With a tanking economy, the central bank demanding both fiscal stimulus and structural reform, the nation’s premier economic policy outfit warning of a productivity and innovation crisis and having spent the election campaign mugging for the cameras and tearing at Labor’s long and self-destructive reform proposals, Scott Morrison has a major problem.
How does he respond to calls for economic reform when he has no agenda and no mandate for doing anything?
His solution: go through the garbage bin of neoliberal reforms and pull a couple out — and then tell business to make the case for actually doing them, hopefully sidestepping the small problem that the government has no electoral authority for change. Package them into a speech dropped — in the time-honoured fashion — to Nine and News Corp to ensure some positive coverage, and there you go.
Morrison’s “reform” speech to a business lobby group hits two of the three clichés of neoliberal “reform” — industrial relations reform and deregulation (the third, company tax cuts, was ruled out during the election campaign, but give that twelve months). But the onus will be on business to make the case for them. On industrial relations reform of “impediments to shared gains for employers and employees”, Morrison says “we would expect business organisations such as yours to build the evidence for change and help bring the community along with you too”.
As we know, the Australian business community has been highly effective in recent years in bringing the community along with it on the need for reforms.
Indeed, contrary to the implication of Morrison’s speech that business somehow hasn’t done enough to promote industrial relations reform, they never shut up about it. Even as wages have stagnated, the profit share of national income has surged and industrial relations disputes have fallen to negligible levels, we’re constantly lectured that workers and unions have too many rights and that major reforms are needed to provide much-needed “flexibility”.
But Morrison also wants business to dictate the government’s deregulatory efforts: “By focusing on regulation from the viewpoint of business, we will identify the regulations and bureaucratic processes that impose the largest costs on key sectors of the economy.”
Note that this was reported by Nine and News Corp journalists as though the Coalition hadn’t been in power for six years, and hadn’t spent its first two years engaging in theatrical bonfires of regulations — all six iterations of the Lighthouses Act, out they go! — that it boasted would inject billions of dollars into the economy through savings for business.
Of course, if you actually thought about two of the major problems in the economy currently you might not think allowing business to dictate regulation was the best idea. We’ve just had a royal commission that detailed what happens when a government allows major financial services companies to regulate themselves (and whatever happened to the legislative agenda to implement the Hayne royal commission recommendations, or are we supposed to forget that now as a pre-election fever dream?)
And isn’t the east coast construction industry teetering on a precipice in which one more big construction project with major flaws — occasioned by a caveat emptor approach to building certification — will send buyers fleeing, so much so that the industry itself is calling for a more effective regulatory framework?
Still, regulation is just “cholesterol in the arteries”, eh?
Morrison actually has a list of reforms that would spur productivity and encourage investment and innovation. He asked the Productivity Commission for it when he was treasurer, and it delivered it in 2017. Virtually none of the items in today’s speech feature in the PC’s Shifting the Dial report. They focused on improving efficiency and effectiveness in health and education services, making infrastructure investments based on proper benefit-cost analysis, proper infrastructure pricing including congestion pricing, land taxes, breaking up the pharmacy racket and a carbon price (climate change being a major economic policy challenge according to everyone except the government itself).
And you can bet that Morrison’s call for industry-led deregulation won’t involve the removal of the iniquitous Anti-Dumping Commission which, as the PC has repeatedly shown, costs the construction industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Instead, we get neoliberal Groundhog Day, where the same clichés we’ve been hearing for decades are trotted out, in the face of wage stagnation and industry chaos caused by lack of effective regulation. But worse, Morrison doesn’t even have the courage to push them himself. Instead, he wants business to his job of leading the country for him.
It could be a very long three years. And a lost decade of economic opportunity.
This is what we get from a mob who did not expect to be in government now. They spent the pre-election period trying to minimise the losses in the election so had no agenda for anything much. The budget was set with the election in mind and now they are stuck with a do nothing budget they did not expect to manage. Once they lost Turnbull’s seat and became a minority they basically shut down the Reps and did not have enough legislation to keep it occupied for the days it did meet. Congratulations Australia – this is what we voted for.
“impediments to shared gains for employers and employees”
Isn’t that the problem of the past decade – the employers haven’t been sharing the gains with the employees?
So what would the impediment be? Management?
John Kenneth Galbraith : “One of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy … is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.”
Errm ..shum mishtake shorly.. “Labor’s long and self-destructive reform proposals“? the havoc wrought was due to the complicit meeja repeating ad nauseam the falsehoods on behalf of the ruling class.
Far from being “long” agenda’ it was derisorily brief, lest it tread on the toes of too many donors.
As for being “self-destructive” the proposals were mere baby steps in the right direction if “Labor” had been serious about real reform – which we know it is NOT, too many fat cats to appease as Albumin Agonistes has reconfirmed (had anyone been deluded enough to think otherwise) when he intoned “we must get closer to the business community (sotto voce “bugger the proles”) and take notice of its concerns” and barely stopped himself saying ‘crush the unions, make this country safe for Kapital!’
And far from being .
The stupidity of labors policy agenda was the fact it was badly thought out and badly promoted/explained and gave scomo the opportunity for his massive scare campaign, labor should have realised that the voting majority are extremely dumbed down by years of news ltd propaganda and now even the cowering A. B.C, the franking credits issue simply pitted small income self funded retirees against aged pensioners and split labors base , the simple fact was that any retail or Industry superannuant was also the recipient of franking credits through the super fund returns of the funds share investments and that was where labor expected to gain most financially from, the wealthy where untouched by labors stupid policy because they still got their franking refunds as tax offsets the system alsoallows wage earners earning under a certain limit also received any tax paid weekly as a full refund at tax time, as are small income self managed superannuants who are under the taxable limit are also eligible to receive their franking as a tax refund and that franking credit was paid by the companies and not the tax office or the government.
“the wealthy where untouched by labors stupid policy because they still got their franking refunds as tax offsets”.
At least the wealthy ones you refer to, were actually paying tax. Unlike those paying no tax and demanding a tax refund.
The super. funds were untouched by Labor’s franking credits policy braddybear.
Very few people seemed to have understood the policy, and it’s still the case.
Maybe they should just ‘borrow’ Labor’s Economic Policies from the Election Campaign and Australia will be the winner.