that the goal here should not always be deregulation. Regulations are often justified to pursue social goals. "But these goals should be approached through better regulation that doesn't have the side effect of curtailing competition.

"To my mind, foremost among this list, for immediate economic bang for the buck, is planning and zoning."

Planning and zoning systems may create excessive barriers to the entry of new businesses  by limiting  number and size of outlets and  types of business models permissible.

"In other areas, the challenge for governments is not so much to reform regulation as to make way for 'digital disruption'. Uber  connects passengers with drivers and AirBnB  connects travellers with spaces.

"We should welcome competition here too – governments should not be too quick to assume they will always be better regulators than the private sector."

Clearly, Fraser has an ambitious agenda. It's different to mine, but sometimes my duty is to make sure you know what the econocrats are thinking.

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Our poor treatment of mental illness is costing us

Don't take this as implying that I condone the misuse of taxpayers' money, but the almighty to-do over politicians' "entitlements" reminds me that small things annoy small minds.

If you think the odd unnecessary $5000 helicopter ride constitutes the worst of the wastage of our money – or that it makes much difference to the $430 billion the federal government spends each year – you haven't done enough thinking.

As several people reminded me at the Byron Bay Writers' Festival at the weekend, such matters as politicians' pay and perks pale into insignificance compared with the threat to our way of life posed by climate change and other continuing environmental damage.

My conscience tells me that, for as long our response to that threat remains so inadequate – including our inadequate contribution to the success of the Paris climate change conference in December – I shouldn't be writing about anything less consequential.

But we ought to be able to juggle more than one problem at a time, and although climate change is our most pressing problem, it's far from our only one.

One combined threat and opportunity that 'coptergate prevented from getting the attention it deserved last week is one we should have been on to long ago. It was raised in a noteworthy speech to the National Press Club by Professor Allan Fels, now chairman of the National Mental Health Commission (and with a family interest in the topic).

Fels' point was that we've been making a hash of mental health for ages, but that if we got our act together, we could not only reduce the misery of up to 3.7 million Australians, but eventually do everyone else a favour.

Fels is, of course, a professor of economics. So he spoke with authority when he argued that mental health is not just a significant social issue – although that should be enough to make us pay attention – it's a significant economic problem as well.

"Mental health is a significant problem for our economy – as significant as, often more significant than, tax or micro-economic reform," he says. (More significant than tax? Not possible.)

"Many people do not get the support they need, and governments get poor returns on substantial investment. The economic or gross domestic product gains from better mental health would dwarf most of the gains – often modest ones – being talked about in current economic reform debates."

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the average overall cost of mental health problems to developed countries is about 4 per cent of GDP. In Australia, this would equate to more than $60 billion a year, or about $4000 for each person who lodges a tax return, or more than $10,000 a family.

Those costs include the direct costs of treatment, plus the indirect costs, such as disability support pensions, imprisonment, accommodation and so on, plus the costs of lost production and income, plus the costs to carers and families and their reduced participation in the workforce.

But just what is the mental illness we're talking about? Of the 3.7 million Australians estimated to have mental health problems in any year, 3 million have a mild to moderate condition, such as anxiety or depression at a clinical level.

It's because so many people with "common" mental disorders are employed – and unemployed – that mental ill-health has such big implications for economic production and productivity. It causes about 12 million days of reduced productivity each year, arising from absenteeism and "presenteeism" (being at work but not getting much done).

The remaining 700,000 people have persistent complex and chronic illness, such as schizophrenia or severe depression.

Seven people die every day from suicide, about double the road toll. But while the number of deaths on our roads has diminished substantially, there has been no major reduction in the suicide rate over the past decade, we're told.

Death from suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is twice that of non-Indigenous Australians.

Fels says there are excellent examples of suicide prevention, treatment, follow-up and "postvention" in Australia.

Even so, the government review conducted by Fels concluded that much of the $10 billion a year the feds spend on mental health "is neither effective nor efficient".

Almost 90 per cent of it is spend on "downstream programs", such as income support for sufferers, payments to support state hospitals and mental health-related medical and pharmaceutical benefit payments.

"Much of this is payment for failure, payment for failure to treat the problems early and cost-effectively," Fels says.

"I believe this heavy expenditure could be reduced with greater emphasis and investment in prevention, early detection, a focus on recovery from mental ill-health and the prevention of suicide."

If we enable people to live contributing lives – to have relationships, stable housing, and to maximise participation in education, employment and the community more broadly – we will help build economically and socially thriving communities and a more productive Australia, Fels says.

I'm not a believer that things we should be doing for social or cultural reasons must first be asked to justify themselves on economic grounds. We're rich enough to afford to look after those among us with problems, and to pursue knowledge for its own sake.

But the argument that doing better on mental health would improve economic outcomes seems unassailable.

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Don’t be sure lower penalties mean more jobs

The argument that reducing or eliminating weekend penalty wage rates would have great economic benefits is obvious to all business people and economists – but not to me. I think it's fallacious.

The received wisdom was well expressed by Anna McPhee, of the Retail Council: "The rebalancing of penalty rates to reflect the needs of the modern economy will mean retailers can create jobs to meet increased consumer demand, which in turn will benefit the economy more broadly."

She was responding, of course, to the proposal in the Productivity Commission's draft report on Australia's Workplace Relations Framework that Sunday penalty rates in the hospitality, entertainment, retailing, restaurant and cafe industries be cut to the same level as Saturday penalty rates.

Even the commission goes along with the received wisdom: "Excessive penalty rates for Sundays reduce hours worked, mean unemployment is higher than it needs to be, and reduce options for businesses and consumers. Trading hours are likely to be lower and capital under-utilised."

But I believe such thinking rests on a fallacy of composition, that what's true for the individual must be true for the whole.

It's not hard to see why particular business people, thinking only of the circumstances of their own business, see lower penalty rates leading to more sales, higher profits and, as a pleasant side-effect, more not-so-well-paid casual employees.

There would be some, of course, who looked no further than benefit of the lower wage rates they'd be paying even if they didn't bother opening their business for more days or longer hours than they are at present.

And, indeed, since they'd now be earning more than they were, that might be enough for some.

But let's assume the owners of the affected businesses really did want to open longer, sell more and profit more. Their fixed costs would now be spread over more sales, while their main variable cost – wages – would be lower per hour.

Question is: where would all these extra sales come from? From rivals that didn't bother opening on Sundays? That advantage isn't likely to last.

From businesses in other industries that now sold less during the week because their customers were seizing the opportunity to spend more on the weekend?

Of course, even if that were true it need be of no concern to any business person confident of being able to sell more. Their motive is to make more money and that's all a market economy expects of them.

But here's my point: just because some businesses can make more and employ more, this doesn't do much for the economy overall if their success comes at the expense of other businesses that make less and employ fewer.

When the advocates of lower penalty rates tell us that many extra jobs will be created, they're surely expecting us to take that as meaning more jobs overall, not just more jobs in some industries but fewer in others.

So let's switch to a macro or, as the commission likes to say, "economy-wide" perspective. We're told it will be great because, with more businesses open on the weekend, consumers will spend more and it's this extra spending that will create more jobs.

But how much the nation's consumers spend is ultimately constrained by their income. Are we expecting that consumers will spend more by saving less? Why would this be a good thing?

Why are we compelling employees to save 9.5 per cent of their wages if we really don't care about people saving much? (And don't mind being more reliant on foreign investment as a consequence.)

Maybe so as to spend more on weekend entertainment the nation's consumers might borrow more – on their credit cards or however. Would this be good for the economy? In any case, borrowing to boost your consumption is not something the nation's consumers can go on doing for long.

I don't believe there is much scope for us to be consuming a lot more than we are already – certainly not over the medium term. If so, then a lot of the businesses that sell more will be taking sales from other businesses.

And there's another possibility, one I suspect is quite likely: those businesses that open for longer on the weekend will sell more at the weekend, but less during the week.

To the extent that businesses achieve nothing more than spreading essentially the same amount of sales over longer opening hours – which I think is quite likely – they're likely to be worse off rather than better. The economy-wide benefits will be small, as will the net gain in employment.

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It's official: the labour market is different

Any report that the hardline commentators brand as "mushy drivel" can't be all bad. And, indeed, the Productivity Commissions' draft report on the Workplace Relations Framework is far more enlightened, balanced and sensible than we've come to expect from that highly model-bound institution.

For several years, militant employer groups and the national dailies have been claiming that Julia Gillard's Fair Work Act reregulated the labour market, put the unions back on top and caused the slowdown in productivity improvement.

The report puts those people back in their box, rejecting outright their claim that the industrial relations system has become dysfunctional.

"Many features work well, especially given the need to find a balance between the conflicting goals of the parties involved," the commission's chairman, Peter Harris, said.

"Changes to the workplace relations framework have to recognise that it's not just about the economics. There are ethical and community norms about the way in which a country treats its employees."

The report's conclusion is that industrial relations needs "repair not replacement". So it does propose a lot of changes – most of which go the employers' way – which are worth debating, but not today. Today let's just record the full extent to which the scales have fallen from the commission's eyes.

Its first realisation is that the labour market isn't the same as other markets and labour is not just an ordinary input to the production process.

"Labour economists [those economists who specialise in studying the labour market] generally recognise that labour markets work somewhat differently from the pure competition model. Of course, no market aligns completely with the basic and tractable model described in introductory economic textbooks, and some of the common divergences from the competitive model arise in labour markets too," the report says.

"However, labour markets additionally have some particularly distinctive features. These features provide a potential economic rationale for different aspects of labour market regulation . . ."

What's distinctive about the labour market is that "units" of labour being added to the production process inescapably come with fallible humans attached. What's more, the human units work for fallible human managers. This makes the labour market far less impersonal than textbooks describe.

"In the real world, employers and employees are people with all their various flaws and virtues, and these can collide in workplaces in ways that have ramifications for how labour markets function."

For one thing, "people make mistakes". For instance, employers and employees may form an employment contract without doing enough to check the other side out.

For another, "employers and employees have values that are important to the way they do their work. An employee may want to work many additional hours at no cost because of professional pride. Employers may want to pay bonuses, provide better staff facilities or assist an employee facing family problems (say domestic abuse) because they are dealing with human beings who they wish to help and please.

"Employers and employees dealing with each other are not merely doing so as part of a calculated business strategy, and in some cases this opens the door for one party to exploit the other's goodwill and non-monetary motivations. (One less altruistic formulation of this is that employers may sometimes set higher prices for labour to motivate trust and to increase the cost of shirking – one example of so-called 'efficiency wages'.)"

The simple model assumes units of input and even units of output are homogeneous (all the same). But "there are few 'representative' employers and employees. People have heterogeneous [different] tastes for workplace conditions and heterogeneous abilities, even when paid the same wage rate.

"Some businesses are poorly managed, and most are not at the technological and managerial frontier [not best-practice]."

Some of these complexities "suggest a need for regulation, others not. For example, regulation of blatantly unfair dismissal is justified, not only because the act itself is problematic but also because the potential to do it allows leverage by an employer to exploit vulnerable employees".

The commission "considers that, on average, employers have stronger bargaining power than employees, with consequences for wages and conditions, unless countered by regulations or (constrained) employee collective bargaining".

Get that? The commission acknowledges the legitimacy of collective bargaining. It also accepts the relevance of ethical and social considerations.

"Labour market outcomes do not just affect economic performance – they also have a substantial impact on equality of opportunity, the stability of family relationships and social cohesion more generally.

"The ethical and social dimensions of the labour market form a basis for many aspects of the workplace relations system that differentiate it from the regulation of other markets. For example, the 'price' of labour differs from the price of most other inputs in an economy.

"A broad principle underpinning Australia's competition policy framework is that lower prices from competition are almost always desirable. In labour markets it is less clear that a lower price is necessary desirable, given that many people's incomes and wellbeing depend to a considerable extent on the price of labour and it can be costly to use alternative mechanisms to redistribute income.

"Indeed, the existence of a minimum wage – a 'floor price' set by regulation, which would usually be seen as contrary to the public interest for other goods and services – illustrates this distinction."

Returning to the commission's dismissal of the militant employers' claims, it finds that "contrary to perceptions, Australia's labour market performance and flexibility is relatively good by global standards, and many of the concerns that pervade historical arrangements have now abated.

"Strike activity is low, wages are responsive to economic downturns and there are multiple forms of employment arrangements that offer employees and employers flexible options for working."

But my favourite quote is this: "Toxic relationships between employers and employees can sometimes surface due to poor relationship management rather than flaws in the workplace relations framework."

Ain't that the truth.

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Digital disruption: more pros than cons

Do you get the feeling we've got a government that's worrying about everything except getting on with governing? One issue that's not getting the attention it deserves is the rise of "digital disruption".

The pace at which the continuing revolution in information and communications technology is reshaping industries and occupations is remarkable.

As the consultants Deloitte Access Economics wrote in a report for Google, just a few years ago most consumers logged on to the internet to access email, search the web and do some online shopping. Most of us still accessed the internet using a computer.

"Today, digital technology including cloud platforms, smart hand-held devices and social networks are the new beachheads of the sweeping impacts of the internet," the report says.

"Rapidly evolving from basic connectivity, these technologies are further changing not only how consumers interact with businesses, but also how businesses are organising themselves."

We've seen the digital revolution change the way we buy and listen to music, read books, learn the news, shop, do our banking, pay bills and check in on flights. Its changes to the news media and banking and other financial services have a long way to run yet.

The digital revolution is about information in all its forms, how it's gathered, processed, accessed, transferred and stored. "Big data" is about how all this information is analysed to produce further information about how we behave.

This is why you don't have to be very brave to predict that digital-driven change will be affecting many more industries before it's through.

As the consultants say, while reaching new customers and responding to customer needs is a big reason for businesses to go online and to use social media, we're now seeing "transformational change" inside businesses as they take advantage of the efficiencies that advances in digital technology are making possible.

This means "cloud, data analytics and machine-to-machine technologies" emerging as a second big driver of change. (It also means you and me learning to live with a lot of high-sounding words we barely understand.)

And phones are taking over the world. "The rise in mobile access to the internet and digital services through smartphones and connected devices [I think that means iPads] has prompted new ways of thinking about presenting information to consumers on smaller screens and capitalising on usage trends."

Read your newspaper on a phone? Sure. Many people already do, and we're working to improve our offering as we speak.

Hip business people speak of digital disruption as though it's a wonderful thing. It will make the world a better, faster, easier place, so bring it on.

But that word "disruption" sounds more nasty than nice. So which is it to be?

Both. If new inventions take hold and spread it's because enough people really do think they're an improvement.

But that doesn't stop the industries and businesses most affected by the advance from being turned on their head and maybe even forced to close. So the benefits to customers usually come at a cost to many workers.

Some are redeployed, some become redundant. Most ejected workers eventually find a new job – even if it isn't always as good as the one they left – though some, particularly older people, may never get back on their feet.

But how far have we got with the digital revolution to date? Deloitte Access Economics has gathered what we know and done some rough figuring in a report for the Australian Computer Society.

The consultants say that, compared with other developed countries, Australia is a high-level user and adopter of information and communications technology, with comparatively high rates of mobile broadband penetration and business adoption of digital technology for commercial practices.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for every 100 people in Oz there are about 114 subscriptions to mobile wireless broadband, more than any other country bar Finland.

Almost three-quarters of our businesses have a website and a very high 38 per cent of businesses actually make sales over the internet.

The OECD says our information technology specialists make up 3.6 per cent of our workforce, which puts us right behind the Nordic countries and North America. Using a broader definition, about 22 per cent of the workforce is in info-technology-intensive occupations.

The consultants' own estimates say about 300,000 info-tech workers are in the industry proper, with about another 300,000 in other professional and scientific service industries, public administration, financial services and various other industries. This amounts to 5 per cent of the workforce.

They estimate that the digital economy contributed almost $80 billion to gross domestic product in 2013-14, well up on their previous estimate in 2011 and about 5 per cent of the total economy.

But they identify two areas of weakness. First, the 10 per cent of our total annual spending on research and development that we devote to information and communications technology is way behind other developed economies, even small ones.

Second, demand for info-tech workers is expected to grow by 100,000 over the next six years, but Australian new graduates with info-tech qualifications have declined significantly since the early noughties.

More than 10,000 temporary skilled migrant 457 visas have been granted annually to info-tech workers in recent years. In 2013-14 it was closer to 20,000.

Really? This is the best we can do by our own young people? Surely we should be trying harder.

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Mainstream economics remains highly useful

When Gigi Foster gave a radical speech to the Economic Society in Sydney last week – which soon had the audience interjecting and arguing among itself – she was careful to begin by saying her goal was to add to the standard economic model, not replace it.

She claimed the economists' model was the most successful model in all of social science, then listed what she considered to be its four most useful contributions.

By rights I should be telling you about her radical additions to the model, but I'll save that for another day because I, too, have been known to be fairly full and frank about the model's weaknesses and, like her, I don't want anyone thinking that means I regard it as a load of bulldust.

Just the reverse, in fact. It's been so useful and so influential that most of its insights will strike you as bleeding obvious. They are now.

Dr Foster, an associate professor at the University of NSW, is one of Australia's leading behavioural economists. Along with Professor Paul Frijters​, of the University of Queensland, she's the author of the ground-breaking book, An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks.

Her first "big hit" of conventional economics is its discovery that there are "gains from trade". And what's true within an economy – where we each specialise in producing something we're good at, then use money to trade with others – is equally true between economies.

It follows that countries preferring self-sufficiency to the interdependency of international trade will forgo much prosperity. One of economics' earliest discoveries is the benefit of "comparative advantage": countries do best when they concentrate on producing those things they can make at least opportunity cost relative to other countries' opportunity costs.

So you avoid erecting barriers to trade, follow your comparative advantage and import the rest from the cheapest suppliers.

Foster's second big win for economics is realisation of the benefits of competition – not just between producers but also between producers and their customers. So we prevent or regulate monopolies. We create markets when none exist – by, for instance, putting a price on carbon.

And we intervene in markets where we see that competition isn't sufficient to prevent them from failing to deliver the benefits we expect and where the intervention is likely to make the market work better.

Third, a natural role for governments is the provision of "public goods" – goods or services whose nature prevents private producers from capturing enough of the benefits to induce them to provide as much of the item as is in the community's interests.

Examples of public goods provided by governments are numerous: infrastructure, defence, education, the system of law and even the currency.

Foster's final example is the finding that monetary incentives matter. People respond to price changes – though their degree of responsiveness or "elasticity" varies under the influence of other factors. Taxation discourages economic activity, leading to a "deadweight loss" to the community.

That's Foster's list of insights we owe to economists and their model, but I can think of a few more. One is the aforementioned concept of opportunity cost. Because economic resources – including environmental assets – are limited, anything we choose to do comes at the cost of everything else we can't do with those resources.

Since these other things are endless, economists measure opportunity cost by looking only at the next most desirable thing we could have done. The moral of opportunity cost is: since you can't have everything, choose carefully.

Another insight is that anything we choose to do will bring costs as well as benefits. Moral: be sure to weigh the costs against the benefits before you jump.

Then there's our tendency to look only at the initial effect of particular developments. Economists know to ask the next question: but then what happens? It's usually the reaction to the initial effect – the "second-round effect" – that matters.

Say there's a big rise in the cost of electricity. The initial effect is to leave you with less money to spend on other things, which you hate. So you react to this by using power less wastefully, by buying a more energy-efficient fridge next time, or by investigating the costs and benefits of installing solar panels.

All this may seem obvious, but that's a measure of the economists' success in influencing the way we think.

Even so, it's surprising how often we forget these things. That's why we need economists as well as their model: to keep reminding us of the seemingly obvious and doing what they can to stop us wasting money.

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Uni economics declines at hands of accountants

If you think economists have too much influence in the halls of power - or that Australia would be better off if its accountants and business people knew less about how the economy works - or that the political debate would be improved if fewer citizens were economically literate - I have good news: academically, the economists are being cut down to size.

And it's the accountants who are doing it.

While business and management courses and departments are booming, many universities are cutting back, even abandoning their teaching of economics. Faculties of economics are becoming business schools.

At the University of Sydney, the economists have been ejected from their own faculty and - along with the political economists - consigned to the outer darkness of the arts faculty (where, as it happens, they're getting more customers).

It may not be long before, to be able to study economics at uni, you'll need an ATAR (Australian tertiary admission rank) high enough to get into one of the "sandstone" universities, the Group of Eight (Go8): Australian National University, the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Queensland and Western Australia, plus Monash and UNSW.

Trouble is, the sandstone unis don't rate as well on teaching as do the newer, smaller metropolitan and regional unis. Their top priority is research - and don't believe anyone who tells you researchers make the best teachers.

The story of the decline of academic economics in Australia has been told in several papers by Dr John Lodewijks, of the University of NSW, and Dr Tony Stokes and Dr Sarah Wright, of the Australian Catholic University.

At La Trobe University in Melbourne, the school of economics has had to greatly reduce its staff, with fewer professors. Its stand-alone economics degree is no longer offered. Similar changes began at the University of Western Sydney in 2012.

Victoria University's department of applied economics has been broken up, with staff now teaching finance and international business. Economics is being subsumed within business at the University of Newcastle, University of New England, University of Tasmania and James Cook University in far north Queensland.

Griffith uni on the Gold Coast has reduced its offering in economics. Edith Cowan uni in Perth has discontinued the economics major within its bachelor of business. Its economics teaching staff has been slashed, with most of those remaining now teaching finance and quantitative methods. Curtin uni in Perth has also got rid of many economists. Even at the uni of WA a bachelor of economics is no longer offered.

As with Sydney uni, at the multi-campus Australian Catholic University economics has  been ejected from the business faculty and transferred to arts.

When I did a commerce degree at the uni of Newcastle in the late 1960s, three years of economics were compulsory. These days in business courses it's down to one year - or less.

It's clear the accountants would like to be rid of economics completely. What holds them back is that their degree would lose accreditation with the professional accounting bodies.

Over the period from 2002 to 2011, Australia's total student load grew by 40 per cent. The economics students' load rose by just 28 per cent.

From 2012, but with transitional arrangements starting in 2010, universities' enrolments of domestic students were deregulated, meaning unis could enrol as many students as they liked and also that the federal government could no longer influence the number of students studying particular subjects. Enrolments became "demand determined".

The objective of this was to ensure a higher proportion of school-leavers went on to uni. So it has involved a general lowering of ATAR cut-offs for entry into particular courses.

Despite the growth in student numbers overall as a result of the uncapping of places, the number of students studying economics actually declined between 2008 and 2013.

The overall increase in domestic undergraduate commencements was 34 per cent. Business and management numbers rose 38 per cent, and marketing and sales courses rose 39 per cent. But economics commencements fell by 7 per cent to fewer than 5400.

Between 2007 and 2014, the average ATAR cut-off for "business/commerce" (which would include economics) at non-Go8 unis fell by 7.8 points to 65.1, while the average for the Go8 rose fractionally to 89.1.

It seems that the sandstone unis are now capturing more of the able students who formerly would have gone to the newer, lesser-status metropolitan and regional universities.

And it seems all this has allowed a turning away from economics. It's likely  the subject is perceived by students as more intellectually demanding, with less well-prepared students preferring business studies. Many people think business studies is more practical and more likely to lead to a job.

University managers want to shift resources to the subjects in greatest demand from students and probably think they're more likely to get funding from businesses.

So the teaching of economics is contracting and concentrating in the group-of-eight unis. But while these are well known for their high quality research, they're not particularly noted for high quality teaching of economics.

Research has shown a negative relationship between research quality and student satisfaction with teaching. And studies of course-experience questionnaires show that the elite unis perform worse in student satisfaction with teaching than the other unis, particularly the newest ones.

It was two of the lowest ATAR unis, Australian Catholic and Western Sydney, which achieved the highest scores - 86 and 80 respectively - in the good-teaching category.

It's easy to blame an intellectually lazy younger generation. But, to some extent, the academics have brought this on themselves.

There are plenty of hard subjects at uni, but for decades economists have taught economics as though it's only the cultivation of future PhDs that matters to them, making little attempt to capture young imaginations by demonstrating the practical relevance of their dry, ever-more mathematical theories.

Trouble is, it's not only they who'll pay the price of their neglect.

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BANKING AND FINANCE IN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Talk to dinner guests of Hall & Wilcox, lawyers, in association with the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne - Wednesday, July 29, 2015 in Sydney & Tuesday, August 4, 2015 in Melbourne

I’ve been invited to talk to you about the future of banking and finance which, being a journalist, I’m more than happy to do. As a great newspaper owner from the Victorian era, Lord Northcliffe, once said, journalism is a profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally doesn’t understand. I know a fair bit about the economy, a fair bit about budgets and monetary policy and a fair bit about the news media, but I’m no expert on banking and finance, and I’m certainly no techhead.

In preparing for tonight I faced two choices: I could give you a gee-whiz job about all the radical, amazing, frighten changes that are about to engulf us, or I could give you the benefit of the views of grumpy, somewhat cynical old man who’s been watching banking and finance from the sidelines for 40 years and, in particular, watching the process of economic and social change over that time. You can’t be a commentator without being a student of change. I’ve decided to give you a bit of both, but less of the gee-whiz and more of the sceptical old fart.

But before I get into it, let me say this: it never ceases to amaze me that people never tire of asking economists - or, in my case, economic journalists - to tell them what will happen in the future. They keep doing this even though they know full well that economists are hopeless at forecasting. Why? Because as humans we’re addicted to the desire to know what the future holds so we can do something about it: stop it, sidestep it or exploit it. Psychologists call this humans’ “illusion of control”. We have an ingrained belief that if we can find out what’s coming up we can control what happens to us. It’s an illusion, of course. No one knows what the future holds and our ability to change it is usually a lot more limited than we imagine.

It’s because our desire to know and influence the future is a product of our evolution as a species that no amount of bum forecasts in the past deters us from asking for another forecast. So let me oblige. But rather than getting down to a few sexy, gee-whiz examples, I’m going to give you a more top-down, analytical view.

Around the world, and in Australia, banking and financial markets have been changing continuously since the early 1980s - that is, for about 40 years, because of the interrelated forces of globalisation (including the increased integration of the world’s financial markets), changing attitudes to regulation (first deregulation and now a degree of reregulation), and technological advance (particularly greatly reduced costs of telecommunication and of the collection, analysis, transfer and storage of information).

The practice of banking involves “intermediation” - taking deposits from savers and lending the money to investors - and “maturity transformation”: borrowing money for short periods or at call, but lending money for long periods of up to 25 years. Australia’s banking system, like most countries’, has long been dominated by a small number of very large banks, engaged in providing the full range of financial services: facilitating payments, taking deposits and making loans, providing investment advice and the management of assets, and actively participating in most financial markets, for short-term money, securities, foreign exchange, shares, derivatives and so forth. Why is banking so oligopolistic? Because of high barriers to entry arising from economies of scale and the high cost of information.

At this point the main sources of change in banking and finance are, first, continuing changes in the regulation of banks and other major financial players as governments and financial regulators seek to prevent another global financial crisis and, second, continuing innovation as entrepreneurs seek to exploit the opportunities and greatly reduced information costs created by the digital revolution.

The main question we’re considering - the main imponderable - is the extent to which changes in regulatory requirements and in information costs will reduce the barriers to entry, break down the banks’ dominance in the provision of financial services and lead to a flowering alternative suppliers of those services.

The international regulators’ efforts to raise the capital and liquidity requirements imposed on the world’s banks will reduce their gearing and thus, as they frequently complain, increase their costs of intermediation. Whether these greater costs will be borne by the banks’ shareholders or passed on to their customers will be determined by the strength of competition in the relevant markets. But, either way, the higher cost of intermediation will make the banks vulnerable to unregulated suppliers of financial services. As witnessed by the growth of Australia’s corporate bond market, our big corporates are already borrowing directly from the market rather than from banks, and this practice is likely to move down to medium-sized corporates.

Of course, to the extent that the costs of tighter capital requirements shift transactions from the regulated to the unregulated sector, it will frustrate the regulators’ efforts to reduce the risk of another financial crisis. But don’t underestimate the regulators’ ability to fight back by using the digital revolution’s huge reduction in the cost of gathering and analysing financial information to impose much greater disclosure of transactions of non-banks as well as banks (see the speech by Andrew Haldane and others at the Bank of England, in March 2012).

At last we’re up to the sexy bit: all the amazing new products, and opportunities and new players that are likely to emerge as digital disruption reaches banking and financial services. As a journo I do know something about the way the digital revolution is hugely disrupting one industry after another, changing their face for ever. Whatever scepticism you may hear from me, be clear on this: I don’t for a moment doubt that major digital innovation is coming to banking and financial services.

For a full list of every presently conceivable innovation that may possibly disrupt banking as we know it, I refer you to the report on The Future of Financial Services, prepared by Deloitte and others for the World Economic Forum in June this year. But picking out the highlights, in payments system category we have mobile money and digital wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google wallet. This will continue the reduction in the use of cheques and cash, increasing the efficiency of the payments system to the benefit of all, but without much disruption to the banks. We can perhaps reduce the involvement of banks in the making of payments, but I don’t see how we can get away from holding our money in banks. If so, there’ll be a bank somewhere at either end of the payment, even if the transfer isn’t actually conducted by a bank.

Of course, we could keep our money in “crypto currencies” such as bitcoin, but so far the only people doing so seem to be crooks and a few geeks who love trying anything new. If you go back far enough you find we have a history of non-government money - of banks issuing their own banknotes - and it wasn’t a happy one, hence the ultimate outlawing of private money. Apart from any risk benefits from a government monopoly over the issue of fiat money, remember that governments and their central banks benefit greatly from seigniorage.

Turning from payments to intermediation, we come to peer-to-peer lending. The main point here, I think, is that you don’t need to be a bank to match a person or company wanting to lend a certain sum for six months or five years with a person or company wanting to borrow that sum for the same period. Nor do you have to be a bank to assess borrowers’ credit worthiness using advanced software. But matching is not intermediation; it’s not standing between the depositor and the borrower so that the depositor’s claim is against a big, regulated, virtually government-guaranteed bank, not against some puny borrower. Similarly, matching is not maturity transformation; it’s not using a thousand at-call deposits to issue one 20-year loan. Both intermediation and maturity transformation involve taking risks. If a digital upstart doesn’t take on those risks there wouldn’t be many people wanting to lend through them rather than a bank. Certainly, not after the first time the economy had turned down and caused many borrowers to be unable to repay their debts. Were the digital upstart to take on those risks it would either have to lay them off to a bank, or with help from a bank, or it would itself become a virtual bank - in which case it wouldn’t be long before the bank regulators began regulating it.

Turning from intermediation to investment management, much of which is done today by bank subsidiaries, it’s not hard to see that digital upstarts could have success in offering automated, and hence cheaper, advisory functions and actual asset management. But one question is how many punters - or even businesses - would be happy to hand their savings over to a financial robot rather than a human with a good bedside manner.

Summing up, it’s clear that digitisation gives new entrants to the financial services industry the potential to greatly reduce the costs of gathering, processing and transferring financial information. They also have the potential to create valuable new information from the analysis of that financial information. And they have the advantage of having no legacy assets or attitudes.

By the same token, incumbency also carries some advantages. The banks have deep pockets to match the upstarts on the digitisation of financial information or to buy out or copy innovators that succeed with new tricks. And they have a record of being early adopters of improved technology.

But banking is very different from news or books or records or shopping for sneakers. Banking is much more about managing of various forms of risk. And to me the key question is whether digital innovation offers any great advance in the management of risk in addition to its advantages in the management of information. If it doesn’t, I doubt if it will get far. If it does, the banks really will be given a run for their money. But remember that the regulators’ primary concern is systemic risk - the ability of failures in the banking system to inflict great damage on the rest of the economy. So if the digital upstarts do become bank-like - the banks you have when you’re not having banks - I don’t imagine the authorities would waste too much time in starting to regulate them as banks. Bill Gate’s famous saying that “we need banking but we don’t need banks” is a non-sequitur. Any rival outfit that steals the banks’ core business itself becomes a bank.

Now, at last, we come to the part where the grumpy old man comes out of his cave. People have been predicting the demise of the big banks since the advent of financial deregulation in the 1980s - so far to no avail. Can you remember when the entry of the foreign banks was going to do in our local banks? Can you remember when deregulation and the emergence of superior specialised rivals in the provision of particular financial services was going to dismember our big universal-provider banks? So far, whatever the challenge, our big four have gone from strength to strength. Moral: don’t write them off too cheaply.

Next, if you want advice on what the future holds for banking and finance, my advice is that you’ll do better talking to economic historians and the students of earlier waves of major technological innovation - from the railways to electricity to the internal combustion engine to radio - than listening to futurologists and tech-heads. One thing the students of economic history will tell you is that it can take decades for the full commercial potential of major advances to be uncovered and implemented. Another is that the hundred or more start-ups determined to make a killing out of producing automobiles (or whatever) will eventually pack down to just a handful of big, successful, long-lasting corporations - GM, Ford and Chrysler - but until the end it’s impossible to predict who the victors will be.

Even in terms of which gee-whiz new ideas will survive and prosper, and which won’t, the futurologists have a list of failed predictions as long as your arm. They impress us because they seem to know so much about the new technological wonders just over the horizon, but this is their downfall: they love the technological and they love novelty. What they don’t know much about is human nature. Consequently they fail to make the key distinction between what new technology could do for us and what we’ll want it to do for us. Only the stuff we want - the stuff that fits in with human nature - will survive and prosper. Consider the lack of interest in telecommuting. Or the continuing concentration of the financial markets despite the move to electronic trading. Predictors must never forget that humans are intensely social animals. We like to be with others. Urban economists studying the increasing concentration of GDP - value-adding - in CBDs are realising that we learn from being in contact with others. It seems conference calls, even Skype, are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact. MOOC - massive open online courses.

Next, what drives technological change is competition and the desire for profits; business outsiders trying to steal a march on the incumbents, or insiders on their fellow incumbents. I remember Bob Gottliebsen before the Tech Wreck banging on about the huge profits to be made from B2B. But if you study the major technological advances of the past you soon realise that what starts as business people out to make a killing ends up delivering its greatest benefit to customers. The way it works is that any player who comes up with a really successful innovation will soon be copied - by other outsiders and, eventually, by the incumbents- which forces down prices and profits, and shifts the benefit to customers. Apart from any history, I know this from the digital disruption of classified advertising in newspapers. The users of classified ads for houses, jobs and cars have ended up with an infinitely better product for a fraction of the price of an old newspaper classified.

This process by which well-functioning market economies deliver the benefits of digital disruption and other technological change to customers rather than capitalists is one of the great attractions of capitalism. Which is why, though I’m uncertain how much digital disruption will do knock the banks off their perch, I am confident the new or improved products we end up with will be of great benefit to the users of financial services.

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