Part II: A Generation of Reform

[Part I is here…]

The Howard Prosperity (1996–2007) and the Gradual Evaporation of Reforming Zeal

During the long Howard prosperity, real per capita GDP grew by 32.4 per cent—on average an impressive 2.4 per cent per annum—and total employment by 27.1 per cent, helped along by favourable terms of international trade.

From the outset, the conservative government tried to reform labour markets to do away with central wage fixing, quasi-judicial arbitration and union dominance[1]. One reason for complications in the reform proposals, which the government produced, was the lingering influence of the industrial-relations bureaucracy, but the main reason was that the government had to manoeuvre carefully in the face of Senate opposition. Nonetheless, from 1996 onwards workplace agreements could be concluded with or without union participation during the negotiations; a limited list of minimum work conditions were laid down; the powers of the (traditionally union-dominated) Arbitration Commission were curtailed; secondary boycotts were prohibited; and compulsory unionism was outlawed. Over subsequent years, Senate intransigence repeatedly thwarted the government’s attempts to liberalise job markets further.

Up to the 1990s, big unions had dominated construction, transport or mining. Now, workers and employers were able to negotiate enterprise deals or individual contracts, which eliminated wasteful work practices and permitted them to share the benefits of better productivity. New computer and mobile phone technology—and the exceptional ease of starting a new business in Australia—allowed many to become independent contractors. Most bricks are now laid, most road transport is now operated, and many business-support services are now supplied by small husband-and-wife enterprises. They make up a resilient, resourceful network of mini-entrepreneurs. Since 2004 more Australians have been working as self-employed contractors than as union members.

While the growth of contracting amounted to the spontaneous self-liberation of working people, the Howard government tried soon after taking office to tackle the troublesome waterside workers’ union head-on. Australian ports had become high-cost growth bottlenecks. For all practical purposes, the union had long been the employer and work manager in the ports, reducing the port authorities and stevedores to paying the wages. In the wake of a mighty confrontation in the ports in 1998, the government used tax funds to buy out the superannuation claims of waterside workers, but failed to overcome the quasi-monopolies of the ports that underpinned the abuses in the first place. The construction industry, too, had long been the scene of thuggish and costly union confrontation. When scandalous facts were documented in an official inquiry, the legislators cleaned up industrial practices in 2005. Only after the 2004 election, which changed the Senate majority in Howard’s favour, could legislation remove the “unfair dismissal” obstacle to firing—and hence to hiring.

Labour unit costs dropped over the Howard years, overall by some 8 per cent. So it is not surprising that job creation proceeded steadily. After the removal of “unfair dismissal laws” in 2006, it accelerated. From March 2006 to the onset of the election campaign in September 2007, nearly half a million new jobs were created, adding 5 per cent to total employment, most of it full-time. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 per cent by September 2007, and strikes—once a hallmark of the Australian economy—virtually disappeared. As one would expect in a fairly competitive economy with high employment, not only the rich were becoming richer, but also the poor. Total male earnings, for example, rose by 56.6 per cent during the Howard years. If compared with the preceding Labor administrations, which had pursued a centralised, corporatist macro incomes policy, the workers and “battlers” fared materially much better under Howard’s liberalisation of labour markets. Whilst individual workers did much better, the same cannot be said of the union movement. By August 2007, only 14 per cent of employees in private industry held union tickets. (In the public sector, union membership was still 41 per cent.)

Federal fiscal policy—long given to deficit spending—was put on a new institutional footing by Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello. Among other things, the government promised to publish what it was demanding of corporations, namely a balance sheet of its objectively valued assets and liabilities. To the government’s discomfiture, a “National Commission of Audit” soon documented that successive Commonwealth governments had been in the business of value destruction: Liabilities exceeded assets by over half a year’s revenues. In addition, it uncovered contingent liabilities to the tune of a further year and a quarter of revenues. Any business with such a balance sheet would be declared bankrupt. In 1998 the Treasurer enshrined, against Senate opposition, formal limits on Commonwealth spending and borrowing in a “Charter of Budget Honesty”.

The Howard–Costello team turned the federal budget from an average Keating-era deficit of 2.4 per cent of GDP into an average surplus of 2.2 per cent. The task got easier over time, as interest payments on Commonwealth debt dwindled. The government now also took the opportunity to introduce a 10 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST), streamlining some taxes, placing the invariably conflict-fraught federal–state relations on a new financial footing, but also raising the overall burden of taxation from an average of 22 per cent of GDP on average in the 1980s and 1990s to 23.8 per cent in the 2000s[2]. Thanks to copious revenue flows, the Commonwealth and the states were able to expand the number of public “servants” between 2000 and 2007 by a whopping 40 per cent! Also, the income tax burden was shifted more onto high-income earners[3].

To cope with the prospect of an ageing population, the Hawke–Keating governments had decreed a regime of compulsory saving for retirement. The Coalition now exempted pension payments out of private superannuation funds from income tax to enhance the incentive to save long-term. To the same end, some of the federal fiscal surpluses were channelled into a government-run “Futures Fund”.

The long Howard prosperity was characterised by a growing exuberance in real-estate and share values (paralleled in many other mature economies). Booming asset values and easy credit contributed to a general feeling of wealth and fuelled consumption via a kind of Haberler–Pigou effect[4]. However, private debt also went up steeply (in the five years to 2009 by no less than 70 per cent). Relative to GDP, Australian households now owe more than their US counterparts. To understand what this means, one has to realise that home ownership and mortgage debt in this country are among the highest in the world. Should house prices cave in one day or interest rates rise steeply, the Cassandras might prove correct and excessive household indebtedness might destabilise the economy.

Booming East Asian demand for raw materials is often given as the main reason for the sustained Howard prosperity. But this was only a proximate cause. Behind the growth of exports and incomes has been the capacity of Australian mining, service and transport enterprises to meet demand flexibly and of many Australian manufacturers and service providers to respond creatively to new world-market opportunities. This was supported by a stable tax regime. The much-cited theory of a “resource curse” no longer applied to our responsive economy.

Overall economic growth accelerated thanks to the opening of the economy and the comprehensive supply-side reforms over the preceding two decades, combined with the labour-market flexibility and fiscal probity promoted by the Howard government. Once international trade is free, producers tend to reap static and dynamic specialisation gains. Once capital markets are deregulated, capital is free to seek uses with more promising returns (and sometimes greater risks). Once labour markets are free, labour and skills become more productive.

Alas, the Howard government did not cut tax rates when the resources boom would have made it possible, preferring instead increased populist spending in election years. This met with little political resistance, as the principled liberals, the “Dries” of the 1980s, had long faded from parliament. Australia’s Benthamite political utilitarianism and political opportunism again ruled the scene.

In 2007, the tactic of populist election spending failed, and a massive union campaign saw a new Labor government elected. 

Pause for a Stocktake

Most Australians now live in nice middle-class comfort, enjoying a good measure of freedom, security and material well-being. Many now take this for granted. If—as Simon Kuznets has asserted—children and population growth are indicators of confidence and well-being, Australia is not too bad a place compared to mature OECD countries with shrinking populations: here, natural population growth has accelerated to about 0.9 per cent per annum and we are now adding 0.6 per cent through immigration. Relative to the size of the incumbent population, immigration is now the highest of any major country. In the process, the nation has become multi-ethnic. Alas, illegal boat immigration, which the Howard government had virtually stopped, has snowballed since the Rudd–Gillard Labor governments took over and abandoned the long-standing bipartisan approach to immigration. The big challenge now will be to uphold our time-tested institutions and to integrate new immigrant groups, so that the “institutional cement that holds society together” does not fracture. Some recalcitrant minorities (and elites who are preaching self-hate and cultural relativism) notwithstanding, integration in Australian suburbs and workplaces has so far gone fairly well—a source of justified pride, but also a major challenge for the future.

From a global perspective, the quality of life in Australia is hard to match. Let me only cite one figure, reflecting no doubt a bias dictated by my years: What the World Health Organisation defines as a “healthy life expectancy”—the average age to which people can expect to live without disabilities—is seventy-four years in Australia (surpassed only by Japan, Switzerland and San Marino) no doubt the result of an active outdoor lifestyle, a healthy climate, good, clean nutrition and—maybe—regular alcohol consumption!

In the mid-2000s, the economy enjoyed a robust constitution thanks to the steady reforms of the preceding twenty-five years—financial deregulation, big tariff cuts, tax reforms, privatisations and labour-market deregulation. Ours is now a wide-open economy, with more and more young Australians working in, or interacting with, an exciting, dynamic new Asia[5]. Foreign visitors are impressed by the scale and modernity of agricultural and mining enterprises in Australia’s north and west; young Europeans and Asians, who come to visit and work here for a while, sense the thrill of cultural experimentation and youthful energy. We have become big exporters of technical expertise, development consultancy services and education; the latter increasingly because an Australian education has de facto become an easy way to obtain a residence visa. Just mix with the 30,000 young Australian men and women who are having a ball in Shanghai, or the thousands of Aussies who partake in the entrepreneurial adventures of Dubai and Silicon Valley! I rate this new openness, the joy of enterprise and creativity and the revival of confidence as more important consequences of our new-found economic freedom than mere GDP growth!

While most Australian voters, as elsewhere, are opting for tax-financed welfare hand-outs and subscribe to an egalitarian vision—not only equality before the law, but also a good measure of equality in living standards—they also embrace a sense of individual independence. Maybe nothing reveals this more than the fact that parents decide in increasing numbers to steer their children away from government-run schools. Since 1999 208,000 more youngsters have been sent to private schools, compared to a rise of a mere 26,000 to government schools, and this despite considerable additional costs to parents.

One can best summarise the Australian economic experience with reference to measures of economic freedom. After the Whitlam experiment, an obvious disaster for economic freedom and the subsequent economic pains in terms of slow economic growth, poor job creation, the erosion of the value of money and obstacles to the pursuit of happiness, reforms gradually enhanced our economic freedom and lifted us upward in the league tables of a freer world. The liberalisation of trade and capital movements played a key role in propelling our economic freedom. Successive governments liberalised unilaterally, steadily, across the board and with by and large bipartisan support, even if a few industries were—and still are—a little more featherbedded than others.

While estimates of economic freedom put an objective and internationally and inter-temporally consistent angle on economic freedom in Australia, those many enterprising Australians who live and work in East Asia and America tend to return home to find the country more regulated and the political elites more interventionist than they remember. It is also worth noting that specific interventions, such as tariffs, have been replaced by more general regulatory regimes. While the liberal observer would not object to a more general, abstract and simple set of rules, it has to be recorded that Australian regulatory authorities have grown massively and elbowed aside self-responsibility—whatever lip service elected politicians may pay to “cutting red tape”. We now have mega-regulators, which operate separately from the elected executive branch of government and which can rarely be tamed by the judiciary. The consequences for liberty are serious and are reflected in the fact that the decades of steady, slow improvement in freedom ratings came to an end in 2000.

The Australian story illustrates, yet again, an important insight: what matters for long-term economic growth are not so much the static (Ricardian) specialisation gains from trade, nor the dynamic gains from realising scale economies, nor even the immediate gains from the freer flow of capital and enterprises. What matters above all is what I call the “Eric Jones effect”[6]: openness triggers political rivalry to attract internationally mobile producers and innovators by promoting liberty. This in turn fosters prosperity.

After the turn of the century, the Coalition government seemed more and more glib and self-satisfied—nicer to businesses than to markets. In economic freedom ratings, Australia had ranked for a long time below the benchmark set by the United States. However, when the Bush administration’s “compassionate conservatism” lowered that benchmark early, the Howard government looked comparatively good, despite its own “reform fatigue”[7]. Some state and local governments have been particularly slow learners about the realities of globalisation. These authorities need reminding that they, too, are now in the international competition to attract or retain enterprises and capital and that they, too, are in a position to foster or destroy liberty and prosperity[8].

The loss of reforming zeal was reflected in a slowing pace of productivity growth from an average rate of 2.1 per cent per annum in the 1990s to 1.4 per cent during the 2000s. Much was left undone, not least in letting go of selective industry favouritism. For example, the textiles, footwear and clothing industries still are enjoying a 14.5 per cent effective rate of government “assistance”’ and the car and components industry 11.8 per cent, which perpetuate long-standing distortions and unfairly penalise consumers.

As elsewhere, principled economic reforms have rarely been popular. Neither the broader electorate in mature welfare states nor the politically well-connected big-business community favours fundamental reforms. In the Australian case, reforms have rarely been guided by a cohesive vision. Rather, they often resemble a pragmatic tango: three steps forward, one sideways, one backwards. Political leaders, who all too often suffer from understandable cognitive limits, find it always difficult to interpret evolving circumstances. Established political elites have a natural tendency to postpone timely reforms of the fundamental rules. In Australia’s case, this natural inertia is reinforced by the Benthamite tradition of opportunistic, un-Enlightened constructivism. Hayek’s insight applies, namely that freedom can only be upheld when it is defended as a fundamental principle, not because of some perceived utility in a particular case. Fortunately, citizens from different cultural backgrounds increasingly challenge the traditional utilitarian consensus and can do so effectively, given the new openness to international trade and factor flows and a greater international exchange of ideas. 

The Rudd/Gillard Administrations (2007–present ): The Pendulum Swings from Freedom Fatigue to Anti-Capitalism  

As mentioned, union membership dwindled in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, globalisation progressively curbed the influence of union power-brokers and other self-anointed elites, who had long been sheltered by the collectivist umbrella of the “Australian Settlement”. It came therefore as no surprise that the unions and the intelligentsia intervened massively in the 2007 election campaign in favour of the Labor Party, which committed itself to labour-market re-regulation and other reactionary policy shifts. The new Rudd government was inspired by an ideology quite different from earlier reformist and pragmatic Labor administrations. For example, Rudd opined: “Neo-liberalism … has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy … it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself.” He also expressed the bizarre belief that Hayek had extolled monopoly capitalism.

As payback for electoral assistance from the unions, the Rudd government overturned many earlier, hard-won labour-market reforms, including some which the Hawke–Keating Labor governments had taken such pains to implement. The Gillard-led government seems even more determined to re-regulate labour markets. Due to the economic slowdown and still flexible labour markets, unit-labour costs have so far remained rather stable, so that many jobs have been saved—for the time being. The Rudd–Gillard government also embraced a number of egalitarian-collectivist causes, the most important of which was to curb carbon emissions to “save the planet’. In the process, it tried to set up an elaborate system of taxation, administration and slush funding, called an Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). The tide turned against the ETS only when the citizenry and Opposition backbenchers rebelled and the Copenhagen fracas of December 2009 heralded a sea-change in world opinion about man-made warming. Nonetheless, all political parties have supported costly and energy-wasting designs promoting renewable energy schemes. In addition, Australia’s federal, state and local governments are pursuing all manner of social and environmental causes, which steadily erode private property rights by interventionist salami tactics.

Although they had claimed to be “fiscal conservatives” before the election, the incoming Labor government was disposed to over-react to the global recession of 2008, which offered inexperienced leaders an excuse to lift public spending and engage in manic managerialism. Like so many other governments, they believed that the appropriate reaction to the debt crisis was to incur more public debt. Between October 2008 and February 2009, several big spending programs converted an inherited healthy federal surplus into a deficit of $57 billion. Tax cuts were rejected out of hand.

In the haste, implementation of the “Keynesian spendathon” was poor. Relatively little of the “stimulus” spending went into economic infrastructure (about 14 per cent of the total). Most was directed into quick-fix programs without any cost-benefit analyses being published. Cash was handed to pensioners, roofs in private homes were insulated for “free”, school halls were built whether needed or not, and so on. Since then, we have witnessed a comet tail of scandals, price gouging, rorting, policy reversals, taskforces, commissions of inquiry and other embarrassing unintended consequences. Australian (federal and state) government debt, still modest by most international standards, has been bumped up to $200 billion or about 19 per cent of GDP. In 2010-11, the public deficit will amount to about 4 or 5 per cent of the national product, about half the OECD average—but this average is of course distorted by the BUGS (Britain, United States, Greece and Spain), with whom we are not going to compare ourselves! Unlike the European countries, Australia is not part of a “bail-out club”. Our public authorities therefore have to perform to stricter standards of fiscal probity if this country is not to go the way of Argentina or Greece.

The formal regulatory limits on public spending and debt, which the previous administration had imposed with great fanfare, bound the hands of the new crop of political and bureaucratic opportunists about as tightly as the EU’s Maastricht Treaty did—in other words, the “constitutional limits” were a mere paper tiger! We now experience the unavoidable reverse side of the “spendathon”. Tax burdens are rising and an element of uncertainty about Australia’s international posture on investment was introduced in mid-2010 by a Labor government proposal for a new 40 per cent tax on mining profits. Though since modified, this tax proposal immediately lowered the value of superannuation portfolios, which are heavily invested in mining shares, pushed up interest rates, weakened the dollar and will probably curb the long-term growth of mining in Australia. Miners and other producers will also be affected by the partial re-regulation of labour markets. As a result, Australia became a comparatively less attractive place to invest and work.

In 2008 and 2009, the Australian economy narrowly escaped sliding into what is technically defined as a recession. The government now shares bragging rights with Poland that a recession was avoided. The question on many people’s minds is whether this resilience was due (a) to the government’s prompt and massive “stimulus”, or (b) to the healthy constitution of a reformed, responsive economy.

I am inclined to place the bulk of the explanation on the latter factor, although one cannot totally dismiss an impact on the time profile of production and employment. Were massive expansions of nominal demand to create real jobs and growth, as the Keynesians tell us, then fiscal stimulus would have worked for Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and José Luís Rodrigues Zapatero. It hasn’t. One can also refer to an IMF analysis, which compared the size of expansionary Keynesian spending as a percentage of GDP in the G20 countries with the degree to which growth outcomes differed from the IMF’s original forecasts for 2009. There was no significant positive correlation whatsoever between “stimulus” and aggregate output[9]. By May 2010, the G20 finance ministers, too, appear to have discovered that exhilarating demand stimulus tends to be promptly followed by a vexatious debt hangover. Arguably, the citizenry perceives public stimulus programs by now as no more than the announcement of future tax increases. We learnt, yet again, that the need for market-oriented supply-side reforms and smaller government cannot for long be covered by a summary fiscal brush.

So, by default, we must conclude that recession was avoided thanks to the healthy constitution of Australia’s responsive economy, our strong banks and our reformed market institutions[10]. While economists have long extolled the growth benefits of economic freedom, we must not forget another major benefit of economic freedom: economic resilience when cyclical demand fluctuations hit home[11]. Alas, Australia’s predominantly collectivist, short-termist commentariat and the government are unlikely to absorb this insight.

My worries about the long-term consequences of the rush into Keynesianism notwithstanding, the greatest single threat to economic freedom in Australia is coming from political reactions to the, as yet unproven, allegation of man-made global warming. The Gillard government, which was narrowly elected and rules with the Greens, seems to aspire to be the first lemming to jump into climate-induced serfdom. A swing from enlightened, fact-based analysis to a policy based on emotional, romantic sentiment—sometimes even based on faked scientific evidence—has taken hold. This swing in the zeitgeist is driven by hard political motives: the UN-led push for climate controls offers manifold excuses for political-bureaucratic elites to re-assert the “primacy of politics”, which was first postulated by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. A big political push is on to encroach again on individual freedom, outflank free markets and regain political primacy, which was weakened by the international mobility of capital, knowledge, high skills and enterprises. The climate push now spearheads a “political primacy offensive”.

Australia seems particularly imperilled because one of our biggest competitive advantages has been cheap energy; we are an energy superpower[12]. “Energy wowsers” now urge us to forgo the elemental pleasures which cheap, clean and copious energy offer—enjoyment, comfort, mobility, employment, empowerment. They ask us to abandon our successful economic structures and our lifestyle. They also demand that Australians no longer contribute to these same benefits for others through energy-intensive exports. Imports of aluminium made in Australia, for example, now allow official Europe to look more pure and self-righteous in the UN emissions calculus; our energy-intensive exports now help Chinese citizens avoid worsening burdens of local air pollution. Is all this to change? Will we soon be forced to shut down our world-class metal-smelting, because federal, state and local governments inflict artificial controls on Australian fossil-fuel users, while corrupt United Nations officials hand out blanket indulgences to less fuel-efficient competitors in the Third World? Will Australian governments continue confiscating the traditional property rights of farmers to harvest rainwater and trees on their land in order to make us look good in climate negotiations? Such interventions hamper productivity growth and adaptive flexibility at a time when Australians are progressively ageing and need all the productivity growth they can realise.

Australians have experienced openness and enhanced economic freedom and are now aware of the challenge of rapid economic advances in Asia. Australian producers now operate in a frontline state and therefore must compete unhindered by regulatory handicaps to make good use of ample land and energy resources. Given our openness and connectedness with ascendant Asia, even minor slippages in freedom standards will inflict prompt and massive losses of growth and jobs. This—I trust—will prevent a complete return to the dirigiste excesses of the Whitlam era, the rhetoric of government-funded NGOs notwithstanding. Nonetheless, I predict a substantial decline in economic freedom. I dread the consequences for prosperity, internal harmony and other freedoms.

We have again reached a critical crossroads, where freedom and its material and psychic benefits are widely taken for granted. Anti-capitalist sentiment is again in the ascendancy. Former Mont Pèlerin Society presidents Jim Buchanan and Antonio Martino were right when they warned us during the marvellous decade following the demise of communism that collectivism will persist in the mature democracies and even advance again.

In many respects, politics in this country is torn between the European social-democratic aspiration to lazy collective welfare and an older and a more American taste for individual self-reliance and liberty. Like all of humanity, Australians are condemned to fight an interminable battle to uphold the banner of freedom. 

Emeritus Professor Wolfgang Kasper has been a contributor to Quadrant since 1988. This is an edited version of a paper presented to a gathering of the Mont Pelerin Society in Sydney in October. Professor Kasper would like to acknowledge most helpful comments on earlier drafts from Sinclair Davidson, John Roskam, John Stone and David Trebeck.   

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Footnotes: