Ever since the Hawke government announced the “Trilogy” commitments in 1984, promising no increase in the revenue and expenditure shares of national income, Australian politics has been, in effect, a conspiracy of silence about the central issue of economic policy, that of the appropriate balance of private and public expenditure. The steady growth in demand for services like health and education has ensured that no reduction in the public sector share has been feasible, while the market liberal dogma enshrined in the Trilogy has prevented any increase.

In retrospect, it’s striking that Hawke’s commitment came just after the reintroduction of Medicare, funded (in part) by a levy on all incomes. Medicare’s success has made it politically untouchable. On the other hand, it has been assumed (though without much supporting evidence) that any increase in taxation (not matched by offsetting cuts) is politically impossible.

The Gillard-Swan government was, until yesterday, ruled by this doctrine. With their unfortunate habit of making categorical commitments out of aspirations, both Gillard and Swan had repeatedly ruled out a levy to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme (by contrast, “conservative” state premiers like Newman were happy with the idea) But, as a recent Grattan Institute report has made clear, there is no way of meeting the needs for health and education without a substantial increase in revenue (as well as cuts in low-priority direct expenditures and tax expenditures).

So Gillard has announced a proposal for a 0.5 percentage point increase in the Medicare levy, raising $3 billion a year. Abbott has equivocated so far, but has stated his support for the NDIS, which leaves him no honest options except to go along.

If we could achieve consensus on paying for improved services through higher taxation in this case, we might finally have a serious debate about what, as a community, we are willing to pay for.

The full version of the Costello Commission of Audit Report has finally been released, along with the Newman government’s responses. As it turns out, the “Interim” report was the Commission’s last word on most of the big issues, such as the state’s debt position and fiscal outlook. The Final Report consists of

* A general discussion of the role of government, which is just a restatement of the market liberal orthodoxy of the 1980s and 1990s, proposing privatisation, competitive tendering and contracting and so on
* The specific claim that Queensland can deal with the problem of rising demand for health, education and similar services in coming decades by permanently raising the rate of productivity growth in those sectors.
* Detailed discussion of all areas of government activity.

Of these, the second is the important one. The fact that productivity grows more slowly in human services than in other sectors of the economy, and that this implies relative growth of the public sector, has been known since the work of Baumol in the 1960s. This pattern is unlikely to be changed by the kinds of measures being proposed by the Commission.

I appeared at a Senate inquiry into the Minerals Resource Rent Tax yesterday. Given the virtual certainty that the tax will be abolished after the election, I tried to focus on the future. Here’s my opening statement

Read More »

Back in the 1980s, there was a constant stream of international delegations to Wellington, seeking to learn from the “New Zealand miracle”, in which a group of radical free-market reformers turned around a sclerotic welfare state. While the results had yet to show themselves, everyone was confident that NZ would soon surpass Australia, where the political system threw up many more obstacles to reform. Everyone knows how that turned out. After 100 years of economic parity, NZ GDP per person has fallen to around 60 per cent of the Australian level. The gap closed a little when NZ abandoned radical reform (from the first MMP election to the end of the Clark Labor government) but is now widening again.

And, just in the last week, the intellectual foundations of austerity polices have been cut away with the discovery that the influential paper of Reinhart and Rogoff, predicting disaster when public debt levels exceed 90 per cent of GDP, was based on a coding error (not to mention some dubious statistical choices). That follows the demolition of the even more influential work of Alesina, Ardagna and other co-authors, some of which I criticised in Zombie Economics

Against this background, it’s truly bizarre to see the Australian right (IPA, CIS and Tony Abbott) presenting New Zealand as a model, on the basis that the budget has been returned to surplus. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that the economic outcomes have been consistently appalling, as long as the ideology is right.

I have a simple suggestion which I hope will appeal to everyone. Since the new NZ government came in, deluded Kiwis have been voting with their feet in large numbers. The resulting imbalance could be addressed if the CIS, IPA, Parliamentary Liberal Party and their keenest supporters moved across the Tasman to try out the marvels of free-market reform for themselves.

There’s an important new report out from the Grattan Institute, which has received a fair bit of press (some of it rather off-point) for its prediction that, under current policies, Australian governments will need to find an additional 4 per cent of GDP (about $60 billion a year) over the next decade if they are going to meet new expenditure needs for health and education services and maintain a prudent fiscal surplus.

The options aren’t explored in much detail, but it seems clear that expenditure cuts (particularly the usual suspects like duplication and waste, “middle class welfare” and so on) won’t be enough, so more tax effort will be needed. The top priorities ought to be tightening up the income tax system and increasing income tax rates at the top. If that’s not enough, the next option (tough, but maybe necessary) is an increase in the rate of GST.

I’ll try to post in more detail soon, but I think Grattan gets the story right on most points, and their analysis will certainly help anyone who wants to take a serious look at Australain fiscal policy