I’ve been flat out with final revisions to my book manuscript and various other things. So I didn’t get time to say I would be on Australia Talks this evening talking about the resource rent tax. It went fairly well, I thought. You can judge for yourselves when the podcast becomes available
Not quite sure when I will surface from my current deluge of work. Light posting until then.
* Budget lockup low point: Only instant coffee, had to get my caffeine hit from Diet Coke. High point: Asked for autograph by Treasury officials. Also, a fun dinner with Robert Gottliebsen, Alan Kohler, Natasha Stott-Despoja, the Crikey crew and others. Not quite as lively as some accounts suggested, but a good time was had by all.
* One thing I missed: Got through some of the confusion on the aid budget but wasn’t able to work out if the money for Copenhagen commitments was additional new money (as promised) or old money taken from elsewhere in the aid budget. Unsurprisingly, it was old money
* A bigger thing I missed: What Possum’s Pollytics correctly calls the most important chart in the budget, a graph showing a regression of the size of economic stimulus against economic growth relative to IMF forecasts. The relationship is highly significant, and the coefficient is approximately 1. That is, each dollar of stimulus resulted in (roughly) a dollar of extra output. No doubt this will be subject to reanalysis, but it’s a striking result.
* Tony Abbott’s reply: predictably weak. Freezing public service recruitment is silly symbolism, not a serious way of cutting spending.
It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
Last year’s Commonwealth Budget represented a huge, and, for the most part, successful economic gamble. The gamble last year was that a big budget deficit would yield an economic stimulus sufficient to outweigh the associated increase in public debate and provide a basis for sustainable economic growth in the future.
As the Treasurer’s speech points out, the Australian economy has recovered strongly at a time when the US and European economies are only marginally stronger than at the depths of the recession. Public debt is now projected to peak at 6 per cent of GDP, compared to a developed world average of more than 80 per cent. The government’s claims as strong economic managers have a fair bit of credibility.
This year’s Budget is a political gamble; that the government can win re-election based on that credibility, without offering any significant electoral sweeteners. The government doubled down on this gamble with the series of backflips and repudiated promises in the leadup to the Budget, motivated largely by the desire to achieve an early return to surplus. The political price for these backflips, most notably the indefinite deferral of the CPRS, has been steep, and it’s far from obvious that the Budget will provide any offsetting bounce.
Read More »
I’ve changed this a bit to be clearer on points that I hadn’t sorted out in the lockup. It was a long day
My response to the Budget’s international outlook
I’m going to post a bunch of pieces I wrote for Crikey during my day at the Budget lockup. Here’s some pre-budget speculation. The reasoning still looks OK, but the government didn’t go for the rabbit from the hat I thought possible: a return to surplus in 2011-12.
I’m going to be in the Budget lockup tomorrow, so I probably won’t be posting much after this. So, rather than polish it up, I’m going to bang out some thoughts on the Resource Rent Tax proposal, the main element of the Henry Review adopted by the government. The shorter version: the Tax is a good idea, and the criticisms we have seen are what you would expect from rent-seekers seeking to protect their rents.
The central arguments in favor of the RRT proposal are intertwined, and I’ll try to put them together in coherent way
* The basic efficiency argument: Since mineral deposits yield super-normal profits to those who have the right to exploit them, a tax on those profits will not lead to less investment – the profit will still be enough to induce investment
* The economic equity argument. Compared to almost any other tax we could impose, the burden of the RRT falls least on low-income Australians and most on high-income investors, many of whom are foreigners
* The legal equity argument. In Australia, mineral resources are, and always have been, owned by the state, representing all Australians, and not by individuals. So we should seek to maximize the return on our own assets.
* The political economy argument. Ever since I can remember, and probably before that, mining companies have been threatening to pack their bags and go overseas. They’ve made these threats when they were upset about tax policy, about environmental restrictions, about Aboriginal land rights, about union wage demands and work practices and when they were in a bad mood for no particular reason. But, even though lots of Australian industries have disappeared, or contracted drastically for a range of reasons, the miners are still here. The reason is obvious. They can leave, but they can’t take the minerals with them. It’s precisely this immobility that underlies the case for RRT
Read More »
Open for your thoughts on mothers and motherhood, reminiscences, and so on.
I’m getting tired of comments threads being derailed by disputes over nuclear power. So I’m going to give everyone a final chance to state their views on the question, then declare this topic off-limits. Here are my views:
* If there is no better option, I’d prefer an expansion of nuclear power to continued reliance on fossil fuels (particularly coal) to generate electricity
* We don’t have enough information to determine whether nuclear power is more cost-effective than the alternatives (conservation, renewables, CCS) and we have debated this question at excessive length (a fact which itself reflects our lack of info)
* In practical terms, there is no chance of any movement towards nuclear in Australia for at least the next five years.
So, I’m going to ask everyone to have their final say, and come back in five years when we might have something new and relevant to say.
Update I’ve been asked by Fran Barlow in comments to reconsider my policy, and here is my response. If I see anything new and interesting (to me, that is) on the topic, I’ll post on it, and open up discussion. Readers who see something suitable are welcome to email me and tell me. Otherwise, nothing more on this until further notice, please, including in open threads.
John Quiggin 