Australia adrift: Lost decade beckons as good fortune wanes
As economists debate whether Shinzo Abe can end Japan's long funk, I can't help but wonder if another wealthy, seemingly world-beating economy isn't headed for its own lost decade: Australia.
This mere suggestion will strike many as hyperbolic. The economy Down Under has avoided recession for more than two decades. The government enjoys a fiscal position that inspires envy in Washington and Tokyo. There remain vast resource deposits underground, while new infrastructure is coming online to extract and ship that treasure to China and elsewhere.
Australia's
good fortune, however, looks to be waning. Slowing growth in China, driven in part by the government's efforts to rebalance the economy, has devastated commodity prices: Iron ore, Australia's biggest export, now fetches half of the $US140 per tonne it did last December; coal prices have tumbled as well. These are long-term, not cyclical trends.
And unfortunately, the trajectory plotted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott over the last 14 months has left the country less prepared for that difficult future than when he took office.
A needlessly austere budget slashed education, health and welfare spending. The government appears to be coddling mining billionaires and backtracking on its environmental pledges. It even cut funding for national icon Australia Broadcasting Corporation.
My worry has more to do with Abbott's economic priorities, which ignore how rapidly the world is changing around the Lucky Country. Although Abbott has talked about diversifying the economy away from its dependence on China, his policies have effectively done the opposite.
Where the previous government moved to tax outsized mining profits to fund investment in education and infrastructure, Abbott has changed incentives so that commodities and mining companies become a bigger share of the economy and have an even bigger voice in politics.
Instead of undertaking painful and costly restructuring, Abbott has prodded the central bank to loosen monetary policy more and more. Whether all that easy money is pushing Australia toward a subprime-loan crisis has now become a matter of serious debate.
Over the last year, anytime a journalist asked Abbott or Treasurer Joe Hockey about frothy real-estate prices, they were dismissed as nervous nellies. When I probed Hockey myself in September in Sydney, he derided such views as "rather lazy analysis".
Yet in an interim report in July, David Murray, the former head of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, called the surge in housing debt since 1997 and banks' exposure to mortgages a significant risk. Since that time, Murray's panel said, "household leverage has almost doubled," and "higher household indebtedness and the greater proportion of mortgages on bank balance sheets mean that an extreme event in the housing market would have significant implications for financial stability and economic growth."
On Sunday, in the final report to emerge from his yearlong inquiry, Murray urged specific reforms, including cuts in much-loved housing tax breaks. The report called for "unquestionably strong" capital levels, which could force the four biggest banks to keep another $25 billion on hand for a rainy day.
On the other hand, the government needs to rethink urgently its austerity policies. Big investments in human capital - via education and training - as well as infrastructure are the only way to raise productivity and promote job growth in the long run.
Along with re-imposing the carbon tax, the government should capture and redistribute more of the spoils of Australia's resources, replace the high income-tax burden on households with a goods and services tax, and encourage a new wave of entrepreneurship by supporting small companies.
Free-trade agreements with China and Japan are welcome. But the solution to Australia's challenges remain smart, forward-looking, and yes, costly, policy initiatives. Otherwise its citizens could be in for their own decade of unnecessary pain.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-adrift-lost-decade-beckons-...=============================================
As is often the case, the author (in my opinion) has got some issue correct, But not others!i
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