By
Bloomberg on 05:11 pm Dec 09, 2014
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
$140 per ton 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.
Australian
voters have soured on Abbott — his coalition lost power in southeastern
Victoria state’s election last week, leading to chatter that he might not
survive a full term in office — because of what they see as broken promises. 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 the national icon Australian
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.
Scrapping a carbon tax, and resisting any serious limits on emissions, has made
the economy more vulnerable to international shocks and made Australia a punch
line at this week’s global climate talks in Lima, Peru.
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, any time 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.
There’s
still time for Abbott to turn things around, of course. But that would require,
on the one hand, tightening up the spigot of money that’s fueling housing froth
— essentially relying less on the Reserve Bank of Australia to support growth.
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.
William
Pesek is based in Tokyo and writes on economics, markets and politics
throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Bloomberg
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