Why the era of reform has ended

In case you haven't noticed, you're staring at the end of the era of economic reform. It has ended because it's come to be seen by many voters as no more than a cover for advancing the interests of the rich and powerful at their expense.

The evidence that the jig is up is all around us, in Brexit, Donald Trump and, at home, the near defeat of a government that went to the election with just one substantive proposal - to phase down the rate of company tax - which it sought to hide behind the empty slogan of "jobs and growth".

In the Senate we've seen the rise of the protectionist Xenophones​ and the resurrection of One Nation in even madder form.

To call the end of the reform era is not deny we'll still see the occasional policy proposal worthy of that name - such as Malcolm Turnbull's highly desirable changes to superannuation tax concessions and Labor's plan to curb negative gearing and reduce the capital gains tax discount.

But these have become exceptional events, hidden among the more numerous proposals to disguise rent-seeking as reform.

The economic reform era began in the early 1980s with Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and, of course, the Hawke-Keating government.

Many of those early reforms were unavoidable and greatly beneficial. America's airline deregulation brought an end to the cosseted flag-carriers and their unaffordable fares. Britain needed to end nationalised coal mines and other inefficiencies.

In Australia, we needed to open up our economy to the reality of a globalising world: to deregulate an inefficient and expensive financial system, float the dollar, phase out protection and move from centralised wage-fixing to collective bargaining.

But from such a promising start, now it's over. What brought the era to its ignominious end? Its noble goals were lost as it was hijacked by faulty ideology and vested interests.

The sceptical approach towards government intervention of the otherwise naive economists promoting reform left them susceptible to the smaller-government ideology - the belief that the private sector always does things better than the public sector, that government does too much and taxes are always too high.

This made them sitting ducks for the greedy rich - who cloak their greed in "libertarianism", while actually resenting being asked to subsidise the poor via taxation.

Economists were also the dupes of business people anxious to find ways of increasing their profits easier than the hard graft of price competition and struggling for market share.

They happily turned the provision of government services over to private firms. It never occurred to them that the private providers might cut corners on quality, exploit the naivety of public officials, find a way to get at the pollies, or lose all sense of restraint in their efforts to rip money out of the public purse.

After the long list of disasters in the field of outsourcing - the great private childcare collapse, the exploitation of foreign students by firms selling phony courses in return for permanent residence, the fly-by-night pink batt installers, and the near destruction of TAFE - the punters can tell something's badly wrong.

An early area of outsourcing was the replacement of the Commonwealth Employment Service with a network of charitable and for-profit providers of "employment services". Just wait for its inadequacies to be exposed when next we suffer a severe recession.

The outsourced provision of aged care is likely to be an ever increasing headache for governments.

Then there's privatisation, where too often governments have sacrificed the reformist ideal of increasing competition to increase efficiency on the altar of using existing or newly created monopoly power to enhance the sale price.

Why maximise sale price at the expense of consumers? Because of the obsession with debt levels and maintaining credit ratings. Faced with a choice between efficiency and the budget deficit, too many state treasuries have looked the other way.

A win for accountants over economists.

But the reformers' greatest failing has been the conceit that they look after efficiency and leave equity to lesser mortals: they ignore their reforms' effect on fairness.

At a time when technological change and globalisation are shifting the distribution of market income in favour of the top few per cent of earners, they're pushing "reforms" to make the tax system less redistributive.

And the very reformers who want freedom for some industries to expand while others contract have been happy to allow the rate of unemployment benefits to fall to almost a third below the poverty line.

Then they wonder why the punters decide something is badly off-beam and turn to soothsayers and medicine men.

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Why cut interest rates again? It's the exchange rate, stupid

The trouble with the Reserve Bank's continuing cuts in the official interest rate – this week to another record low, of 1.5 per cent – is that it could leave people thinking the economy's in bad shape.

It isn't. As Reserve governor Glenn Stevens was at pains to point out, recent figures suggest that "overall [economic] growth is continuing at a moderate pace" notwithstanding a very large decline in investment in new mines and natural gas facilities.

In consequence, employment is increasing and unemployment is, as they say in the financial markets, “flat to down”.

It's not brilliant, but it's not bad. Our economy is growing faster than most other developed economies. Nor is it expected to slow.

In which case, why is the Reserve cutting interest rates? Good question. Actually, it says more about the trouble other rich countries are having getting their economies moving than it does about ours.

The advanced economies – even the Americans – have still not recovered properly from the Great Recession precipitated by the global financial crisis of 2008.

The long boom that preceded the crisis involved a lot of borrowing by banks, businesses and households, partly to bolster living standards, but also to buy housing, commercial property and other assets.

When, inevitably, the credit-fuelled boom busted and asset prices fell back to earth, a lot of households and businesses were left with assets whose value no longer exceeded their liabilities.

Recessions that arise from such "balance sheet" problems always take a long time to recover from, as households and businesses cut their spending and investing in order to pay off their debts.

That was bad enough. But the difficulties were compounded by governments on both sides of the North Atlantic convincing themselves the problem wasn't excessive private sector borrowing, but government borrowing.


They not merely concluded they should do no further deficit spending, they embarked on the deeply misguided policy of "austerity", in which they tried to cut government spending and raise taxes at a time when the economy was already weak. Unsurprisingly, they made little progress in reducing deficits and debt.

This foolish fashion of forswearing the use of fiscal policy (the budget) to increase public sector demand at a time when private demand was weak threw all the task of restoring the economy's growth onto monetary policy.

From a position in most North Atlantic economies where official interest rates were already quite low, central banks cut their rates almost to zero.

When this did little to boost demand they resorted to the unconventional policy of "quantitative easing" – they bought bonds from banks with money they created with the stroke of a pen.

This was intended to lower long-term bond rates, which it did. But it did more to push up the prices of financial assets than to encourage increased spending in the real economy.

With QE doing little to help, some European central banks have even moved to negative interest rates – actually charging lenders a tiny percentage for borrowing their money.

If this sounds increasingly crazy, it is. But it's the world we and our central bank have to live in.

Historically, monetary policy was designed to keep inflation low. But it's a long time since many countries had to worry about high inflation. These days more of them worry about the opposite problem of "deflation" – continuously falling prices.

We, too, have very low inflation: an underlying rate of 1.5 per cent, compared with the Reserve's target range of 2 to 3 per cent.

This situation has led some to conclude the Reserve's reason for cutting the official rate this week was to help get the economy growing a lot faster, so inflation pressures would build and get the inflation rate back into the target zone.

That would make sense in normal times, but times aren't normal. Nor do I imagine the Reserve thinks a cut of another 0.25 percentage points (and less for people with mortgages) will make much difference to the strength of borrowing and spending.

So why did the Reserve feel it needed to cut by another notch? My guess is it had more to do with trying to reduce upward pressure on the dollar – our exchange rate.

The biggest effect of QE – creating more of a country's currency – has been to put downward pressure on that country's exchange rate. Meaning, of course, upward pressure on other countries' exchange rates – including ours.

Our dollar soared during the resources boom when the world was paying extraordinary prices for our coal and iron ore. It dropped back when commodity prices fell, but its return to more comfortable levels for our export and import-competing industries was impeded particularly by the Americans' resort to QE.

It eventually got down to the low US70¢s and the Reserve regards a lower dollar as a key element, along with low interest rates, in stimulating faster growth in our production of goods and services.

Of late, however, the dollar has drifted back up to about US76¢, which the Reserve regards as a retrograde step.

Get this: contrary to the easy assumption of some people, there's no simple, mechanical relationship between the level of our interest rates (or, strictly, the difference between our rates and those offered by big players such as the Americans) and the level of our exchange rate.

Even so, with no inflation problem in sight – and, indeed, with any fall in expected inflation leading to a rise in our real interest rate – the Reserve decided to err on the safe side by trying to reduce upward pressure on the dollar.

So why did the Reserve cut rates? It's the exchange rate, stupid.

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Fast-moving China is big and bold; we think small and fearful

Sorry if I sound wide-eyed, but I was mightily impressed when I visited China as a guest of the Australia-China Relations Institute. Obviously, we were directed to the best rather than the worst but, even allowing for that, it was still impressive. Those guys are going places.

In a hurry. I was struck by how fast-moving the place is – in several senses. We argue interminably about getting a high-speed rail link, while the Chinese just get on with it.

We took the bullet train from Beijing to its nearest port, Tianjin, 140 kilometres away. So smooth you didn't really notice how fast it was going.

The government-run China Daily announced while we were there the plan to have 30,000 kilometres of high-speed track built by 2020. You could be sceptical – except they already have 19,000 kilometres installed.

Tianjin, admittedly a city of 11 million, has the newest, fanciest, most cavernous cultural centre and municipal buildings I've seen. I tried not to wonder how much it all cost and where the money had come from.

So many of us have outdated perceptions about China. It's a poor country producing cheap clothes and toys and knick-knacks in sweat shops.

That used to be true, and in parts of the country still is. But these days China is a middle-income country anxious to get rich gloriously.

In the Tianjin free trade zone is a factory for the European-owned Airbus. All the jetliners it produces are sold in China.

Of course, we tell ourselves, any technology they use has come from foreigners, sometimes without proper recompense.

Don't be so sure. We visited Shenzhen which, until 36 years ago, was a fishing village just across the water from Hong Kong, before someone made it a special economic zone.

I remember visiting it in January 1984 on a tourists' day-trip from Hong Kong. It was a dusty country town with a big new hotel for foreign visitors and a few factories, plus stalls selling stuff to tourists. I bought a Chairman Mao cap with a red metal star.

Today it's a city of 10 million, with income per person of about $29,000 a year. It has maintained 45 per cent of its area as parks and forest by the simple expedient of having housing go up rather than out.

It still has some low-end manufacturers, but they're being encouraged to move inland or to some south-east Asian country, such as Vietnam.

Land and wages in Shenzhen are too expensive for low-value production. Last year in China consumer prices rose by 2 per cent, while the average wage rose by 8 per cent.

So manufacturing in Shenzhen is moving to the high-tech end and the services sector now accounts for 60 per cent of its economy.

Its businesses put huge sums into research and development. In 2014 R&D spending accounted for 4 per cent of Shenzhen's gross domestic product. In Oz it's about half that.

BYD – standing for Build Your Dreams – is a private company founded in the city in 1995. It started out making batteries for mobile phones, but is now well advanced with the research and development needed to fulfil its "three green dreams" of making solar farms, travelling renewable energy storage stations, and electric vehicles.

It still makes and sells conventional cars, but is more interested in its range of hybrid and pure electric cars and buses. It's best known in Australia for its electric forklifts.

Many Chinese cities seek to reduce pollution by capping the number of new cars they'll register each year. Buy a hybrid or electric car, however, and you avoid the lottery.

Buy an electric SUV and the government gives you a subsidy of about $27,000, reducing the price of BYD's model to $47,000. The subsidy will be phased out as the company gains economies of scale.

Before moving to Shenzhen, BGI began life in 1999 as the Beijing Genomics Institute. It's now one of the world's largest genomic institutes, using gene sequencing to develop antenatal tests for genetic abnormalities and to detect diseases earlier.

In agriculture it's using genetic assisted breeding (not genetic modification) to develop better strains of fish and millet – a grain widely consumed in China.

It has more than 800 scientists working for it, and a wall showing the many covers of the journals Science and Nature celebrating its notable discoveries.

Huawei was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer in the People's Liberation Army. It started as a manufacturer of office PABX phone systems, but is now the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world.

It ploughs a minimum of 10 per cent of its revenue back into research and development, spending about $12 billion last year. The company is staff owned, with Ren's share down to 1.4 per cent.

It has installed Australia's largest private 4G communications network for Santos' mining operations.

In China it helped the Shenhua coal company raise the capacity of its Shuo Huang railway to 200 million tonnes a year. Its 4G system permitting synchronous control of multiple locos allows single train lengths up to 3000 metres long, carrying up to 20,000 tonnes.

China is big; we think of ourselves as small. China is confident, impatiently pushing towards a better future; we are fearful, waiting for more luck to turn up.

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China plans big expansion of trade - without us

You've heard of belt and braces. You may even have heard of one country, two systems. But have you heard of One Belt, One Road? No, I thought not. Rest assured, you will.

It's a topic much discussed in business and economic circles in China, as I learnt on a visit there sponsored by the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney.

It's a plan for the establishment of a new Silk Road between Europe and China, to increase trade and cultural exchange between all the countries along the route.

It's an initiative of the Chinese government, first announced by President Xi Jinping​ in 2013, and much elaborated since then.

The belt refers a land-based Silk Road Economic Belt running through China to Central Asia to Russia and Europe.

The road refers to a sea-based Maritime Silk Road taking in the countries of south-east Asia and running through the Indian Ocean to the countries of South Asia, then through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.

To keep muddling metaphors, the maritime "road" may even have a spur line to Africa. In principle, more than 60 countries could be involved.

It may sound like a politicians' grand vision that won't get far. That's certainly the way some American critics have reacted to it. There could be much suspicion, resentment and resistance to China's expansion plans from countries and their citizens, they say.

But while pollies talk big in Western countries, in China they tend to act big. Making the initiative a reality would involve much spending on infrastructure such as sea ports, airports, railways, highways, oil and gas pipelines, power stations and special economic zones.

China has much to gain from all this, of course. Its existing development activity in certain African countries suggests it would supply much of the materials and labour for infrastructure projects.

Should the oft-predicted economic "hard landing" eventuate and lead to rapidly rising unemployment at home, its desire to get on with foreign construction projects might be heightened.

Establishing a new Silk Road means China, already the world's largest trading nation, would greatly expand its export opportunities.

But trade between a willing buyer and willing seller is mutually beneficial. And increased trade could do much to hasten the economic development of the "stans" of Central Asia - such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Already there is much interest and activity in Pakistan.

Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China, has observed that the initiative is "of great strategic significance for Beijing, as it is also intended to reduce China's major strategic vulnerability caused by so much of its seaborne trade, especially crude oil, having to go through the Strait of Malacca".

As an aside, this vulnerability also helps explain China's sensitivity over the South China Sea.

Full implementation of the initiative could take decades, of course. But a solid start has already been made. For instance, a freight rail link between the south-western China province of Sichuan (the one with the spicy food) and Lodz in Poland is now running three trains a week.

This fits also with the Chinese government's earlier - and continuing - Go West campaign to move economic activity - particularly labour-intensive manufacturing - inland from the richer coastal provinces, where labour is getting ever-more expensive.

But have you noticed something? The many countries that could get involved with the initiative include Indonesia, but not us.

At least, not directly. There is scope, however, for Australian banks and other financial institutions help facilitate the funding of infrastructure projects.

Much of the construction of projects will be done by big Chinese state-owned enterprises. We could, of course, sit back and hope this leads to restored demand for our coal and iron ore.

But the SOEs will often need to partner with foreign firms able to provide the specialist expertise they lack in in such things as engineering and major construction.

Many Australian companies are well-equipped to supply such consulting services, but to-date our firms have shown limited appetite for the higher risks involved in developing country projects.

Much safer to limit your innovation and agility to pressing the government for "reforms" that cut the tax you pay or allow you to drive harder bargains with your employees.

But not to worry. There are Japanese and South Korean firms who'll be happy to eat the Chinese lunch we don't fancy.

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China does its own thing in its own way

On the prospects for China's economy, it's easy to be wrong. We analyse unfamiliar things by comparing them with things we understand, but in its massive size and economic history, China is one of a kind.

That's one conclusion I've drawn from a visit to China as a guest of the Australia-China Relations Institute, at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the All-China Journalists Association.

In recent years people in the world's financial markets have gone from ignoring the Chinese economy to assuming it works the same way a developed economy does.

Hence the consternation in global share markets last year and again early this year when China's share market took a sharp dive. Surely this meant its economy was in big trouble.

Well, maybe, but not for that reason. China is still a developing, middle-income economy and its share market is a relatively recent creation of its government, lacking the strong links with the real economy we're used to in the West.

As Professor Peter Drysdale, of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research at the Australian National University, has explained, the worth of China's share market is equivalent to about a third of its gross domestic product, compared with more than 100 per cent in developed economies.

It accounts for less than 15 per cent of the financial assets of China's households, which is why formerly booming share prices did little to boost consumer spending and why falling prices will do little to hurt consumption, he says.

The market is dominated by individual investors rather than financial institutions, as in the rich world, and Chinese companies don't rely on it for capital-raising.

Much of the angst in the West over China's slowing rate of growth – from 10 per cent a year for many years to 6.7 per cent over the year to June – reveals an ignorance of how developing countries develop.

Provided they're well managed, it's easy for underdeveloped economies to grow rapidly as workers move from the farm to a city factory and as existing Western technology is taken off the shelf and applied.

But as the economy expands it becomes harder and then impossible to maintain such high rates of expansion.

China's less dramatic growth rate of six point something is now "the new normal", as its government says. Further slowing is possible in the next few years.

We in the developed world – where growth rarely gets much higher than 2 or 3 per cent a year – are so unfamiliar with such rapid growth rates that we forget the basic arithmetic involved.

At a constant growth rate of 10 per cent, an economy doubles in about seven years. At a constant rate of 6.7 per cent, it doubles in about 10.

Consider this: China's growth in 2005 of 11.3 per cent added $US338 billion to its size, whereas growth of 7.4 per cent in 2014 added $US708 billion. It's the absolute size of China's growth – its addition to gross world product – that matters most to the rest of the world.

Another trap for foreign observers is to assume China has a market economy like ours, or that the Chinese government is busy turning its economy into a market economy.

That's easy to believe when you're told that, in 2014, China's private sector produced at least two-thirds of its GDP, with the private sector creating more than 90 per cent of the additional jobs and with the public sector accounting for just 11 per cent of China's workforce (compared with 14 per cent in Oz).

But China's economy is still far from being a market economy like ours, and it's not clear the Chinese government wants to make it one.

Remember China's history. In the 1950s, following the Communist revolution of 1949, private property was expropriated and a planned economy established.

All that began changing after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping initiated the far-reaching market-oriented reforms that have brought China's economy to where it is today.

China's many remaining state-owned enterprises may not be as dynamic and fast-growing as its private sector, but they remain an important part of the economy. Indeed, they're a drag on the economy, often badly run with problems of overcapacity and overproduction.

Many foreign economists are urging China to simply close or privatise its remaining SOEs. And it's true that reforming them would be an important part of raising China's productivity performance.

But it's not clear this is the intention of China's President (and general secretary of the Communist Party), Xi Jinping. Some degree of reform may come, but it may involve adopting market mechanisms where thought appropriate rather than eliminating the government-owned business sector.

Making China's economy the same as any Western developed economy is unlikely to be Xi's objective, even if the pressure of events causes it to continue drifting in that direction.

China remains a one-party state, and the objective of that party is to remain in power. That may mean reforming rather than eliminating SOEs, which are run by party officials.

Within the Chinese government, power is shared between the central, provincial and municipal governments, all of them run by party officials. Beijing's power is constrained.

Xi is unlikely to initiate any big changes before the Communist Party's 19th national congress late next year, when he will be able to increase his grip on power.

Economic reform and year-to-year economic management is guided by the 13th five-year plan. Growth in GDP is not just a measure of economic success, it's a political target.

Most Westerners believe continuing economic development and rising living standards lead inevitably to democratic governance, and the cases of Taiwan and South Korea add support to this idea.

But whether that applies to China remains to be seen. Certainly, it's a long way off. The safest prediction is that China will do its own thing in its own way.

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Liberals ignore the moderate middle at their peril

It's amazing to realise that the greatest threat to the success of the Turnbull government comes from the Liberal Party. Malcolm Turnbull's biggest enemies are inside his own government, not outside.

If he's to make sufficient progress with controlling the budget and reforming the economy to warrant re-election in three years' time, he needs to mix budget restraint with fairness, and combine efficiency with equity.

This, after all, was the formula the Hawke-Keating government used to stay in government for 13 years, despite all the things it did to get the budget back to surplus after the deep recession of the early 1980s and all the controversial reforms it made to open up the economy.

Remember that the people with the most reservations about those reforms – deregulating the banks, floating the dollar, removing protection – were its own supporters.

Only much later did Labor's true believers adopt Paul Keating as one of their heroes. And it was only by making uncharacteristic changes that Hawke-Keating came to be remembered as one of our greatest governments.

The people making trouble for Turnbull within the Liberals seem to have learnt none of that. They haven't even learnt the lesson of their latest near-death experience: low and middle income-earners won't vote for you in sufficient numbers if they suspect you don't represent their interests.

It's much easier to argue that Turnbull lost votes because his party had pushed him too far to the right than because he wasn't as far to the right as a noisy minority thought he should be.

Turnbull lost votes partly because, to get the party's permission to rescue it from certain defeat under Tony Abbott, he had to agree to leave untouched various extreme policies the whole country knew he didn't believe in.

Labor's Medi-scare was effective because Abbott's attempt to dismantle bulk-billing with his $7 co-payment exposed the party's lifelong antipathy to Medicare that a chastened and wiser John Howard had cloaked with his claim that the Libs were the best friend Medicare ever had.

Turnbull's policy for the reform of superannuation tax concessions was the epitome of the carefully balanced policies we need more of if we're to have reform without fear of electoral defeat.

It was a micro reform in that it reduced the tax system's distortion of saving choices, and it will contribute significantly to reducing the budget deficit, but do so in a way that reduces the concession to the undeserving well-off (including me) while making the scheme fairer to low income-earners and women.

And yet the Liberal dissidents' greatest push is to modify the super reforms in favour of a relative handful of high-flyers. If Turnbull – and the more moderate, sensible elements of the parliamentary party – let this push succeed there could be no better demonstration of the party's instability and its continuing commitment to governing in favour of its well-off cronies, not ordinary voters.

The first rule of Australian politics is that Aussies won't vote for extreme parties. That's why, over the decades, both sides have moved towards the middle ground.

But it's remarkable to realise that, while Labor has been working hard to house-train its left wing, the Libs have been drifting further to the right, allowing extremists to dominate its state branches and more and more hard-liners to be elected to the parliamentary party.

Although the pragmatist faction still has most adherents in Parliament, much of the party is now out of step with the community on social issues and obsessed with furthering the economic interests of the well-off, not the punters.

Too many in the party have become self-indulgent and inward-looking. Let's play favourites between Tony and Malcolm. Let's let the old men continue blocking the talented young and the female. Let's make the party utterly unattractive to the younger generation.

In short, too many in the party have lost touch with electoral reality. In this they've been led astray by noisiness of their media cheer squad and the libertarian think-tanks. The Murdoch press has yet again demonstrated its inability to deliver the tabloid voter.

In this election the Coalition stuck its neck out by making an unpopular cut in company tax its main policy proposal. And yet big business seems to have failed to offer much support in the way of donations.

If that doesn't give the Liberals pause for thought, nothing will. Apparently, big business thinks itself so virtuous – so synonymous with the nation's interests – that even the Libs owe it a living.

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Government outsourcing has many pitfalls

Labor's Mediscare will have a benefit if it causes our politicians to think twice before they resort to "outsourcing" or "contracting out" the provision of government services, a practice that's led to a string of disasters.

The pretext for Labor's claim that the Coalition was planning to "privatise" Medicare was the Turnbull government's intention to save a little money by shifting the processing of Medicare's many bank transfers from its giant cheque-writing agency, the Department of Human Services, to a private provider.

We wouldn't even have noticed this back-office switch, but Malcolm Turnbull felt obliged to swear the proposal would be abandoned.

This probably means he'll also have to give up any thought of outsourcing all the many other, pension, allowance and benefit payments the department makes.

One reason for doing so was that the department's computer system is old and clunky and needing to be replaced – a prospect that always seems to frighten governments, especially those trying to keep their budget deficit low by postponing needed asset replacement.

Since polls show the public is strongly opposed to all privatisation, it's not hard to imagine most voters wouldn't like the sound of outsourcing.

But if this realisation comes as a surprise to the Coalition, it may also be a caution to Labor, which over the years has also engaged in much outsourcing.

Much of it has gone on, at state and federal level. When a woman rang me the other day to do a government security check on someone I'd worked with, I was surprised to hear she worked, not for ASIO, but for a Canberra company called Key Vetting Services.

In principle, it's very simple. You call for tenders and if a private outfit can do the job more cheaply than your public servants can, you give it the job.

In practice, it's never simple. For a start, you can't be sure that what we're assured is saving the taxpayer money really is, once you measure it properly.

For instance, one of the ways federal and state governments seek to retain their AAA credit ratings is by using "public/private partnership" agreements to have the borrowing for motorways and other big projects done by some private enterprise. This way, the debt appears on its balance sheet rather than the government's.

Small problem: hiding the government's debt in this way ends up being far more costly to taxpayers. The oh-so-holy credit rating agencies turn a blind eye.

Federal and state departments spend a fortune each year on private sector consultancies. It's possible this saves money.

But it's also possible it was done to get around some directive to reduce staff numbers and is actually more expensive. Or maybe they got rid of people they later realised they couldn't do without, and had to pay top dollar to get 'em back.

Another dubious scheme is the sale and lease-back of government offices. The budget deficit takes a big dip in the year you sell the office off, but is worsened in subsequent years by the big rents you now pay.

These schemes are notorious for the outrageously good deals used to entice private sector players to take up the properties and rent them back.

A related version of outsourcing follows the notion that the provision of government services should be made "contestable". Services normally provided by government agencies or by non-profit community groups are opened up to for-profit providers.

Successive governments have done this with Job Services Australia, childcare centres and vocational education and training. The pink batts scheme was left entirely to for-profit providers.

With childcare, the government let one aggressive provider, ABC Learning, take over more than half the nation's centres before collapsing, at great inconvenience to parents and expense to taxpayers.

The disaster from the outsourcing of VET – again, federal and state – is still being cleaned up. The loss of future trained workers may hurt the economy for years.

Many people assume the private sector will always do things more efficiently – or less inefficiently – than those tea-drinking public servants.

Maybe. The private sector has a big advantage over the public sector: it has just one objective, to make a buck.

But what those who think this way often forget is that private sector tenderers have to undercut the public service's price and make room for their profit, which they hope to make as big as possible.

Often they do this by cutting corners on the quality of the service they deliver. Leave a loophole in your contract and they'll jump right through.

The public sector's big disadvantage is also its big advantage: it always has a range of objectives, imposed on it by politicians who know that voters will hold them responsible should the service prove really bad.

And here's a point you won't find in any textbook, but all the stuff-ups of recent years should have woken us up to: when you give businesses access to the government's coffers, a surprisingly high proportion of them lose all sense and start acting like robbers in Aladdin's cave.

Witness: all the unsafe behaviour by outfits trying to make a killing in the pink-batt boom; all the operators using inducements to sign up students for unsuitable courses, the costs of which were borrowed from the government; all the operators using the lure of permanent residence to rip off foreign students with phoney courses.

I also suspect that, for the Coalition, there's an additional, political motive: outsourcing some government service shifts economic activity to private enterprise, the part of the economy whose interests the Coalition champions, and to the people who are your friends and donors.

If so, why does outsourcing also need to save the taxpayer money?

The Turnbull government's intention to implement the Harper competition report's proposal for greater contestability in the delivery of "human services" is now likely to be approached with caution. No bad thing.

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A SLIGHTLY DEFENSIVE CRITIQUE OF AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC JOURNALISM

History of Economic Thought Society of Australia, annual conference, Melbourne, July 14, 2016

It’s a huge pleasure to speak at conference where passing remarks about your predecessors and competitors is not seen as a self-indulgent irrelevance. I’m going to leave it to Gerard to talk about two key pioneers of economic journalism in this country - Jack Horsfall and Max Newton - and say a little about the early, current and future practitioners of economic journalism, before moving on to say something more substantial about its strengths and weaknesses.

Just as macroeconomic management is essentially a post-war phenomenon and the quarterly national accounts have been published only since 1959, so the practice of economic journalism - reporting and commentary on macroeconomic and microeconomic events and issues, usually without reference to the fortunes of particular listed companies (a subject matter known to journalists as business journalism) - does not have a particularly long history.

During the 17 years he spent as financial editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Tom Fitzgerald combined editorials and commentary on economic management with his path-breaking exposes of corporate mismanagement. When he left to join the Australian in 1970 he was replaced by both a financial editor and an economics editor. The economics editor was Alan Wood, who had been a Canberra economics correspondent for the AFR. After a period out of daily journalism Alan returned eventually as economics editor of the Australian. Ken Davidson worked for Treasury before becoming the Australian’s Canberra-based economics correspondent in 1965 and the Age’s economics editor in 1974. P. P. McGuinness joined the AFR as an economics writer in 1971, left to work for the Whitlam government, then returned as economics editor in 1974. When I joined the SMH as a cadet in 1974, having previously worked as a chartered accountant, I was encouraged to focus on economics rather than business, sent to Canberra late that year as economics correspondent and returned to Sydney in 1976 to replace the departing Wood as economics editor.

So it was in the early 1970s, and particularly after the first OPEC oil shock of December 1973 and the stagflation-induced crisis of confidence in conventional economic management, that economic journalism came to be seen not as an adjunct to business (financial) journalism, but as a specialty within political journalism. Indeed, it suddenly dawned on the nation’s editors that most of politics was economics, so that they needed more economic reporters and economic commentators, most of the latter referred to as economics editors.

It follows that a rollcall of the main economics editors and commentators over the years since then is not long. At the AFR: Paddy McGuinness, Michael Stutchbury, Steve Burrell and Alan Mitchell. At the Australian: Ken Davidson, Alan Wood, Michael Stutchbury and David Uren (I don’t include the additional contributions of Judith Sloan and Henry Ergas). At The Age: Ken Davidson, Tim Colebatch and Peter Martin. And at the SMH: Tom Fitzgerald, Alan Wood and me. Jessica Irvine was for a time the first and possibly the only national economics editor for the Murdoch capital city tabloids. That’s only about a dozen.

With most of those people now in retirement and people starting to wonder how much longer I’ll last - a fair while yet, I hope - you may be tempted by the thought that the end of an era is looming. But I think the future of economic journalism is in good hands: Peter Martin at The Age, Jessica Irvine at the SMH, plus, further afield: Garry Shilson-Josling at AAP, Stephen Long at the ABC and Shane Wright in Canberra for the West Australian. Among the rising generation, I have great hopes for Gareth Hutchens at Guardian Australia and Clancy Yeates at the SMH/AFR.

I’ve made the point that economic journalism isn’t to be confused with business journalism, about the activities of listed companies. Another important distinction to be noted is between the reporting of economic news and economic commentary. Reporting concerns mainly movements in economic indicators, policy pronouncements by governments and the Reserve Bank, speeches by treasurers and econocrats, and occasionally the contributions of think-tanks and university research centres. And, of course, the commentary on macroeconomic developments provided by the many business economists employed in the financial markets.

Because most announcements are made in Canberra, most economic reporting is done from the federal parliamentary press gallery. This is true of most reporting of Reserve Bank announcements, even though the bank is headquartered in Sydney. The main national and metropolitan newspapers have specialist economics correspondents in the gallery, most of them with university qualifications in economics. In smaller gallery bureaus the reporting is done by political correspondents. By comparison with American practice, Australia economic reporters aren’t afraid to offer their own interpretation of the meaning of movements in economic indicators.

Economic reporting suffers from the same shortcomings as other reporting. The role of the news media is much misunderstood by many people. They assume the media’s role is to give their audience a balanced picture of what’s happening in the world beyond people’s personal experience. In fact, because the media is directly or indirectly selling its news, we limit our reporting of what’s happening in the world to those things we believe our audience will find particularly interesting. This imparts considerable biases to what we report: we pay a lot more attention to bad news than good, to problems rather than solutions, and to conflict and controversy (so that, for instance, dissenters from the dominant view on climate change among scientists get a lot more space than their numbers warrant).

The media are more interested in people than concepts, and more interested in concrete case studies (what economists call anecdotes) than abstract principles. In political and economic reporting there is much resort to ‘race-calling’: which side’s doing well in the polls and which isn’t, which leaders are secure and which under threat; which economic indicators are up this month and which are down (or, for the sharemarket and the exchange rate, which are a bit up or a bit down today). The media tend to pander to what they assume to be their audience’s prejudices: so falls in interest rates and rises the dollar are always good, while rises in rates and falls in the dollar are always bad. Deficits are always bad, surpluses are always good.

Reporters’ eternal search for a good story, particularly one involving conflict, controversy or worrying news, makes them easy marks for governments and interest groups seeking to use the media to influence public opinion. Claims that some policy will caused the loss of X thousand jobs in the widget industry are widely reported, with little scrutiny. Governments and treasuries, no less than business lobby groups, advocating or opposing tax changes commonly employ an ever-growing industry of “economic consultants” to whip up modelling purporting to back up their case. Issues tend to be reported and judged on their political potency, not their economic merits.

Turning from economic reporting to economic commentary, economic commentators, in sharp distinction to political commentators, don’t hesitate to take a position in the policy debate and to campaign for particular policies. It’s intended to be a constant and logically consistent position - not one that keeps adjusting so that whatever a government does can be criticised - based on their school of economic thought and personal values, not on partisan loyalties and certainly not on personal interests. The bane of an economic commentator’s life is people always trying to consign him or her to a party-political box. The commentators’ paper’s emphasis on race-calling means macroeconomic issues tend to crowd out microeconomic issues, which are often more important. The journalistic profession’s obsession with timeliness - with never being ‘off the pace’ - limits commentators’ ability to continue pursuing issues once the media caravan has moved on.

Economic commentators are not great original thinkers. They don’t keep up with the literature. As with most economists, most of the arguments they mount and policy solutions they espouse are pretty derivative. I’ve never deluded myself I’ve been giving the pollies policy advice that was significantly different from and superior to the official advice they were getting. Economic commentators spend a lot of time talking to senior econocrats, and much of what they write echoes the views of the particular econocrats they talk to. They don’t talk to academic economists as much as they probably should, mainly because so few academics keep up with the policy debate.

A big part of any conscientious economics editor’s job is standing up to vested interests on the make - drug companies, chemists, private health funds and the doctors’ union in their effort to extract rents from Medicare; protectionist manufacturers, mining companies claiming a carbon tax would lead to massive job losses, the superannuation industry and all the rest.

Over the years I’ve often found it my duty use my column up the back of the paper to beat down the front-page beat-ups by overexcited youngsters. These days I’ve often found my duty lies in exposing the dubious modelling unprincipled economic consultants have been happy to produce for their paying customers. Sometimes these people know full well the way they’re twisting models and assumptions to fit their client’s vested interest, but other times I suspect they’re so caught up in the imaginary games all modellers play that they’ve actually forgotten the exercise is imaginary.

I’ve come to believe the big issue facing economic editors is whether they see their job as missionary - convincing their readers of the rightness of economic fundamentalism and its policy prescriptions. I think that’s the way most economics editors see their job and, in the first part of my career I did too, though my specialty has always been explanatory journalism - helping my readers understand why economists believe what they do and governments adopt the policies they do. I’d like to believe I write more overtly about economic theory than my competitors do.

While I’ve continued that explanatory role, the more I’ve read and learnt about economics - including my interest in behavioural economics - the more convinced I’ve become that I shouldn’t imagine myself to be a member of the economists’ union, but should take a more independent stance, providing my readers with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments economists present to the community. I should be more like the Herald’s theatre critic than an economic evangelist.

That should be enough to get you going.

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Election result need not be a setback for good government

Maybe those who complain about a boring election campaign are condemned to an exciting election finish. Many in the establishment – particularly the business establishment – have convinced themselves the country is off to hell in a handcart, but it doesn't have to be like that.

The nation won't be ungovernable provided Malcolm Turnbull is willing to negotiate with the minor parties when necessary – hardly a new experience for governments, which rarely have a majority in the Senate.

Nor does it follow that the government will be unable to hasten the budget's return to surplus.

As a study by the Australia Institute has demonstrated, much of this year's budget can be legislated, particularly with a little compromise.

In any case, the budget is not the economy. And, contrary to any casual impression you may have absorbed, the prospects for the economy remain reasonable.

Brexit is bad news for the Brits, and adds to Europe's many problems, but it's not big enough to greatly affect the rest of us. The US economy is gathering speed.

The messy election result won't have much effect on the economy. Business loves whingeing about "uncertainty" – when it's got nothing else to do or say, that's what it does – but the period of transition from the mining investment boom is getting towards its end and, as it does, the rest of business will be getting on with it.

The economy has been growing at a rate that's about average, and the best guess is it will continue doing so. It has been creating additional jobs and this should continue.

For all that, however, there are messages for politicians on both sides from this election. How well they listen will determine how well we are governed over the next three years.

(Don't fall for the one about how we'll be back to the polls in no time. The more-excitable always say that at times like this.)

The first message comes from the continuing decline in people voting for the major parties. The proportion of voters giving their first preference to a minor party reached almost one in four.

This is not surprising when you remember how standards of conduct have fallen: the broken promises, the scare campaigns, the negativity and automatic opposition to whatever the other side says, the statements that are true in some sense but have been crafted to mislead.

The plain fact is that the mainstream politicians have forfeited our trust and lost our respect.

Many of us have concluded they're all liars, and we tune out whenever they start slagging each other off, or arguing about who has the bigger hole in their costings. They could save themselves much energy if they learnt not to bother doing this.

The message for the government is that it must broaden its appeal if it wants to attract a comfortable majority of two-party-preferred vote.

Any lapse into infighting between Abbott and Turnbull supporters will be the final proof the Coalition is no different from Labor.

The Coalition campaigned on its plan for jobs and growth (which boiled down to a cut in the rate of company tax), while Labor campaigned on the public's worries about cuts to government spending on education and health.

Labor's success in this argument explains why it did so much better than expected.

The Coalition suffered from the lingering resentment and suspicion provoked by Tony Abbott's first budget, which attempted to fix the deficit almost solely through cuts to the spending on health, education and welfare depended on by low and middle income-earners, while protecting the earnings of businesses supplying services to government and the tax breaks enjoyed particularly by high income-earners.

Many of those measures were abandoned, though some remain "zombie measures", rejected by the Senate but still on the government's books.

The memory of that deal-breaker budget was kept alive by Scott Morrison's insistence that the budget had a spending problem, not a revenue problem. (Surely Turnbull will use this opportunity to find Morrison "a job to which you're better suited".)

The message for the Coalition is obvious: it must switch to budgeting for all Australians. That means tax increases as well as spending changes that seek genuine efficiencies in contracting with business suppliers (drug companies, for instance), not just cost-shifting to the public.

The message for Labor is that its strategy of not being as obstructionist towards the government as Abbott in opposition was towards it, and of making itself a big target in the election by proposing "positive policies" (such as limiting negative gearing), worked well.

So now is not the time to revert to Abbott-like spoiler behaviour – if I wreck the joint they'll have to give up and hand over to me.

When they combine, the two sides can get anything through the Senate. Labor can win itself voter respect for being sane and sensible without bowing to the government's every wish.

It can help with the compromises. And when the government's fighting the good fight against powerful interests (such as the two big pathology companies, and the Coalition greedies​ making spurious claims about retrospective super changes) it can resist the unworthy temptation to take advantage of it.

With Labor now hopeful of winning next time, any budget nasty it helps the government fix now will be a problem it won't have to fix then.

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Oh no, not a credit rating downgrade

Sorry, but I've put Standard and Poor's and the two other big American credit rating agencies on a negative watch.

For me, the rating agencies' involvement in the global financial crisis has destroyed their credibility forever. I can no longer take their solemn pronouncements seriously, nor hear them with the reverence or contrition they imagine themselves entitled to.

The rating agencies were one of the private sector institutions charged with upholding standards of behaviour in America's financial markets, putting investors' interests ahead of their clients' and their own.

They were supposed to be a bastion against crisis and collapse, but they betrayed their trust.

The way their system works is that institutions wishing to borrow money by issuing bonds or other securities have to pay rating agencies to give those securities a rating of their credit worthiness.

The agencies' job pre-crisis was to be the hard-headed wise men who could see through the smoke and mirrors created by "innovators" on the make. They failed.

While everyone else in Wall Street was making money hand over fist, they didn't resist the temptation to get in for their cut.

They obliged their paying customers by awarding AAA credit ratings to securities subsequently exposed as "toxic debt".

In the process, they exposed the obvious conflict of interest involved in the common practice of governments attempting to protect the interests of investors and others by requiring businesses to buy "independent" certification from other businesses.

To an extent, governments around the world give the rating agencies a captive market by requiring certain organisations to hold only those securities certified as AAA.

This was how some Australian local councils got sucked into America's toxic debt crisis.

Trouble is, with this monumental blot on their record, we can no longer be sure what game the ratings agencies are playing and in whose interests they act.

In the case of government ("sovereign") borrowers, the agencies take it upon themselves to issue ratings. They then have the temerity to present the government with a bill for their services, though no self-respecting treasury pays up.

They seem to be pretty tough on government borrowers, though the lines they draw between safe and unsafe levels of debt seem pretty arbitrary.

What I wonder is if they have higher and holier standards for government than they have for their private sector fellows.

Why not? Everyone in business (and a lot of people in treasuries) know that governments, because their actions are not the product of market forces, are therefore non-rational and prone to being either mad or bad.

The agencies want us to believe their deliberations are highly scientific and sophisticated, applied consistently across the world.

But it's open to doubt how true that is.

After all, many of us believed the line that the whole towering edifice of ever-multiplying derivatives and synthetics built up before the financial crisis was the product of amazing advances in statistics and the science of finance, which had rendered us far smarter than we used to be at "managing risk".

When it comes to signalling changes in the riskiness of particular borrowers, the agencies purport to be the leaders: their vigilance causes them to be the first to see the problems looming, with the market following their lead.

But it's common for the market to turn against some borrower, leaving the agencies scrambling to adjust their ratings to fit. Are they just purveyors of conventional wisdom?

Whenever a downgrading of one of our governments is threatened, the media unfailingly assure us this would be a bad thing because the government would have to pay higher interest on its debt.

If this is still true, it's much less so than it used to be. And if there is still a premium to be paid, it's smaller than it's made to sound.

The rating agencies' loss of authority since the financial crisis is evident.

When, in 2011, in a rush of blood to the head – or maybe a touch of the megs​ – Standard and Poor's announced it had cut the US Government's credit rating to AA+, the other two did not follow suit and the market took not a blind bit of notice.

The yield (interest rate) on US Treasury bonds continued falling. Moral: don't try to get smart with the world's reserve currency.

But something similar happened when the three agencies downgraded Britain to AA- in the wake of the Brexit vote. Yields on British bonds have since fallen, along with those of other "sovereigns", including us.

Sometimes there are forces more powerful than a bunch of for-profit rating agencies.

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