The era of the warrior king was awe-inspiring. The leader that rode his troops into battle, survived arrow puncture wounds and chopped off a dozen enemy heads really earned the right to sit on that throne.
Richard III – shortly before his reign ended – at the Battle of Bosworth
But over time, it became clear that the two skill-sets – sagacious governing and vigorous neck-hacking – were rarely found in the same individual.
We saw specialisation and gains from trade.
Kings paid knights to do their warring for them while Knights benefited from having a bookish type on the throne – someone inclined to spend hours contemplating the merits of the laws, rather than lifting heavy rocks.
So we come to modern politicians. There’s a lot of complaints that these people are “too dumb”.
But is that fair? Since when did we expect the parliament to do the heavy thinking to come up with new policies?
That’s why we have the public service, the think tanks, the vast commentariat. There is no shortage of good ideas in Australian politics. Take today’s call for the end of negative gearing, for example. That idea doesn’t need to be invented, just implemented.
What we need in parliament is people who can make parliament work.
We need coalition-builders. We need people other people are happy to follow. We need people who can bolt together a coalition of interested parties to make something happen. We need leaders.
But will that inspire and delight the community at large?
Recent evidence says no.
I’m not saying the level should be brought down that low, mind you. The politicians still need to be able to tell a good idea from a bad one.
The Dunning Kruger effect, wherein a person may be too stupid to tell they are stupid, is an ever-present risk among candidates for parliament. Many of them self-select, thinking they are the first person who ever wanted to take “common sense to Canberra”.
“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”
That may have been true once. But these days we are barely governed at all. Years pass without any real reform, while reams of sensible but bold recommendations printed on glossy A4 blow emptily round the inner-city streets of Canberra.
So don’t be afraid to vote for a Jock. Someone who seems smiley and friendly and very popular, if a little bit dim. Someone whose electoral success is not explained by a dazzling academic CV. They might be the the exact politician we need.
That’s a 6.2 per cent fall against the USD and a 4.5 per cent fall against the trade-weighted index during the month. That makes imports more expensive
If electricity prices or taxes went up that much, we’d have hyperventilating shock-jocks all up in our front pages. But when the dollar moves that much, the silence is tangible.
That’s actually crazy. We spend far more of our money on imports than we do on electricity. We spend a similar amount on imports as on taxes.
If there is no locally made equivalent for what you like to buy (e.g. a laptop computer, quality coffee, petrol, most clothing) you’re just stuck paying more for what you love. But before your weeping becomes unconsolable read on: a lower dollar could actually do some good, eventually.
The benefit to the Australian economy works in two ways:
1. Australian exports start to look cheaper, and they sell more.
The upside will be extra apparent to you if the company you work for does exporting. Exporting is rarer than you might think. Just 2 per cent of Australian firms export (although obviously they tend to be bigger firms with more employees).
If you work for BHP Billiton, CSL or a school that teaches English to international students, your employer should find sales lifting without any extra effort, and you should find that the payrises start flowing a little more easily. Beauty, mate!
2. Consumers start buying Aussie products, not the imported equivalent.
If the product your company makes competes with foreign imports (including overseas travel), the fall in the dollar will help. Maybe your company is in food production or owns hotels on the Gold Coast. If so, plan for better times ahead. But don’t get overexcited.
The time it takes for a lower dollar to flow through to higher-priced imports can be long. While some things like petrol are traded frequently on world markets, most imports have their prices locked in well in advance.
So, on balance, how should you feel about the lower dollar? It depends.
If you’re a big fan of buying Australian made and you think foreigners should be too, happy days are ahead.
If you’re a connoisseur of foreign made products or a fan of international travel, then it’s more gloom and doom.
If you work in the Australian economy, then you can (gradually) start to whoop it up.
If you’re retired and you mainly consume the output of the Australian economy, then things look less rosy.
Every change in price that hurts someone helps someone else. Even if this seems like a windfall to you, the polite thing to do is re-arrange your face into a neutral position and carry on with your day.
In Australia, Coke is launching a 250mL coke can with a big hullaballoo. Spin it all you want, but this is an admission the industry is in giant trouble.
The normal procedure for shrinking portion sizes is to be damn sneaky about it. Toilet paper companies shrink the number of squares per roll, chocolate bar companies shrink the grams per Snickers, detergent companies shrink the bottles and put the words “ultra concentrate” on the front.
But Coke is upfront.
““The 250ml pack size provides Australians with a perfect serve of their favourite beverage from the COCA-COLA range. Priced at a maximum of $2, the 250ml can is expected to be popular with consumers,” said Antoinette Tyrrell, Marketing Manager COCA-COLA South Pacific.
After decades of watching Pepsi stalking them, Coca Cola got hit by a different sort of market change. Functional drinks have slashed the market share of soft drink. Energy drinks, sports drinks, juices, water etc. are all in the space. Coke has bought and built these brands up when it could, but when consumers are not choosing cola, Coke can’t ever hope to control the market like it did once.
The rise of functional drinks means people are thinking about what their drinks will do to them. That can never help Coke.
Aware of the perception that Coke is not that good for you, Coke manages it by giving you less!
They don’t even pretend to hope people will buy more of the smaller cans. They just hope people will buy them at all.
The last great marketing campaign Coke had was “share a coke with“. Now that was brilliant, completely. But its link with the underlying product is very weak, and it can’t overcome the long-run trend.
The global soft drink market is growing far more slowly than global economic growth (2 per cent vs 5 per cent) Coca Cola’s reported net revenues are down 3 per cent in the year to date, and Australia’s Coca Cola Amatil is a shambles. The share price has fallen from $15 to $9.
The end of Cola is a good thing. Much of Coca Cola’s revenue growth now come from the poorer parts of the world. But the model is there for them to follow – when they grow rich they will likely also no longer “Enjoy” Coke.
There are lessons in Australia’s history we can learn from. One of them is the screw-up that is Sydney.
Sydney was well-placed to become the London of Australia. A prime location, settled first, the early seat of power. It had it all. But while London remains by far the wealthiest and biggest city in the UK, Sydney is on-track to be overtaken by Melbourne in population.
If Melbourne overtakes Sydney, it won’t be the first time. Sydney had a 40-year headstart and yet lost its lead in the 19th century. At that stage the reason was the Gold Rush. Sydney got its lead back when a financial crisis hit in the 1890s.
Sources: various, but consider this a rough approximation.
If Sydney is overtaken by Melbourne in population, you can’t blame the Sydney-siders. They work hard, but they’re behind the eight-ball. The problem is the harbour.
If you think of it as public space, it’s lovely to look at and nice to use. But if you think of it as distance, is it smart to put so much of it right in the middle of your city? Do you really want so much distance between inner-city suburbs? Wouldn’t it be better to have a network of streets?
I contend that the harbour creates a massive problem in the middle of Sydney. The CBD is unable to connect properly into adjacent suburbs because they are a ferry-ride away.
Sydney has more than one major business cluster. The city competes with North Sydney and Parramatta.
But I’d argue that’s a sign of weakness, not of strength. Of course every city has suburban centres, but powerhouses like New York and London aren’t confused about where might be the centre of power, or the best spot to locate a business. Sydney’s situation whispers: this city is too big to really be one functional city. But globally-speaking, Sydney is not even that big, population wise.
So, the harbour in the middle could be part of the problem. But the harbour became the centre of Sydney only when a bridge was built that made the north shore more accessible. You can see the population develop in this video and the north only really takes off after 1932, when the final rivet was painted.
The smart move would have been to densely fill in the area to the south, intensively, before building to the north.
We’ve all played computer games where you have to build certain things in a certain order. If you build too many of the wrong thing too early, you get out of whack, run out of gold and you can’t beat the game. I’d argue that’s what Sydney did.
The Bridge was built using £6.25 million of public money. That represented about 2 per cent of NSW’s GDP at the time. For comparison, 2 per cent of GDP now would be about $10 billion. (sources: 1, 2)
Despite using tolls to pay it off, the debt lingered until 1988.
The opportunity cost? Not just the proper development of contiguous land areas, but also what that money might have bought if spent differently. When the rest of the world was building world class public transport systems, Sydney let theirs go.
If Sydney didn’t build the bridge, the city might have simply left the harbour as a boundary on the north. Of course some people would have chosen to live there still, but probably fewer. There’s plenty of space to the south that could have become very desirable had the economic centre of the city not been shifted north by the “coat-hanger”.
London has lots of bridges but the wealth and the productivity is overwhelmingly on one side of the Thames. It required Manhattan house prices to reach many millions before Brooklyn got any buzz, and Shanghai only developed the far side of the Huangpu in the last 20 years.
I’d be very interested to see a meta-analysis of whether, in the last 50 years, the value of having a river has turned from positive to negative in terms of a city’s economic growth. The impediments a big river would create to city connectivity are likely to be significant, especially where bridges are in short supply.
All this is very interesting, but we can’t go back and unbuild the Sydney Harbour Bridge. So what’s the point?
The point is we can learn a valuable lesson. Don’t spend valuable taxpayer resources providing infrastructure that will “shape” your city in the wrong way.
Infrastructure is extremely durable. Every mis-spent dollar will spend centuries choking your city. If it accidentally facilitates growth in hard-to-access places, or encourages inefficient kinds of transport use, infrastructure spending can be the enemy of a good city.
“Recent housing price growth seems to have encouraged further investor activity. As a result, the composition of housing and mortgage markets is becoming unbalanced, with new lending to investors being out of proportion to rental housing’s share of the housing stock. “
Do not get the impression the RBA thinks this will be a minor:
“In the first instance, the risks associated with this lending behaviour are likely to be macroeconomic in nature rather than direct risks to the stability of financial institutions.”
nb. “In the first instance…”
Who knows what sort of calamity could follow a macroeconomic event associated with a big house price fall? And if you think not owning a house makes you safe then you are wrong.
“…a broader risk remains that additional speculative demand can amplify the property price cycle and increase the potential for prices to fall later, with associated effects on household wealth and spending. These dynamics can affect households more widely than just those that are currently taking out loans: the households most affected by the declines in wealth need not necessarily be those that contributed to heightened activity”
This chart got the RBA concerned:
“… expectations of future housing prices seem to be influenced by the recent past (Graph 3.4). This tendency was stronger than average in New South Wales and Victoria at the end of last year. The risks associated with this behaviour are likely to be macroeconomic in nature if households were to react to declines in their wealth and any repayment difficulties by cutting back their spending. “
The recent rise in interest-only loans (yellow line below) also has the RBA worried about whether speculation is rife.
They are so worried about house prices they are cracking open the weapons safe and rustling around for some ammo to try to scare off packs of hungry investors.
“The Bank is discussing with APRA, and other members of the Council of Financial Regulators, additional steps that might be taken to reinforce sound lending practices, particularly for lending to investors. “
“A speculative upswing in demand can also be damaging if it brings forth an increase in construction on a scale that leads to a future overhang of supply. This risk is more likely to arise in particular local markets than at the national level.”
The researchers look into entrepreneurship to see the demographic impact. It turns out to be bad news for those countries whose workforce is ageing.
The reason the researchers hypothesise is that younger people don’t get the experience they need to make a business fly. Their inherent capacity to think about problems in a new way is not matched with business skills. The reason for that is that old people are hogging all the senior positions.
“Workers may begin with raw talent and inherent creativity, but the acquisition of skills at work is essential to their founding a business. It is for that reason that the young are not the ones most likely to start businesses, even if they are the most creative. They must have time to obtain the skills on the job that will allow business that they found to succeed.”
Stuck at the bottom of the corporate ladder, it’s raining, and the economy is being ruined. This is your life.
The data support this model of thinking about entrepreneurship:
“The estimates imply that a median age that is one standard deviation lower is associated with a 2.5 percentage point higher country rate of entrepreneurship, which is about 40% of the mean rate. This effect is significant both statistically and economically, and is robust across different specifications, alternative measures of entrepreneurship, and among OECD and non-OECD countries.”
But older people have more business skills and experience. Does that help? Not at all, apparently.
“Within every age group, the entrepreneurship rate is lower in countries that are older.”
Japan is the sine qua non of this theory, with its fertility rate declining towards 1.0 and massive conglomerate companies full of ageing workers.
“[I]n Japan, none of the top 10 high-tech companies were founded in the last 40 years. New firm entry
rate dropped from the 6 to 7% range in the 1960s and 1970s to 3% in the 1990s (Acht, Thunik, and Verheut, 2004), which amounts to less than 1/3 of that in the U.S. and trails all the other OECD countries. “
Potato Drink? Japan, you’ve stopped even trying.
The researchers emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship to economic vitality. New companies tend to do things old ones just can’t.
“Existing companies can modernize and update their products and techniques of production, but the major innovations tend to be associated with entrepreneurship and the formation of new companies.
Many significant inventions of the last 150 years illustrate the point. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and founded General Electric. The inventor of the automobile was Karl Friedrich Benz, followed closely by Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler. Daimler-Benz is the product of their inventions. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and founded AT&T. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, was a founder of Wireless Telegraph & Signal in Britain. The Wright Brothers founded The Wright Company, which later became Curtiss-Wright. Steven Wosniak, who invented the personal computer, teamed up with Steve Jobs to form Apple. The list goes on.
In Australia, you might cite Kogan and Cochlear, A2 milk and Atlassian.
But to produce a handful of companies that are both new and extremely exciting, you need a steady stream of companies that are new.
And Australia has been performing worse and worse on that measure.
There could be many reasons this has happened. But the data doesn’t refute the theory that demographics should take the blame.
Everyone already knows the ageing of Australia’s population will create a major labour force shortfall. We’ve all heard that there will be fewer and fewer workers in the economy for every retiree (This article says the ratio will decline from 15:1 in 1909 to 2.6:1 by 2050). Everyone is aware of the fiscal imperatives around ageing. But the possibility that it is crushing the spirit of our economy is not something I’ve heard discussed.
Roads come in for close scrutiny and harsh words.:
“Roads are the least reformed of all infrastructure sectors, with institutional arrangements around funding and provision remaining much the same as they were 20 years ago.”
The competition policy review is listening to, and amplifying, the right sort of complaints
“Lack of proper road pricing also contributes to urban congestion, which is a growing problem in Australia’s capital cities. With road users facing little incentive to shift demand from peak to off-peak periods, greater road capacity is needed. As IPART notes: ‘During peak periods of demand, roads are allocated through queuing which imposes a far greater cost to road users and the economy than would an effective pricing mechanism.'”
“Lack of proper road pricing distorts choices among transport modes: for example, between roads and
rail in relation to freight and roads and public transport for passenger transport”
Having different subsidies for different types of travel makes as much sense as having different rail gauges across Australia. The point of competition law is to put options on the same footing for consumers (after taking into account market failures). But here, the rail gauge analogy is a good one, because it shows that coordinating what should be an obvious win for efficiency is actually going to be very difficult.
In competition policy, an ungainly solution like dual-gauge track is not available. Photo Source: Wikipedia
The report hangs its hat on transponders. This technical advancement will allow a new era of road-charging, the report argues.
“Technologies are available that allow greater use of cost-reflective pricing, which in turn could be linked to the provision of road infrastructure. This could make roads more like other sectors, where road authorities charge directly for their use and use the revenues raised for road construction and maintenance.”
But the report is chicken. It deals with the neat, obvious and simple issues of economic efficiency of road pricing. Do you really need a professor and a QC to tell you there are efficiency gains from pricing things in the economy?
What it doesn’t do is try to figure out a way to make road pricing happen. Except for this piece of wanton wobbliness:
“To avoid imposing higher overall charges on road users, there should be a cross-jurisdictional approach to road pricing. Indirect charges and taxes on road users should be reduced as direct pricing is introduced. Revenue implications for different levels of government should be managed by adjusting Commonwealth grants to the States and Territories.”
This is an injudicious turn of phrase. In setting expectations that avoiding imposing higher charges on “road users” should be the goal, it knots its own noose. Obviously, some people need to pay more. The word “overall” is poor choice since some people’s savings in fuel taxes, etc, will be less than their tolls. Perhaps the word “average” (which has a nice clear meaning) should have been deployed instead.
This paragraph is a nod to the idea that the issue needs selling. But as a political strategy goes, it is awfully weak.
The big impediment to road charging is not a lack of understanding of the benefits among those who read wonkish .pdfs. It’s a lack of desire for them . Road charging is actually completely different to the rail gauge problem, because 99 per cent of people couldn’t explain its upside. (Probably they’d mention politicians lining their pockets.)
The terms of reference for this review do not insist that the review panel stick to an economics 101 approach to looking at the issues. The terms of reference actually focus on making change happen:
“The Review Panel should also consider and make recommendations where appropriate, aimed at ensuring Australia’s competition regulation, policy, and regulatory agencies are effective in protecting and facilitating competition, provide incentives for innovation and creativity in business, and meet world’s best practice.”
This report is a welcome reminder that the issue of road pricing is still alive. It underlines that – through a process of elimination – road pricing is becoming one of our most pressing economic reform issues. But road pricing is a long way from having an effective support base, and is a million (untolled) miles away from being widely introduced. This draft report does little to change that.
