Mining makes pollies confused about demand and supply

Since almost all of us have lived in a market economy all our lives, you'd expect the effects of supply and demand on price would be well understood, particularly by anyone who managed to get themselves into Parliament.

In fact, however, our politicians on both sides have terrible trouble working out how supply works. Sometimes they tell us increasing supply will put downward pressure on price and sometimes they tell us it won't.

Turns out they're wrong on both counts.

When it comes to natural gas, Industry Minister Greg Hunt – like his predecessors Ian Macfarlane and Martin Ferguson who, purely by chance, have since gone on to jobs lobbying for the mining and gas industries – tells us the solution to the high price and looming "shortages" is for the Victorian and NSW governments to give gas companies free rein to do their fracking wherever they choose on the states' farmland.

Adding to the eastern states' production of coal seam gas would increase supply and thus put downward pressure on gas prices and avert the risk of shortages, they tell us.

This would be true if Australia – strictly, our eastern seaboard – had a closed market. If there was no international trade in gas.

But that's the trick the pollies and the business interests they want to help don't want to draw attention to.

There's been little change to the eastern states' demand for gas, nor decline in the supply of gas from Australian gasfields.

What's changed is the decision of our governments to allow foreign investors to set up several gas liquefaction plants near Gladstone in Queensland.

By doing so they opened a link between our closed gas market and the world market, where the world price of gas just happens to be a lot higher.

The inevitable result is our wholesale gas price has doubled to reflect the world price, our manufacturers are claiming to be "uncompetitive" at such a price and people are claiming to see shortages looming.

(As is typical in a resources boom, when our politicians see their job as complying with every demand coming from the miners in their greed-driven frenzy, we allowed too many liquefaction plants to be built and now none of them is making money. But that's a separate stuff-up.)

The point is, for as long as our governments allow local gas producers to charge us the world price (which I think they should), no amount of additional coal seam gas production would be sufficient to lower that world price.

Federal pollies of both colours bang on about reducing the restrictions on fracking because they're doing the bidding of their mates/generous party donors/future employers in the gas industry and because they want to draw attention away from the truth that they allowed domestic gas prices to rise and don't want to do anything to cut them.

There'll be no gas shortage as long as we pay the world price.

When it comes to the politicians' enthusiasm for constructing Adani's Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin of central Queensland, however, they leave us with the impression its addition to world coal supply would have no effect on the world coal price (or global carbon emissions, for that matter).

But we're one of the world's biggest exporters of coal. And Carmichael would be one of the world's biggest mines.

So it couldn't help but push down the world price, relative to what it would otherwise be, to the detriment of all our existing coal producers and their employees, and government royalty and company tax collections.

The Queensland government is so keen to see the mine proceed ASAP it's willing to subsidise a rail line to a coastal port by $1 billion. Can you imagine what that would do to its net royalty revenues?

It claims the rail line isn't a subsidy because it's a loan (believe that if you like) and because the line will open up the Galilee Basin to other mines.

Should they emerge, however, the downward pressure on coal prices and tax receipts would be even greater.

All this says Australia has not much to gain and a lot to lose by pressing on with the development of one more coal mine.

At a time when the whole world needs to make the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy as soon as we reasonably can, pushing down coal prices slows the process down by increasing the relative price disadvantage of renewables.

There seems to be something about political office in Australia that interferes with our pollies' economic reasoning powers. I can't think what it might be.

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What's happening in the labour market

Oh, no! They say the Bureau of Statistics' jobs figures for November are good because they show employment growing by 39,000, with all those jobs full-time. But then they say the unemployment rate increased a click to 5.7 per cent. Huh?

It is possible to make sense of what's happening in the labour market, but only if you follow a few rules.

For a start, it's never possible to make sense of the monthly figures if you focus on the change from last month because they're subject to sampling and other errors and keep bouncing around.

You make it doubly hard if you defy the bureau's advice and focus on its "seasonally adjusted" estimates rather than its "trend" (smoothed) estimates.

Also, employment and unemployment aren't opposite sides of the same coin. There's a third possibility: neither employed nor unemployed, because you don't have a job and aren't looking for one. The statisticians call this "not [participating] in the labour force".

So it's perfectly possible for both employment and unemployment to increase at the same time - if, say, some people are leaving the unemployed because they've found a job, while others are adding to the unemployed by joining the labour force to look for work.

But let's stick to the trend figures and step back for a longer view, looking at the 12 months to November.

The figures show total employment grew by 87,000 and the rate of unemployment fell 0.3 percentage points to 5.6 per cent.

If you think that sounds good, sorry. Over the same period, the proportion of working-age people participating in the labour force, either by having a job or looking for one, fell by 0.6 percentage points to 64.5 per cent.

About 0.25 percentage points of that fall would have been caused by the ageing of the population, but the rest was probably caused by "discouraged jobseekers" ceasing to be classed as unemployed because they gave up looking for work.

The bureau points out that growth in total employment of 87,000 is an annual increase of only 0.7 per cent, which is less than half the average growth rate over the past 20 years of 1.8 per cent.

Then, when you delve into the employment story you find that while part-time employment grew by 138,000, full-time employment actually fell by 51,000.

It's not so surprising that the jobs market isn't doing as well as our reasonable rate of growth in gross domestic product would lead us to expect, because a lot of the output growth is coming from increased production of minerals and energy, which involves employing very few extra miners.

But why are those jobs we are creating more likely to be part-time? The Reserve Bank investigated this question in last month's quarterly statement on monetary policy.

It says much of the recent swing from the creation of full-time jobs to the creation of part-time jobs is explained by the economy's return to non-mining led growth since the end of the mining construction boom.

The Reserve divides the economy into three broad sectors. First, the goods-related sector: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, utilities and distribution (transport, postal and warehousing, and wholesale and retail trade).

Second, the business services sector: finance and insurance, administration and support, media and telecommunications, professional scientific and technical, and rental, hiring and real estate.

Third, the household services sector: health and aged care, education, accommodation and food, and arts and recreation.

"Since 2013," the Reserve says, "employment growth has been strongest in the household services sector, where the share of part-time employment is relatively high at about 45 per cent."

Over this period, the share of part-time employment in the business services sector and the goods-related sector has also increased but, at about 25 per cent, it remains much lower than for the household services sector.

Employment growth has been weakest in the goods-related sector, partly reflecting the loss of jobs as mining construction projects come to an end and the ongoing decline in manufacturing employment.

So far we've said that, since 2013, some sectors of the economy have growth faster than others, with the sector that's grown fastest also being the one that's always had the biggest proportion of part-time jobs.

But there's also been a shift to part-time employment within each of the sectors. The Reserve says this fits with what businesses are telling it in its "liaison" interviews, that they've been hesitant to employ full-time workers until they see evidence that increased demand for their output is likely to be sustained.

Of course, the share of part-time employment in total employment has been increasing steadily since the mid-1960s. Then, it was 10 per cent; today it's about a third.

Being able to employ people for those times in the week when you need them - rather than having full-timers with little to do for much of the week - has allowed firms to increase the efficiency with which they use labour.

So there's been growing employer demand for part-time workers. At the same time, however, there's been growing willingness among employees to supply their labour on a part-time basis.

The obvious examples are full-time students, parents of very young children and, these days, older workers seeking semi-retirement.

This makes it wrong to think that part-time jobs are inferior to full-time jobs, that everyone with a part-time job really wants a full-time job (there aren't many for whom that's true) or that all part-time jobs are casual rather than permanent.

What is true, however, is that with the rise in part-time employment has gone a rise in under-employment - essentially, people with part-time jobs who'd prefer to be working more hours.

Since February 1990, under-employment's risen from 4 per cent to 8.5 per cent today, though it's been steady for the past two years.

On the downside of the resources boom, employment growth isn't as strong as we'd like it to be.

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Experts agree emissions intensity scheme the way to go

If ever there was proof that modern-day politicians are more followers than leaders, Malcolm Turnbull must be it. Last week, under pressure from the Coalition's climate change-denying rump, he dropped the ball on global warming.

He inherited from Tony Abbott a commitment under the Paris agreement to reduce our carbon emissions by 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, plus a plan for a review in 2017 to determine what policies were needed to achieve that target.

Everyone's agreed that the government's existing direct action approach, taking money from the budget to pay farmers and others to cut their carbon emissions, is quite inadequate to achieve the new target.

The authorities responsible for advising the government on energy and climate change – the Climate Change Authority, the Chief Scientist, the Australian Energy Market Commission – have each decided the best approach would be to introduce an "emissions intensity scheme" on the electricity generation industry.

But last week, when Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg mentioned that the review would include examining an intensity scheme, the Coalition's deniers went ape and Turnbull summarily excluded such schemes from the review, claiming they would add too much to electricity costs.

We're not all climate change deniers, however – and far from all Coalition voters – so if we think something decisive should be done, the way forward is to convince Turnbull this is what most of his potential followers want.

In other words, it's our community and our economy and prime ministers don't get to dismiss options without us even being allowed to think about them and decide what we prefer.

Since electricity generation accounts for about a third of our total carbon emissions, it's pretty clear it will be the main focus of our efforts to reduce emissions, especially because of the emergence of renewable energy from wind and solar.

The final report of the energy market commission, released at the Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday, evaluated three different policies for achieving the pledged reduction in emissions.

The first was one that would appeal to many environmentalists: extending the existing large-scale renewable energy target.

At present, the target is to achieve 33,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy a year by 2020. To achieve our commitment under the Paris agreement, we'd have to more than double the target to 86,000 gigawatt hours a year by 2030.

The second approach was for a government regulator to work out which coal-fired power stations should be required to close down at which times, as renewable energy expanded.

You'd start with the oldest generators, including the particularly polluting brown coal generators.

The third approach was the one Turnbull rejected sight unseen: imposing an emissions intensity scheme on electricity generators.

You start by measuring the industry's present emissions intensity by dividing its total emissions of carbon dioxide in a year by its total production of electricity in the year.

This average becomes the industry's emissions intensity standard. Those generators operating above the standard have to get down to it by buying "credits" from those that are below it.

The standard is lowered – made more demanding – each year by the set amount needed to achieve the desired reduction in emissions.

See how it would work? The "dirtiest" generators – the coal-fired generators – also happen to be the ones whose electricity is cheapest to produce, whereas the cleanest producers – wind and solar – are the ones whose electricity is dearest.

So the cheap dirty generators are required to subsidise the expensive clean producers, thus creating a price incentive for the clean producers to expand and the dirty producers to contract.

It also means the overall price doesn't change much.

So how do the three approaches compare, according to the modelling done for the report – remembering that all modelling is built on a host of assumptions?

The extended renewable energy target turns out to be the worst approach. It leads to almost the biggest increase in the cost of electricity to consumers over the years to 2030.

It also has the highest cost per tonne of emissions reduced – $42 a throw.

This is because it doesn't allow businesses to pick the type of technology most appropriate to their needs. Dirtier brown coal would remain in the market for longer, while black coal and gas-fired generation were forced out.

Regulated closure of generators would cause the highest increase in prices to consumers, though its cost of emissions reduction is the second lowest - $19.50 a tonne.

The bureaucrats and politicians making decisions about which generators to close would have to get it right, avoiding the temptation to take account of political pressures and the interests of generous donors to party funds.

This leaves the emissions intensity scheme. It has the lowest effect on consumer prices relative to what the model assumes would happen to prices even if no attempt were made to reduce emissions.

It assumes consumer prices would still go up under "business as usual", but would rise by less under the intensity scheme.

It also has the lowest cost of reducing emissions – $17.50 a tonne.

So the option the formerly studious Turnbull rejected without considering is the best, and the one least likely to put prices up.

Well done, Malcolm. Especially as it's a safe bet Labor will be offering such a scheme at the next election.

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Politicised Treasury bites own tail, covers for Turnbull

Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen is right: One of the Abbott-Turnbull government's various acts of economic vandalism is its politicisation of the once-proud federal Treasury.

Among Tony Abbott's first acts upon becoming prime minister in 2013 was to sack the secretary to Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson.

Even so, Parkinson was left in place for more than a year before being replaced by John Fraser, a retired funds manager, hand-picked by Abbott.

Fraser had risen through the ranks of Treasury under the formative influence of the legendary John Stone, until he left in the early 1990s to make his fortune in the money market.

When Fraser returned in triumph to take the top job, singing the praises of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and David Cameron's austerity policy in Britain, it seemed clear he hadn't spent the intervening decades keeping up with developments in thinking about fiscal (budgetary) policy.

The Abbott government's next act of politicisation came a few months later with the publication of Treasury's fourth five-yearly intergenerational report.

It had been turned into a partisan propaganda rag, full of dubious figuring intended to prove the Abbott government's failure to return the budget to surplus as promised was all the fault of the previous Labor government. The media tossed the report aside.

The latest stage in the politicisation of Treasury came last week with its publication of a report on The Effectiveness of Federal Fiscal Policy, commissioned from Professor Tony Makin, of Griffith University.

If you've never heard of Makin's work, you'll be surprised to learn he regards fiscal policy as utterly ineffective and probably counterproductive.

If you have heard of it, you won't be. Makin's views on the ineffectiveness of fiscal "activism" – using budgetary stimulus to assist recovery during recessions – are well known, unchanged and unchanging.

He's the go-to guy for anyone who'd like an independent report asserting that fiscal policy doesn't work – never has and never could.

In all the decades since Makin made up his mind on this question, all the academic theorising and empirical evidence from the real world have served only to confirm the wisdom of that decision.

His paper's "review" starts by rubbishing that deluded fool John Maynard Keynes – who, presumably, will never attain the intellectual heights reached by Makin and his mates – and praising such giants of the profession as Robert Mundell, Marcus Fleming, Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent.

It then reprises Makin's well-rehearsed argument that the Rudd government's budgetary stimulus – undertaken at the urging of the then Treasury secretary, Dr Ken Henry – was unnecessary and unhelpful.

And finally it does a lot of hand-wringing about the rapid growth in the public debt (especially when you exaggerate the size of the debt by quoting gross rather than net, a trick Makin seems to have learnt from Barnaby Joyce), the burden being left to our children, and the need to make reducing recurrent government spending our top fiscal priority.

One small problem – the last time Makin ran his anti-activism line, in a paper commissioned by the Minerals Council, Treasury issued a detailed refutation. Makin seems to have taken none of its substantive criticisms into account in his Treasury-commissioned version.

This is a measure of the extent to which politicisation has changed Treasury's tune.

Apart from correcting various factual errors, old Treasury noted that the 1960s-era Mundell-Fleming open economy model Makin uses relies on extreme assumptions that don't hold in Australia's case, and certainly didn't hold during the global financial crisis.

Makin is unimpressed that, at that time, such lightweights as the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development heaped praise on the Rudd government's budgetary stimulus.

So why has new Treasury chosen now to pay one of its former critics to repeat his ill-founded criticisms?

One reason is that Fraser left Treasury not long after it had advised the Hawke government not to use fiscal policy to respond to the severe recession of the early 1990s, but to rely solely on monetary policy (lower interest rates).

Henry and others in Treasury eventually realised how bad that advice had been. Indeed, Henry's advice to Rudd was influenced by a determination not to repeat the mistake. But Fraser had left the building by then and didn't read the memo.

Another reason is that, now, both the IMF and the OECD are urging the Turnbull government to help strengthen the economy by increasing its spending on worthwhile infrastructure.

What's more, some guy called Dr Philip Lowe has been saying the same thing. Forcefully.

Makin has been hired to tell these idiots they don't know what they're talking about.

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How to tell if recession looms

What would economic race-calling be without its little excitements? As you may possibly have heard, this week's news is that the economy has contracted - shrunk, gone backwards - by 0.5 per cent.

Oh, no! Another negative quarter will see the economy lapse into "technical" recession. Technically true, but quite unlikely - as almost all the money market economists had the honesty to admit.

If you're more practical than technical, and you live in Sydney or Melbourne, the best way to judge whether recession looms is to look out the window.

Bearing in mind that anyone under 25 has never seen a severe recession, and that anyone under about 40 probably wasn't paying much attention in 1991, let me give you a hint: they don't look anything like what you see around you.

What the self-styled experts on "technical recessions" don't tell you - perhaps because they don't know - is that employment is falling and unemployment climbing rapidly during actual recessions and even before the "technical recession" is proclaimed by a slavering media.

Think about it: rapidly climbing unemployment is the main reason those of us who've lived through a few recessions don't toss the word around lightly.

So what do we know about the employment story in Sydney and Melbourne?

According to the Bureau of Statistics monthly survey of the labour force, over the year to October total employment in NSW rose by 39,000, while the rate of unemployment fell by 0.6 percentage points to 4.9 per cent (although this was fully offset by a fall in the rate of participation in the labour force).

Not all that wonderful, but a long way from the precursor to a recession.

As for Victoria, it's performance is pretty good: total employment up by 109,000 over the year to October, with the unemployment rate down 0.3 percentage points to 5.7 per cent, even while the participation rate rose by 0.9 percentage points.

If you live in Perth, however, looking out your window would convince you the West Australian economy is in something like a recession.

Over just the six months to October, employment has fallen by 19,000 (1.4 per cent) while the unemployment rate rose 0.7 points to 6.4 per cent and the participation rate fell by 0.9 points.

Get it? If we were in or near recession, you wouldn't need the technical brigade to tell you.

The other point is that most of the weakness in the nationwide figures comes from the very tough times in the 15 per cent of the national economy represented by WA - which, of course, is bearing the brunt of the massive fall-off in mining and natural gas construction activity.

NSW and Victoria aren't doing too badly.

But why the sudden sharp contraction in the national figures? The bureau's national accounts for the September quarter show that the 0.5 per cent contraction lowered the economy's annual rate of growth to 1.8 per cent, down from 3.1 per cent over the year to June.

Michael Blythe, chief economist for the Commonwealth Bank, offers the most enlightening metaphor, saying the economy had just hit a pothole.

Paul Bloxham, his opposite number at the HSBC Bank, says the fall reflected an (unusual) accumulation of various one-off factors.

"First, export growth was weak, as coal production was disrupted by a roof collapse at a key mine, and various other factors," he says.

"Second, residential construction fell in the quarter, which the statistics bureau noted was due to inclement weather.

"Third, there was a sharp fall in public investment spending, which followed a sharp rise in the June quarter.

"Finally, mining investment continued to fall as projects are being completed."

It's clear the first three of these are just temporary setbacks. "Export growth is expected to bounce back strongly in coming quarters, given that there is substantial capacity still to come on line in the resources sector, particularly liquid natural gas export facilities," Bloxham says.

Exports of services rose in the September quarter and are expected to continue to rise, supported by demand from Asia.

In home building, there's a substantial pipeline of work yet to be done on new apartment projects, which should keep housing construction growing in coming quarters, although this will come to an end after that.

The sharp fall in public investment is unlikely to be repeated next quarter. Capital spending by the public sector is, to be technical, "lumpy" - it jumps around from quarter to quarter. In this case the figures were distorted by the privatisation of a big asset.

This is the 12th quarter in a row that business investment spending has fallen because of the end of the mining construction boom.

Since December quarter 2012, mining investment's share of gross domestic product has fallen from its peak of 9.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent.

This says we can't be far from the bottom, which is good news. Bloxham says mining investment should level out - and thus stop making negative contributions to growth - around the middle of next year.

Anything's possible, but a second negative quarter seems unlikely.

Even so, when you look behind all the one-offs, you do see signs in these accounts that the economy may not be growing quite as strongly as we formerly thought.

Growth in consumer spending has been on the weak side for two quarters in a row, even though the bureau's latest stab at the household saving ratio (as a proportion of household disposable income) says it's down to 6.3 per cent, quite a bit lower than we thought. Low growth in wage rates is taking its toll.

In November, the Reserve Bank's forecast showed the economy continuing to grow by about 3 per cent next year, strengthening to about 3.5 per cent by the end of 2018.

My guess is, when we see the revised forecast in February, it will be down a bit on that, though not by a lot.

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