We just keep waiting for Godot
One of theatre’s classic works is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The play was revived a few years back by the Sydney Theatre Company starring Richard Roxborough and Hugo Weaving playing Estragon and Vladimir.
The play is essentially about despair and about waiting, desperately, for something, anything to happen – in this case the appearance of a figure called Godot.
The play says a lot about futility and hopelessness.
A perfect metaphor for today’s economic policy.
Reports in both the Australian Financial Review and the Australian give a “drop” (because that’s what the kids call it) on today’s speech to the Press Club by the Treasurer.
The Treasurer will say, apparently with a straight face, that the economy is not dynamic enough, the budget not sustainable enough and the economy, not resilient enough.
Oh really.
OK then, why?
Because we have been waiting for Godot.
Surely none of that pithy grab from the Treasurer should be news to anyone, including the Treasurer himself.
For if it is news, then honestly, we have far bigger problems to deal with as a nation.
Commentary and analysis we don’t lack – it’s the doing part that we can’t quite manage.
And there hasn’t been much doing for a generation now.
Not helped by a Treasurer who started his term with values-based economics instead of good old fashion rational economics.
Such as mucking around with investment mandates for the Future Fund.
Which segue ways the Labor Dry into the next Waiting for Godot despair moment.
At the same time as the Treasurer is reminding us of what we already know well enough, the Chair of the Future Fund is out there giving speeches about investment strategies.
Yep, investment outlooks from a government owned Future Fund.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that perhaps one of the reasons that the economy is not dynamic enough is that we have a Future Fund (along with other funny money funds) that do nothing other than crowd out the private sector?
That allocative productivity (ie how resources are used across the economy) is just as important as technical productivity?
Or perhaps it may occur to someone that one of the reasons the budget is unsustainable is that we are paying interest on debt all the while we persist in maintaining a stupid government owned hedge fund?
So, Mr Treasurer want to do something about productivity and sustainability?
Easy Peezy – liquidate the funny money schemes and use them to pay down debt.
To the next Waiting for Godot moment.
This time from the Master Builders Association.
Apparently, the MBA have put in a submission to the Productivity Commission suggesting that the government offer tax breaks for builders that meet industry standards.
Yep, you heard that right.
Shamelessly, asking for a tax break for doing what the law requires of you - rightly or wrongly.
For the MBA the answer to re-regulation is a tax concession to unwind the cost impact of the re-regulation.
Talk about money go round – solving for a problem (regulation) by creating another problem (tax arbitrage).
To think this is where the country has got to.
Unabashed rent seeking combined with the mindset that says, so long as I get a piece of the jib, that’s perfectly OK.
What does that say about our economic culture as a nation?
Peronismo that’s what it says.
And this from a business organisation – it is despairing.
Waiting for Godot.
And now to the final despair - the Treasurer’s demand for more economic resilience.
Economic resilience is the new fig leaf for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours.
From industry policy, to subsidises, to re-regulation.
All in the name of so-called resilience.
Inevitably doomed to fail and send us backwards at the same time
What will give us resilience is getting our spending under control, especially the new welfare behemoth that is disability.
If Nial Ferguson’s rule dictates that empires crumble when they spend more on interest payments than defence, what would he make of a country that spends more on disability than defence?
A so called healthy, wealthy, in an all to our own continent that now leads the international pack on spending on disability.
Here is a tip to the Treasurer.
You don’t make the country more productive, the budget more sustainable or more resilient if you don’t fundamentally change the NDIS and disability.
Leave that scheme without user charges or co-payments and you have the absence of rationing and with it the misallocation of resources.
And continue to fund it without reform will send the country into the fiscal abyss.
So, like the Future Fund and the funny money schemes, you need to fix that scheme if you want to deliver your trifecta.
Liquide the Future Fund and pay down debt.
Introduce co-payments to the NDIS.
Don’t listen to the twits from the MBA.
Otherwise we will forever be waiting for Godot.