We should change the culture of Christmas

Christmas, we're assured, brings out our best selves. We're full of goodwill to all men (and women). We get together with family and friends – even those we don't get on with – eat and drink and give each other presents.

We make an effort for the kiddies. Some of us even get a good feeling out of helping ensure the homeless get a decent feed on the day.

And this magnanimous spirit is owed to The Man Who Invented Christmas, Charles Dickens. (You weren't thinking of someone else, surely?)

According to a new survey of 1421 people, conducted by the Australia Institute, three-quarters of respondents like buying Christmas gifts.

Almost half – 47 per cent – like having people buy them gifts. And 41 per cent don't expect to get presents they'll never use.

Well, isn't that lovely. Merry Christmas, one and all!

Of course, there's a darker, less charitable, more Scrooge-like interpretation of what Christmas has become since A Christmas Carol.

Under the influence of more than a century of relentless advertising and commercialisation – including the soft-drink-company-created Santa – its original significance as a religious holy-day has been submerged beneath an orgy of consumerism, materialism and over-indulgence.

We rush from shop to shop, silently cursing those of our rellos who are hard to buy for. We attend party after party, stuffing ourselves with food and drinking more than we should.

All those children who can't wait to get up early on Christmas morning and tear open their small mountain of presents are being groomed as the next generation of consumerists. Next, try the joys of retail therapy, sonny.

But the survey also reveals a (growing?) minority of respondents who don't enjoy the indulgence and wastefulness of Christmas.

A fifth of respondents – more males than females – don't like buying gifts for people at Christmas. Almost a third expect to get gifts they won't use and 42 per cent – far more males and females – would prefer others not to buy them gifts.

The plain fact is that a hugely disproportionate share of economic activity – particularly consumer spending – occurs in one month of the year, December.

And just think of all the waste – not just the over-catering, but all the clothes and gadgets that sit around in cupboards until they're thrown out. All the stuff that could be returned to the store, but isn't.

At least the new practice of regifting helps. Unwanted gifts are passed from hand to hand, rather like an adult game of pass-the-parcel, until someone summons the moral courage to throw them out.

Still, buying things that don't get used is a good way to create jobs and improve the lives of Australians, no?

Not really. The survey finds only 23 per cent of respondents agree with this sentiment, while 62 per cent disagree.

One change since Scrooge's day is that those who worry most about waste – at Christmas or any other time – do so not for reasons of miserliness, but because of the avoidable cost to the natural environment.

Rich people like us need to reduce our demands on the environment to make room for the poorer people of the world to lift their material standard of living without our joint efforts wrecking the planet.

This doesn't require us to accept a significantly lower standard of living, just move to an economy where our energy comes from renewable sources and our use of natural resources – renewable and non-renewable – is much less profligate.

This is the thinking behind the book Curing Affluenza, by the Australia Institute's chief economist – and instigator of the survey – Dr Richard Denniss.

He says we can stay as materialists (lovers of things) so long as we give up being consumerists (lovers of buying new things). We can love our homes and cars and clothes and household equipment – so long as that love means we look after them, maintain and repair them, and delay replacing them for as long as we reasonably can.

The survey shows we're most likely to repair cars, bikes and tools and gardening equipment, but least likely to repair clothing, shoes and kitchen appliances, such as blenders, toasters and microwaves.

What would encourage us to get more things repaired? Almost two-thirds of respondents would do more if repairs were covered by a warranty. More than 60 per cent would do more if repairs were cheaper. And 46 per cent if repairs were more convenient – which I take to mean if it was easier to find a repairer.

How about making repair work cheaper by removing the 10 per cent goods and services tax on it? Two-thirds support the idea; only 19 per cent oppose.

Point is, there are straight-forward things the government could do to encourage us to repair more and waste less. Were it to do so, this would help restore older attitudes in favour of repairing rather than replacing.

Trouble is, politicians tend to be followers rather than leaders on such matters. So the first thing we need is a shift in the culture that makes more of us more conscious of the damage our everyday consumption is doing to the environment. That putting out the recycling once a week ain't enough.

We could start by changing the culture of Christmas.

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Turnbull's economic luck: more forecast than actual

It's usually in the interests of us followers to have a leader who is lucky. Malcolm Turnbull has had his share of bad luck but, of late, his fortunes seem to have changed. Latest proof is the mid-year budget update.

According to Scott Morrison and Mathias Cormann, everything is much improved. Although previous mid-year updates have revealed less progress than expected at budget time, this time the budget deficit is expected to be $5.8 billion lower than forecast in May.

The overall budget balance is still expected to be back in (a slightly larger) surplus in 2020-21, and this financial year is expected to be the last one in which the government needs to borrow to cover the day-to-day activities of government (as opposed to its spending on infrastructure), a year earlier than expected.

This means the Commonwealth's gross public debt is now projected to be $23 billion lower than expected by June 2021.

As for the economy, the Turnbull government's unwavering pursuit of Jobs and Growth has turned this from slogan to reality, we are told.

The economy is steaming on, but growth in employment – particularly full-time jobs – has been remarkable.

Well, yes – up to a point. There's good luck in the hand, and there's forecast good luck. Federal governments have been forecasting good results since the days of Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard – so far without much luck.

I would say we can give a fair bit of credibility to what is expected to happen between now and June, but forecasts and projections out another three years to June 2021 remain just that – forecasts.

The fact is that the government has had to revise downward its forecasts for the economy this financial year, but has left its forecasts for the following three years largely unchanged. Well, maybe, maybe not.

The government's forecast in May of a return to budget surplus by 2020-21 rested heavily on its prediction that, despite the extraordinary weakness in wage growth over the past four years, over the coming four years it would steadily return to boom-time rates.

Now these highly optimistic expectations have been shaved back, but only a little. I hope they come to pass, but I wouldn't bet much on it.

But what of the government's attempt to claim credit for the remarkably strong growth in employment over the past year?

I hate to shock you, but governments have been known to claim the credit for improvements that came to pass on their watch, even though the seeds of that improvement were sown before their time.

The surge in full-time jobs is explained largely by the delayed rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (initiated by Gillard) and by the NSW and Victorian governments' increased spending on road and rail infrastructure (for which Joe Hockey can share some credit).

But if some of Turnbull's newfound air of success and optimism rubs off on the rest of us that, at least, will be no bad thing.

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A bigger, better public sector will secure our future

There are important lessons to be learnt from the latest news about where our strong growth in employment is coming from. But if we listen to the nostrums of the Smaller Government brigade, we'll get them exactly wrong.

The (trend) figures we got from the Australian Bureau of Statistics last week showed employment growth of 370,000 – or 3.1 per cent – over the year to November. More than 80 per cent of the new jobs were full-time.

Great news.

But my esteemed colleague Peter Martin delved deeper and came upon a bigger story: the strong growth in employment has not been spread evenly across the economy, but is heavily concentrated in just two industries: "healthcare and social assistance" and construction.

It's also concentrated disproportionately in Victoria and NSW, and among women workers.

Why? Because, though employment in health and aged care has been growing strongly for years, the latest bout can be attributed mainly to the delayed rollout of the national disability insurance scheme initiated by Julia Gillard. Most of these extra workers would be female.

And because the strong growth in construction employment can be attributed mainly to a boom in infrastructure spending by the Victorian and NSW governments, much of it induced by Joe Hockey's incentive payment to state governments which engaged in "asset recycling" by using the proceeds from privatisation to build new infrastructure.

Oh no! You mean the growth in employment isn't the real deal? It's just some kind of temporary budget stimulus? It's not coming from the productive private sector, just from the unproductive, parasitical public sector, which wouldn't exist without the private sector's blood to suck upon?

Remember what I said last week about neoliberalism being ideology masquerading as economics? That last paragraph was a classic case.

It's true that, in some sense, the disability scheme and state infrastructure projects are instances of fiscal (budget) stimulus. But the notion that government deficit spending "crowds out" private sector spending is true only when the economy is booming and already at full employment – which we clearly aren't at present.

Just imagine how much weaker the economy would be now if government spending hadn't caused full-time employment to grow by up to 300,000 jobs over the past year.

The news that so much of the past year's employment growth has come from public deficit spending is actually vindication of the Reserve Bank's longstanding call for monetary policy (interest-rate) stimulus to be backed up by fiscal stimulus.

Note, too, that while even all full-time construction jobs are temporary in the sense that all projects end, employment associated with the disability scheme will continue indefinitely.

And, since governments tend to outsource both their construction projects and their disability care packages, most of the new jobs would actually be classed as in the private sector.

Of course, the notion that the private sector is productive but the public sector isn't is sheer economic illiteracy. We've long lived in a "mixed economy" in which most goods and services are produced by the private sector but, for good reason, some services are produced (or, at least, funded) by the public sector.

As I also wrote last week, economists are doing battle against the misapprehension scaring our youth that robots will reduce the amount of work needing to be done – the latest incarnation of what economists have long called the (fixed) "lump of labour fallacy".

While it's true new technology has been destroying jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution, it's equally true that in those two centuries we've never yet run out of other jobs we'd like to pay someone to do for us.

Since the 1960s, a large share of these green-fields jobs has gone to women, facilitating their (continuing) mass movement back into the paid workforce after child-bearing.

But here's the most important lesson to learn from the news that most of the growth in good, full-time jobs in recent times has come from the government: much of the new demand for people to do new things for us will involve new jobs delivering services in, or funded by, the public sector.

That's because almost all the services best provided or funded by the public sector are "superior goods" – things we want more of as we get richer: education and training, healthcare, aged care, disability care and much else, even law and order.

So the greatest threat to continued growth in the "lump of labour" comes not from robots, but from those wanting to put some arbitrary cap on the size of government – and, of course, on the amount of tax we pay.

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Who's ripping it off? Competition theory and reality

Puzzling over the rich economies' poor productivity improvement and weak wage growth (but healthy profits), American economists are pointing the finger at reduced competition between firms. But can this explain Australia's similar story?

Jim Minifie, of the Grattan Institute, set out to answer this in his report, Competition in Australia.

Economists regard strong competition between businesses as essential to ensuring market economies function well, to the benefit of consumers and workers.

Competition is what economic theory says stops us being ripped off by the capitalists. Firms that overcharge for their products lose business to firms that undercut them.

So competition pushes prices down towards costs (which economists – but not accountants – define as including the "cost of capital", or "normal profit", the minimum rate of profit needed to induce firms to stay in the market).

Competition helps ensure that economic resources - land, labour and (physical) capital – move to the uses most valued by consumers.

Competition also encourages firms to come up with new or better products – or less costly ways of producing a product – in the hope of higher profits. But those that succeed in this soon find their competitors copying their ideas, and bidding down the price to get a bigger slice of the action.

The innovations improve the economy's productivity (output per unit of input), but competition soon takes away the higher profits, delivering them into the hands of consumers, who often get better products for lower prices.

That's the theory. Question is, to what extent does it hold in practice? And does it hold less in recent years than it used to?

The simple theory assumes any market has a large number of sellers, each too small to be able to influence the market price. In practice, however, many of our markets are dominated by two, three or four big firms.

Why? Mainly because of the presence of economies of scale. It's very common that the more you produce of something – up to a point – the less each unit costs.

So, it makes great sense to have a small number of big firms doing much of the production – provided competition ensures most of the cost saving is passed on to customers in lower prices. Which, as a general rule, it has been over the decades.

Trouble is, big firms do have some degree of control over prices. And it's common for the few big firms in an industry to come to an unspoken agreement to compete using advertising or product differentiation, but not price.

Firms can increase their pricing power by taking over their competitors to get a bigger share of the market. It's the role of "competition policy" – run in our case by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission – to prevent overt collusion between firms, and takeovers intended to increase market power. But how well is that working?

"Natural monopolies" – where it simply wouldn't make economic sense for more than one firm to serve a particular market, such as rival sets of power lines running down a street, or two service stations in a small town - are another common departure from the theoretical model.

So, what did Minifie find in his study of competition in practice? He found evidence it had lessened in the United States, but not here.

He found plenty of markets where a few firms did most of the business. But "the market shares of large firms in concentrated sectors are not much higher in Australia than in other countries [of comparable size], and they have not grown much lately," he says.

Nor have their revenues (sales) grown faster than gross domestic product. The profitability of firms – profits relative to funds invested - hasn't risen much since 2000.

Minifie identifies eight industries characterised by natural monopoly (in descending order of size): electricity transmission and distribution, wired telecom, rail freight, airports, toll roads, water transport terminals, ports and pipelines.

Then there are nine industries where large economies of scale mean they're dominated by a few firms: supermarkets, wireless telecom, domestic airlines, then (of roughly equal size) internet service providers, pathology services, newspapers, petrol retailing, liquor retailing and diagnostic imaging.

Next are eight industries subject to heavy regulation by government: banks, residential aged care, general insurance, life insurance, taxis, pharmacies, health insurance and casinos.

(Often, these industries are heavily regulated for sound public policy reasons, but the regulation often acts as a barrier to new firms entering the market, thus allowing them to be dominated by a few firms.)

But note this: by Minifie's calculations, natural monopolies account for only about 3 per cent of "gross value added" (a variant of GDP), while high scale-economies industries account for 5 per cent and heavily regulated industries for 7 per cent.

So that means the parts of the economy where "barriers to entry" limit competitive pressure make up about 15 per cent of the economy. Then there are 29 industries with low barriers to entry making up the rest of the "non-tradables" private sector, and about half the whole economy.

That leaves the tradables sector (export and import-competing industries) accounting for 14 per cent of the economy and the public sector making up the last 20 per cent.

Even so, Minifie confirms that, in industries dominated by a few firms, many firms make "super-normal" profits – those in excess of what's needed to keep them in the industry.

By his estimates, up to half the total profits in the supermarket industry are super-normal. In banking it's about 17 per cent.

Other companies and sectors with substantial super profits include Telstra, some big-city airports, liquor retailers, internet service providers, sports betting agencies and private health insurers.

Comparing this last list with the lists of natural monopolies and heavily regulated industries suggests governments could be doing a much better job of ensuring the regulators haven't been captured by the companies being regulated.

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Robots won't reduce the amount of work we need to do

For me, one of the most significant economic developments of this year was realising how pessimistic many of our youth have become about their prospects of ever landing a decent full-time job.

To be sure, some degree of frustration on their part is understandable. Although it's true we avoided a severe recession following the global financial crisis of 2008, it's equally true that, until recently, employment growth has been weaker than usual in the years since then.

And the burden of this weaker growth has fallen disproportionately on young people leaving education to look for their first full-time job.

What's less understandable is the way older, and supposedly more knowledgeable, people have sought to demonstrate how with-it and future-focused they are by spreading wildly exaggerated predictions about how many jobs will be taken by robots, scaring the pants off our youth and convincing them they're doomed to a life of "precarious employment" in the "gig economy".

I'm sorry to say that the otherwise-worthy Committee for Economic Development of Australia was responsible for writing on many young minds the near certitude that 40 per cent of jobs in Australia are likely to be automated in the next 10 to 15 years.

The good news, however, is that, for once, economists were moved by all the amateur analysis they were hearing to join the debate about the future of work. Dr Alexandra Heath, of the Reserve Bank, dug out the hard evidence about how the nature of work is changing and Dr David Gruen, of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, put worries about the shrinking number of jobs into their historical context.

But the charge has been led by Professor Jeff Borland, of the University of Melbourne, one of our top labour-market economists.

With a colleague, Dr Michael Coelli, Borland examined the papers behind the claim of 40 per cent of jobs being lost to robots, and found it built on questionable foundations. In their figuring, the 40 per cent was likely to be nearer 9 per cent.

And last week Gruen rejoined the fray, giving a big speech about it in, of all places, Jakarta.

Predictions about what will happen in the economy can be based on the belief that it will respond to new developments in much the same way it responded in the past to similar developments, or on the belief that "this time is different".

People who know little economic history are always tempted, as many people are now, to assume this time is different.

But economists have learnt the hard way that this time is rarely very different. The fact is, people have been predicting that the latest technology would reduce the number of jobs since the Luddites at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Gruen reminds us that, in 1953, the great Russian-American economist Wassily Leontief wrote that "labour will become less and less important ... More and more workers will be replaced by machines."

Borland notes that, in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson established a presidential commission to investigate fears that automation was permanently reducing the amount of work available.

In 1978, Monash University held a symposium on the implications of new technologies, with the convenor predicting that, by 1988, at least a quarter of the Australian workforce would be made redundant by technological change.

Then there was Labor legend Barry Jones' prediction in his best-selling Sleepers Wake! that "in the 1980s, new technologies can decimate labour force in the goods producing sectors of the economy".

Gruen admits that "there is no doubt that, over the past two centuries, waves of technological change have eliminated jobs, and rendered some occupations obsolete.

"But they have also facilitated the creation of new jobs to take their place – either directly, or indirectly as a result of rising standards of living generating new demands."

There are two processes at work, he says. One is that technology takes jobs away – this is the bit we can all see. What we can't see is the second process, the invention of new complex tasks, leading to new jobs.

The history of technological advance over the past 200 years has shown the second process has broadly kept pace with the first.

Computers have been changing the way businesses do their business – and destroying jobs – since the early 1980s. If that's all there was to it, there ought to be far fewer jobs today.

But the number of Australians with jobs has increased by a factor of 2.7 since the mid-1960s, while the average number of hours worked per person has remained broadly stable. Fact.

Like the economists, I find it hard to believe this relationship is about to break down because "this time is different".

What's true is that the nature of work has been changing – slowly – for the past 30 years or so, and this trend is likely to continue. It may accelerate, but it hasn't yet.

Using research by Heath, Gruen says routine cognitive jobs (such as office assistants, sales agents, brokers and drivers) and routine manual jobs (factory workers, construction, mechanics) are in less demand, whereas non-routine manual jobs (nurses, waiters, security staff) and non-routine cognitive jobs (engineers, management, healthcare, designers) are in increasing demand.

It's the changing nature of work, not a fall in the amount of it, we should be preparing for.

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We should rescue economics from the folly of neoliberalism

There's no swear word in politics today worse than "neoliberalism". It's badly on the nose, and the reaction against it has a long way to run. But what is it, exactly? Where does mainstream economics stop and neoliberalism begin?

The term means different things to different people. Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard, says in the Boston Review the term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation or fiscal (budgetary) austerity.

I've always thought of it as a fundamentalist, oversimplified, dogmatic version of conventional economics, one from an elementary textbook, not a third-year text that adds the complications of market power, externalities​ (costs or benefits not captured in market prices), economies of scale, incomplete and asymmetric (lop-sided) information, and irrational behaviour.

Rodrik's conception of the term isn't very different. He thinks mainstream economics needs to be rescued from neoliberalism because, as people heap scorn on it, we risk throwing out some of economics' useful ideas.

Which are? That the efficiency with which an economy's resources are allocated is a critical determinant of its performance. That efficiency, in turn, requires aligning the incentives of households and businesses with "social" costs and benefits (so as to internalise the externalities).


That the incentives faced by entrepreneurs, investors and producers are particularly important when it comes to economic growth. Growth needs a system of property rights and contract enforcement that will ensure those who invest can retain the returns on their investments.

And that the economy must be open to ideas and innovations from the rest of the world. Of course, economies also need the macro-economic stability produced by sound monetary policy (low inflation) and budgetary sustainability (manageable levels of public debt).

Does all that smack more of neoliberalism than mainstream economics to you? If it does it's because mainstream economics shades too easily into ideology, constraining the choices that we appear to have and providing cookie-cutter solutions.

"A proper understanding of the economics that lies behind neoliberalism would allow us to identify – and to reject – ideology when it masquerades as economic science. Most importantly, it would help us develop the institutional imagination we badly need to redesign capitalism for the 21st century."

There's nothing wrong with markets, private entrepreneurship, or incentives, Rodrik says, provided they're deployed appropriately. Their creative use lies behind the most significant economic achievements of our time.

The central conceit and fatal flaw of neoliberalism is "the belief that first-order economic principles map onto a unique set of policies, approximated by a Thatcher-Reagan-style agenda" – also known as the "Washington consensus".

Take intellectual property rights. They're good when they protect innovators from free-riders, but bad when they protect them from competition (as they often do when the US Congress has finished with 'em).

Consider China's phenomenal economic success. It's largely due to its orthodoxy-defying tinkering with economic institutions. "China turned to markets, but did not copy Western practices in property rights. Its reforms produced market-based incentives through a series of unusual institutional arrangements that were better adapted to local context," Rodrik says.

Some may say China's institutional innovations are purely transitional. Soon enough it will have to converge on Western-style institutions if it's to maintain its economic progress. Well, maybe, maybe not.

What neoliberal proponents of the single route to economic prosperity keep forgetting is that none of the economic miracles that preceded China's – in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan – followed the Western formula. And each did it differently.

Even among the rich countries we see much variance from the neoliberal cookie cutter. The size of the public sector, for instance, varies from a third of the economy in Korea, to nearly 60 per cent in Finland.

In Iceland, 86 per cent of workers are in a trade union; in Switzerland it's 16 per cent. In America firms can fire workers almost at will; in France they must jump through many hoops.

Rodrik repeats an old economists' saying, one forgotten by the neoliberal oversimplifiers. "Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in economics is: it depends."

It depends on the particular circumstances, on how well your economic "institutions" (laws, official bodies, norms of behaviour) fit with those the model assumes to exist, on what you're trying to achieve, on your priorities, and on the political constraints you face.

As the Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, said when asked if he preferred his own emissions intensity scheme to Malcolm Turnbull's national energy guarantee: "There are a lot of ways to skin a cat."

Economics has many useful insights to offer the community. It must be rescued from neoliberalism because neoliberalism is simply bad economics.

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Mixed news as economy readies for better times

Scott Morrison is right. We're experiencing "solid" growth in the economy – provided you remember that word is econocrats' code for "not bad – but not great".

This week's national accounts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show real gross domestic product grew by 0.6 per cent in the September quarter. Taking the figures literally, this meant the economy grew by 2.8 per cent over the year to September, way up on the 1.9 per cent by which it grew over the year to June.

But it's often a mistake to take the quarterly national accounts – the first draft of history, so to speak – too literally.

As Dr Shane Oliver, of AMP Capital, reminds us, the annual growth figure is artificially strong because the contraction of 0.3 per cent in the September quarter of last year dropped out of the annual calculation, whereas the 0.9 per cent bounce back in following quarter stayed in.

The bureau's trend (smoothed seasonally adjusted) estimates show growth of 2.4 per cent over the year to September, which is probably closer to the truth.

That compares with the economy's "potential" (maximum average rate of growth over the medium term, without rising inflation pressure) of 2.75 per cent a year. And with the Reserve Bank's forecast that growth over next calendar year will reach 3 per cent.

Since growth has fallen short of its potential rate for so long – creating plenty of spare production capacity – the economy can (and often does) grow faster than its medium-term "speed limit" for a few years without overheating.

And, although the latest reading isn't all that wonderful, there are enough good signs among the bad to leave intact the Reserve's forecast of better times next year.

(Remember, however, that much of the growth in all the figures I've quoted – and will go on to quote – comes from a simple, but often unacknowledged, source: growth in the population. The bureau's trend estimates show real GDP per person of just 0.3 per cent during the quarter and just 0.9 per cent over the year.)

Getting to the detail, we'll start with the bad news. Consumer spending – which accounts for well over half of GDP - grew by a minuscule 0.1 per cent during the quarter, and by a weak 2.2 per cent over the year to September.

Why? Because, despite remarkably strong growth in the number of people earning incomes from jobs, the increase in people's wages is unusually low – as measured by the national accounts, even lower than the 2 per cent registered by the wage price index.

Until now, households have been cutting their rate of saving so as to keep their consumption spending growing faster than their disposable (after-tax) income. They've probably been encouraged in this by the knowledge that the value of their homes has been rising rapidly, thus making them feel wealthier.

Now, however, Melbourne house prices are rising more moderately, while Sydney prices are falling a little. Price rises in other state capitals have long been more modest.

In the latest quarter, households' income rose faster than their consumption spending, meaning they increased their rate of saving. It's possible people have become more conscious of our record level of household (mainly housing) debt – though this is probably taking the (particularly dodgy) quarter-to-quarter changes too literally.

Next bit of bad news is that the boom in home building has finally topped out, with activity falling by 1 per cent in the quarter and by 2.3 per cent over the year.

There are a lot of already-approved apartments yet to be built, however. So, though home building's addition to growth has finished, it's future subtraction from growth shouldn't be great.

Which brings us to the first bit of good news. While investment in new housing has peaked, business investment in equipment and structures in the (huge) non-mining part of the economy is finally getting up steam.

According to estimates from Felicity Emmett, of ANZ bank, non-mining business investment rose by 2.7 per cent in the quarter, and by 14 per cent over the year.

The figures for business investment spending overall are even stronger, meaning spending in mining has been growing somewhat, not continuing to fall.

This doesn't mean mining investment has hit bottom, however. Higher commodity prices are prompting some minor investment, but there's a last minus yet to come from the completion of some big gas projects.

The other really bright spot is strong public sector investment in infrastructure – mainly road and rail projects in NSW and Victoria – which grew by 12.2 per cent over the year to September.

The external sector made no net contribution to growth, despite the volume of exports - minerals, rural, education and tourism - growing by 1.9 per cent in the quarter and by 6.4 per cent over the year.

That's because of a bounce-back in the volume of imports. Why, when consumer spending is weak? Because most investment equipment is imported.

If all these ups and downs are too equivocal to convince you the economy really is gathering strength, I have the killer argument: jobs growth.

As Morrison was proud to boast - apparently, all the new jobs are directly attributable to the government's own plan for Jobson Grothe​ - the increase in employment during the quarter was remarkable.

It rose by more than 90,000, with eight in 10 of those jobs full-time. Over the year to September, total employment rose by 335,000, an amazing increase of 2.8 per cent.

It's true the economy won't be back to its normal healthy self until wages are growing a bit faster than prices, reflecting the improvement in the productivity of labour (running at 1 per cent a year).

But an economy with such strong and sustained growth in full-time jobs simply can't be seen as sickly. And precedent tells us that where employment goes, wages follow.

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Latest attack on welfare 'unworthies' is contemptible

Remember the Turnbull government's plans to drug test people on the dole? While you and I are diverted by all the political game-playing in this week's last session of parliament for the year, the government is hoping to slip these and other mean-spirited cuts in social security through the Senate – probably after some deal with the Xenophon-less Xenophones.

You can blame it on my Salvo upbringing – whose influence on my values seems to get stronger the older I become – but I have nothing but contempt for comfortably-off people who try to solve their problems by picking on the down-and-out.

If Australians can't do better than that, what hope is there for us?

The expected savings (which may or may not eventuate) of $478 million over four years are minor in a budget of almost $2 trillion over the same period.

But they'll be coming out of the hides of those most in need, those whose first lack of moral discipline was failing to pick the right parents, those whose luck has been worse than ours, those who've failed to deny themselves and their children the slightest treat at any time, the way we undoubtedly would had we been in their shoes.

They're the cuts a government makes when it wants to be seen to be acting to reduce the budget deficit, but lacks the courage to take on a fight with the medical specialists, drug companies, chemists, mining companies or other powerful interest groups guarding their own, much bigger slice of budget pie.

They're also the cuts you make when you're indulging your well-off supporters' delusion that the "unsustainable" growth in welfare spending is caused by all the cheating by the undeserving poor, not the retirement of the Baby Boomers and their success in getting around the age pension means test.

To be fair, what the Coalition plans is just a step up from the harsh measures imposed by their Labor predecessors. Labor's conscience has returned only now it's back in opposition.

Labor, however, tried harder to disguise its true motive of gratifying the workers' self-righteous envy of those living the cushy life on the dole or sole parent pension.

Labor governments profess to be into tough love. Using carrots and sticks to encourage people of working age off benefits and into a job, which will bring them more money and self-respect.

But I see little of that cant from the present supposed protectors of the disadvantaged, Alan Tudge and his problematically named boss, Christian Porter.

They seem all toughness and no love. They want to be seen as the great punishers and straighteners of the hordes of lazy cheats and bludgers and ne'er-do-wells sucking the blood of all the over-taxed, hard-working upper income-earners whose self-serving interests they were elected to promote.

Consider the plan to drug test people on the dole. It seems an exercise in emotionally gratifying punishment in search of an "evidence base".

According to the Rural Doctors Association, "people who are looking for a job do not generally have any higher incidence of drug use than those in the general population".

In 2013, the government's own Australian National Council on Drugs examined the idea and recommended against it, saying "there is no evidence that drug testing welfare beneficiaries will have any positive effects for those individuals or for society, and some evidence indicating such a practice could have high social and economic costs".

Almost all the doctors and other professionals actually involved in helping drug addicts have opposed the idea. They're particularly insistent that compelling people to undergo treatment doesn't work.

They won't be testing everyone on the dole, however, that would be far too expensive. Just 5000 people. But the amount the government expects to save by denying payments to those who fail the test suggests it doesn't expect the move to have any great deterrence effect. It's just an excuse to cut people off the dole and save money.

Other pettifogging measures in the bills the government hopes to get through this week include freezing benefit rates to wives and widowed pensioners until they're no greater than the "jobseeker payment" (the latest bureaucratic euphemism for the dole), getting rid of the 14-week bereavement allowance, tightening the job search requirement for those aged 55 to 59 (who, as we all know, could find jobs if they tried) and making it easier to suspend their dole, and delaying the start of payments for some welfare recipients.

Another much-needed reform is delaying the start of dole payments until any savings people have are exhausted (then wondering why they can't pay unexpected bills on the single dole of $268 a week).

Other changes would make it easier for Centrelink to "breach" (cut payments to) people judged to have failed to comply with their "mutual obligations". There's more, but you get the idea.

I'm just waiting for the bill that sools Centrelink's robodebt recovery machine on those cabinet ministers and others who breached the Constitution by claiming to be eligible for election when they weren't, but have received months of pay to which they weren't entitled.

Apparently, the rules applying to little guys whose behaviour is less than perfect are a lot tougher than those applying to top guys deciding how tough to be on the little guys. You get the tough, we get the love.

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Politicians should get wings clipped on infrastructure

The more our ever-more "professional" politicians put political tactics ahead of economic strategy – put staying in government ahead of governing well – the more pressure they come under to cede more of their power to independent authorities.

The obvious instance is our move in the mid-1990s to transfer control over interest rates ("monetary policy") from the elected government to the independent central bank.

Shifting interest rates away from those tempted to move rates down before elections and up after them has proved far better for the stability of the economy.

Another issue on which voters don't trust politicians to make good decisions – mainly because of the risk of collusion between them – is their own remuneration.

So, first, responsibility for setting politicians' salaries, and now, their expenses, has been handed over to independent bodies.

Then there was the Gonski report's proposal that responsibility for determining the size of grants to public, Catholic and independent schools be taken away from deal-doing pollies and given to a properly constituted authority, following consistent and transparent criteria.

The idea was rejected by Julia Gillard but, particularly now the amazing variance in the deals Labor did with different school systems has been revealed under the Coalition's version of Gonski, there's still hope we'll end up with an independent, rules-based grants authority.

Some years ago, the Business Council took up a proposal by Dr Nicholas Gruen for the example set by monetary policy to be spread to fiscal (budget) policy. An independent body would set the budget's key parameters – for spending, revenue and budget balance – leaving the government to decide the specific measures to take within those parameters.

The idea didn't gain traction, but it may have boosted the push for independent evaluation of infrastructure projects.

You can see an admission that "something needs to be done" in the establishment of Infrastructure Australia by the Rudd government, and its rejig by the Abbott government, as a supposedly "independent statutory body providing independent research and advice to all levels of government".

Trouble is, the authority has little authority. Its role is to create the illusion of independent evaluation and reformed behaviour, while the reality continues unchanged.

There's no obligation for even the federal government to have all major projects evaluated, for them to be evaluated before a government commits to them and begins work, nor for those evaluations to be made public as soon as they're completed, so voters can debate the merits of particular projects with hard evidence.

Promises to build particular projects in a state, or even an electorate, are a key device all parties use to buy votes in election campaigns.

As Marion Terrill, of the Grattan Institute, has demonstrated, few of the projects promised by the government, opposition and Greens at last year's election had been ticked by Infrastructure Australia, and many of those it had ticked weren't on anyone's list of promises.

Terrill's research has revealed the huge proportion of government spending on capital works that's unlikely to yield much economic or social return to taxpayers.

For some years the Reserve Bank, backed by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has argued that fiscal policy should be doing more to help monetary policy get our economy back to trend growth by spending more on worthwhile infrastructure projects. These would add to demand in the short run, and to supply capacity in the medium run by improving private sector productivity.

This changed approach would involve shifting the focus of fiscal policy from the overall budget deficit (including capital works spending) to the more meaningful recurrent or operating deficit.

This year's budget seemingly accepted this proposal, promising to give greater prominence to the NOB – net operating balance – and announcing two huge new infrastructure projects: the second Sydney airport and the Melbourne to Brisbane inland freight railway.

See the problem? Government infrastructure spending does wonders for the economy only if the money's spent on much-needed projects. As a proper evaluation would show, the inland railway is a waste of money (the product of a deal with the Nationals).

So it's little wonder that cities and infrastructure are the third big item, after healthcare and education, on the Productivity Commission's new agenda for micro-economic reform.

It's first recommendation? "It is essential that governments ensure that proposed projects are subject to benefit-cost evaluations and that these, as well as evaluations of alternative proposals for meeting objectives, are available for public scrutiny before decisions are made."

This is something the professed believers in Smaller Government, and those professing to be terribly worried about lifting our productivity, should be making much more noise about.

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Good could come from bank royal commission

The banks and other opponents of a royal commission into banking told us it would generate a lot of noise and expense without achieving anything of value. They'll probably still be claiming that when the just-announced inquiry has reported.

Well, maybe. By contrast, I think there's a good chance the commission's establishment will be seen as the most visible marker of the time when the two sides of politics turned their backs on the era of bizonomics – the doctrine that what's good for big business is good for the economy and the punters who make it up.

The litany of misconduct by the big four banks – the unscrupulous investment advice given, the mistreatment of people with legitimate life insurance claims, the charges that the bank-bill swap rate was being rigged, and allegations of extensive use of bank facilities for money laundering – has driven the public's growing insistence that the banks be brought to account.

This week Rod Sims, boss of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, confirmed what all of us know, that competition in banking is weak ("not vigorous") leaving the big four with great ability to protect their excessive profits by passing costs on to their customers ("the large banks each have considerable market power").

The arguments of the banks and the Turnbull government that an inquiry must be avoided because it would shake confidence in the integrity and strength of our financial system – including in offshore markets – were just as weak then as they are now when used by the banks and the government to justify holding an inquiry to end the "political uncertainty".

The plain truth is that a rebellion by its own backbenchers has robbed the government of its ability to stop an inquiry going ahead.

This is the best explanation for the banks' sudden reversal from opposing an inquiry to claiming one is now "imperative". Since the revolt makes one inevitable, they'd prefer its establishment to be controlled by their Liberal defenders, not their Nationals, Greens and Labor critics.

They say a smart prime minister never commissions a report unless he knows what it will find and recommend. But that's easier imagined than achieved.

Were the commission's report to be judged by voters as a whitewash, with no significant consequences, this would simply ensure the bad behaviour of the banks remained a hot issue favouring the government's opponents at the next election.

What's just as likely is that royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne will interpret his terms of reference as he sees fit and, in any event, uncover a lot more instances of misconduct.

Broadening the inquiry's scope to cover misconduct in wealth management, superannuation and insurance, as well as in banking proper, is unlikely to leave voters thinking the banks' behaviour hasn't been as bad as they first thought.

Polling shows high public support for a banking royal commission, including among Coalition voters.

But the way the government has been forced by public opinion to abandon its attempt to protect the banks is a sign of much deeper public disaffection with the long-dominant "neoliberal" doctrine – formerly accepted by both sides of politics – that governments should do as little as possible to prevent businesses doing just as they see fit.

That when business mistreats its customers or it employees, there's nothing the government could or would want to do.

That big businesses' generous donations to both sides' coffers mean they have the politicians in their pockets. That the Turnbull government's desire to cut the rate of company tax on foreign multinationals that already avoid paying much is proof the economy's run to please the big boys, not you and me.

I've been writing for months about the breakdown of the "neoliberal consensus". This is evident in the way the Labor side has promised a banking royal commission, opposed big business tax cuts, opposed reductions in penalty rates, and pressed for constraints on negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

But set aside his resistance to a banking inquiry and (impotent) advocacy of big business tax cuts, and you see Turnbull's already doing much to respond to voters' rejection of the fruits of neoliberalism – privatisation, the various economic reform stuff-ups – with his new tax on multinational tax avoiders and coercion of particular companies in his struggle to fix the stuffed-up national electricity market and the cornering of the eastern seaboard gas market by three big companies.

Remember too the way, as part of his efforts to stave off a banking inquiry, Turnbull has become ever tougher on the banks, making them pay for more surveillance by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and imposing a new tax on the five biggest of them.

In his most recent attempt to head off pressure for an inquiry, a proposed arrangement to compensate victims of bank misbehaviour, the banks would have been paying.

When the political smarties look back on this saga, my guess is they'll conclude Turnbull was mad to lose so much political credit in his abortive attempt to protect the banks from the public's disapproval of their greed-driven misbehaviour.

He should have got, much earlier than he did, the message that the era of governments pandering to big business was over, killed off by voters' disaffection with the political mainstream and willingness to flirt with the populist fringe.

I'm not sure Australia's big business has yet got that message, particularly not the big banks – transfixed as they are by their inward-looking contest to increase their profits and chief executive remuneration package by more than their three rivals have.

I support the royal commission because another year or more of public dredging through all the moral (and sometimes legal) shortcuts the banks have taken on their way to higher profits and bonuses may finally get the message through that their way of doing business – and treating their customers – must change.

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