Dog Days: Australia After the Boom (Redback)
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Authors: Ross Garnaut
Dog Days
‘This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the economic and social future of Australia. Garnaut brings to the task one of our most penetrating economic minds in an astringent analysis of the challenges facing us. He presents a wide-ranging and detailed set of policies to meet those challenges successfully. The book is lucid, compelling and unburdened by political bias.’—BOB HAWKE
‘Here is a brilliant guide to the future of the Australian economy that our prime minister, his Cabinet and indeed all members of parliament should study. We cannot be sure that big problems are ahead for Australia owing to the end of the China boom, but it is highly likely, and our government must be prepared. Ross Garnaut draws on the lessons of the past and an ability to explain complex economic issues. He has cogent things to say about our changed political culture.’—MAX CORDEN
‘Ross Garnaut is the nation’s most prophetic economist. Whereas economists are often criticised for not having seen problems coming, Garnaut is always focused on future risks. If you care about Australia’s economic future, this book is a must-read. If you don’t see a problem, it will set you straight. If you do, it will provide solutions.’—ROSS GITTINS
Published by Redback,
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Copyright © Ross Garnaut 2013. Ross Garnaut asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Garnaut, Ross, author.
Dog days : Australia after the boom / Ross Garnaut.
ISBN for eBook edition: 9781922231178
ISBN for print edition: 9781863956222 (paperback)
Mineral industries--Australia--Economic aspects. Mineral industries--Government policy--Australia. Economic forecasting--Australia. Australia--Economic conditions--2001- Australia--Economic policy--2001-Australia--Foreign economic relations--21st century.
338.230994
Cover design by Peter Long
Introduction: Australia’s Choice
PART 1
3. The Great Australian Complacency
PART 2
5. Reform for Full Employment and Stability
6. Reform to Raise Productivity
7. Population, Participation and Equity
8. The Public Sector and the Federation
9. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change
PART 3
10. A Changed Political Culture
11. Public versus Private Interests
It was December 2005, and Australians were enjoying the longest economic expansion – and the largest rise in incomes over a short period – that a developed country had ever known.
‘There are Salad Days of economic policy,’ I said to the annual dinner of the Economic Society in Canberra, ‘days when the economy outpaces even people’s expectations. These are the times when poor policy looks good enough, and ordinary policy looks celestial.’
It was the third year in which the China resources boom was massively boosting payments for Australian exports.
Yet the Salad Days would be followed by the Dog Days, I went on to say, ‘days when celestial economic policy looks ordinary, and ordinary policy diabolical. It will be wise to save much of the economic fruits of the China boom, in case the extraordinary conditions that we are enjoying turn out to be temporary – as they always have in the past.’
The rest is history. Australians now have to make the best of the Dog Days.
This book places before Australians the fateful choice that we will make in the months and years ahead, about how to respond to harder times after more than two decades of extraordinary prosperity.
The Coalition’s decisive 2013 election victory in the House of Representatives gives it the opportunity to take decisions in the public interest. If it uses this opportunity to occupy the centre ground in political life and govern with the welfare of the great majority of Australians in mind, it will at once conserve most of the gains in our standard of living of the past twenty-two years and entrench itself in power for a long period.
Alternatively, if it seeks to govern in the interests of its most powerful supporters, it will not be able to lead Australia away from rising unemployment, large falls in living standards, social tension and growing dissatisfaction with our institutions. Its lifespan is likely to be short. A new government will have to deal with the problems, and we cannot be sure at this distance that it would do better.
Neither major party took policies into the recent election that came to grips with the great challenges facing Australia. Both parties proposed policies that would in fact impede solutions.
The choice for the new Abbott government is between two radically different approaches. We can continue to conduct our public life as if the approaches that seemed good enough in the Salad Days will still work in harder times. If this is our choice, we will continue to live behind the veil of ignorance that has descended over our public life during the past dozen years. We will make choices within a political culture that is distorted by the intrusion of market values into areas of public policy where they have a corrupting effect and produce poor results.
Or we can restore discipline of the kind that framed public choice in the reform era from 1983 to 2000, be prepared to think hard about policy rather than shout political slogans, and be guided by clear analysis even when it requires difficult decisions.
I call these the ‘business as usual’ and ‘public interest’ approaches to policy. They lead to radically different outcomes. If we continue with the former, we will live in greater comfort for a short while. But sooner rather than later we will experience deep economic recession with high unemployment – probably rising with recurring recessionary episodes without falling much in the years between.
The memory of 1974 to 1983 may help older Australians to imagine this future. In some ways the starting point is more difficult than it was in 1974, and the consequences of failing to deal with problems are worse. If we choose ‘business as usual’, we can expect disappointment as public services are diminished bit by bit in response to successive fiscal crises. We can expect bitter political conflict within our society, and unhappiness about our institutions.
Such tensions would be all the more dangerous because they would emerge at a time of international financial uncertainty, in a world dragged down by the overhang from the global financial crisis, and with the causes of that crisis mostly still at large. They would come at a time of ideological uncertainty, with doubts growing about whether the political and economic systems of the developed world still have the capacity to deliver prosperity to most of its citizens. They would be all the more dangerous because they would be emerging at a time of strategic uncertainty, when Australians’ confident presumption that might is right and on our side is challenged by the rise of the Asian superpowers. And they would come at a time of the growing impact of climate change.
The public interest is the much harder choice, but it has better consequences. For Australia to choose this approach, many of us – enough to influence policy decisions at a high political level – will have to put aside the slogans that have replaced thought about public policy so far in the twenty-first century. We will have to reconsider propositions to which we have given unthinking assent. That’s hard. Harder still, we will have to change our minds when the evidence supports change. The public interest approach will not be chosen unless many Australians are prepared to support policies that sometimes go against their immediate personal interests. Political leaders will have to introduce changes that disappoint their strongest supporters.
The odds favour the path that is easier for the immediate future. The odds favour Australians choosing ‘business as usual’ – what I have been calling, since 2004, the Great Australian Complacency of the early twenty-first century. But let us at least consider alternatives to sleepwalking into a deeply troubled future as if we had no choice at all.
This book seeks to explain the choice that Australia faces. It seeks to lay out the path to a better future in enough detail to show that there is indeed a coherent alternative to the Great Australian Complacency.
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM THAT WE FACE
Part 1, Chapters 1 to 4, describes our economic problem and how it came upon us.
Between the 1990–91 recession and late 2013, when this book was going to print, Australia enjoyed the longest unbroken period of economic expansion of any developed country ever. During this time, average incomes, measured in international currency, rose from the lower middle ranks of the developed countries to, at their peak, 25 per cent higher than those of the United States and 50 per cent higher than those of the European Union – a status unknown since the great boom from the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1891 that incubated modern Australia.
The expansion of the 1990s was built on solid foundations: rapid increases in productivity. Yet the expansion of the decade that followed was built on sand that was bound eventually to shift: at first a housing and consumption boom funded by bank borrowing from international debt markets; and then an unprecedented lift in the ‘terms of trade’ (prices for exports relative to imports), leading to an increase in resources investment to an unprecedented share of the economy.
The housing and consumption boom ended by the mid-2000s. That would normally have disrupted the prosperity: the global financial crisis would have descended upon us at a time of weakness were it not for the timely arrival of the China resources boom.
This boom was caused by a historically unique period of economic growth in China: the strongest, longest episode of ‘catch-up’ growth that the world has ever seen, using energy and metals more intensively than other countries had done, which set the world’s most populous country on the way to becoming the world’s largest economy. It was a remarkable episode in history.
Through the second decade of this extraordinary expansion, Australian businesses and households became accustomed to easy increases in incomes, ever-lower taxation and rewards that bore no close relation to effort or achievement. They demanded more and more of these good things. Governments met those demands not through increased productivity, but with the bounties of the housing, consumption and resources booms. Incomes, spending and costs rose to heights that could be supported only temporarily.
The China resources boom has had three phases. The first, high terms of trade, started in 2003 and reached a peak in 2011. The second, investment, started before the Great Crash and paused through it, then gained strong momentum from early 2010 and reached a peak in 2013 before declining. The third, increases in export volumes, started strongly in 2012 and is likely to continue until about 2017. Since increased government revenues were mostly being spent as they arrived from 2003 (the surplus of about 1.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was a small proportion of the increase in income), the first phase had much the largest impact on the national economy and the investment phase the second-largest, while the third phase will have the least impact. Adding the effects of the three phases together, the China boom reached its peak in late 2011, but was already contributing a high proportion of its eventual maximum impact by the time of the Great Crash of 2008. The impact of the resources boom on Australian economic activity declined from 2011 and is likely to fall rapidly from 2013.
Through the long boom our real expenditure and real incomes grew prodigiously. Australia’s real exchange rate against all other countries – an inverse measure of our competitiveness – rose to unprecedented levels. This caused the stagnation and then decline of what had been vigorous exports of services and high-value manufactures.
The problem arose because we spent the benefits of the resources boom as they came in, as if it was going to be with us forever. That’s a lesson for the future: next time we should save most of the increase in incomes generated by any resources boom that might come our way. But it’s too late after the peak of the boom to do that now. The result is that we are internationally competitive in too few activities to maintain full employment without running into external payments problems, unless we greatly improve our competitiveness.
The dog is barking. The fall in prices for resources from their 2011 peak is bringing down federal and state government revenues. Investment in resources has reached its peak and is about to go into decline. The volume of resources exports is increasing rapidly, but they do not have enough domestic impact to maintain full employment. Nothing else is growing strongly to replace the contribution of the resources sector. On current trends, we are headed for lower average incomes and employment.
HOW WE GET OUT OF THE PROBLEM
Part 2, Chapters 5 to 9, describes what we can do to maintain full employment and as much as possible of our living standards.
The first thing is to become much more internationally competitive. The only way that we can bridge the huge gap in costs between us and our international competitors is through a large fall in the real value of our dollar. By real, I mean a fall that does not lead to compensating increases in local incomes and costs as import prices rise.
How do we lower the dollar? There is scope to lower interest rates further. That makes capital inflow into Australia less attractive and pushes down the dollar. If that alone does not do enough because other developed countries are artificially lowering their own currencies, we can look at other measures. While there is still scope for lowering interest rates, we should make sure that this and not increasing government expenditure is the main way that we boost economic activity, because it is the combination of tighter budgets and looser money that takes the dollar down.
It is not easy to turn a fall in the dollar into a real depreciation of the currency and therefore into an improvement of competitiveness. As the dollar falls, Australian incomes are squeezed by the higher prices for imports (shirts, shoes, petrol, cars, iPads and holidays in Bali) and exportable goods and services (meat, dairy products and hotel rooms in Cairns).
Some may ask: why not simply boost economic activity and employment by increasing government spending, as we did in response to the global financial crisis, and by cutting taxes and reducing interest rates to promote private spending?
We could do that for a while, building up government and private overseas debt that will then have to be paid for by Australians who come after us, who may not be in a better position than we are to manage it. But not enough to avoid a big slump and not for long if we care about the future. Our external position is weaker now, after the China boom, than it was following the global financial crisis. Certainly, we are experiencing strong growth in resource exports, but our low competitiveness has stopped the growth of other exports. And each dollar of resource exports contributes less to domestic incomes and economic activity than the average dollar of other exports.
If we only increase spending at home, a large excess of foreign payments over earnings will emerge. We will soon find it difficult to obtain enough overseas money on reasonable terms to cover the excess.
The only way around this is through a large increase in exports from our services, manufacturing and agricultural industries, at the same time as we get as much value as possible from resources exports. That has to be preceded by large increases in investment in these industries. Such new investment requires a reversal of the decline in Australia’s international competitiveness over the past decade. It requires a big fall in the real exchange rate – probably by 20 to 40 per cent from the giddy heights of the first quarter of 2013.
In early 2013 I became more and more concerned that the Great Australian Complacency had extended to nonchalant acceptance of the immense and immensely damaging overvaluation of the Australian dollar. The prime minister, other senior ministers, senior officers of the Reserve Bank and leading commentators all advised businesses and the wider community that they would just have to live with the strong dollar, and that what did not kill them would make them stronger.
There were several problems with the conventional wisdom. There was a risk that the dead firms would be more numerous than those strengthened by an uncompetitive exchange rate. The end of high prices for minerals and energy and of new resources investment was approaching rapidly, but without any sign of strong growth in other export industries. And it was not true that Australians simply had to accept without complaint a dangerously overvalued exchange rate: other countries had taken action, and we could too.
