Joe Hockey’s G20 secret: believe

Treasurer Joe Hockey appeared to be channelling the eponymous self-help bible The Secret as he talked up the significance of the G20 summit on Sky News last Friday.

“Australians and people around the world have to believe that tomorrow is going to be better and more prosperous than today,” he told interviewer Kieran Gilbert. “Therefore, if they do believe that – if it is going to happen – then they are prepared to invest and create jobs for others in the community.”

When the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, prodded by Hockey, declared their commitment to raise their collective GDP by more than 2 per cent the existing five-year trajectory, they appeared to be adopting the sort of “believe it, and it will happen” logic that is the The Secret’s mantra.

Their declared intention to “significantly raise global growth”, accompanied only by vague commitments to cut unemployment and increase investment, sounded suspiciously like the The Secret’s advice to “see yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with setting ambitious targets. Just ask Wayne Swan and his commitment to a return to Budget surplus in 2012-13.

But the essentially naive and ignorable nature of the commitment presided over by Hockey was neatly encapsulated in a put-down by German officials, who dismissed Australia’s initiative as a “slightly antiquated form of economic planning”.

Ouch.

The great thing about a collective commitment to something like a growth target is that everyone – and no-one – has responsibility to make it happen.

Let’s look at the wording of the relevant part of the G20 communique:

“We commit to developing new measures, in the context of maintaining fiscal sustainability and financial sector stability, to significantly raise global growth. We will develop ambitious but realistic policies with the aim to lift our collective GDP by more than 2 per cent above the trajectory implied by current policies over the coming five years.”

Plenty of wriggle room for governments there if growth doesn’t turn out as hoped – just say the financial system was too fragile to push things harder, or budget pressures were too great.

Then there is the question of how this jump in growth might be realised.

To achieve this 2 per cent acceleration, the ministers and governors said they would take steps to increase investment, lift employment and participation, enhance trade and promote competition.

All worthy goals, but tell me the government who says they won’t take steps to boost investment, employment, trade and competition. Ask most governments, and they will say that is what they are doing every day (even if they are not really).

So where did Joe get this idea for an additional 2 per cent growth target?

Have a look at the briefing prepared for the G20 meeting by International Monetary Fund staff, go right past the Executive Summary and the first 10 pages, and read the 11-page Annex at the back, which is full of worthy suggestions for stronger growth and how to achieve it.

Specifically, IMF staff have modelled the effects of what they see are necessary reforms in six key areas where policy gaps have been identified: fiscal, rebalancing (of sources of growth), labour supply, other labour market reforms, product market reforms, and infrastructure investment.

According to IMF estimates, the “policies assumed in the [plausible reform] scenario raise world real GDP by about 2.25 per cent ($US2.25 trillion) in 2018, relative to the October 2013 World Economic Outlook baseline”.

The biggest gains, the IMF believes, will come from reforms to boost competition and improve the business environment, followed by investment in public infrastructure, getting more people into the labour force, other labour market reforms and rebalancing sources of growth.

As the Lowy Institute’s Mike Callahan points out, we have been here before.

At their Toronto summit in 2010, G20 leaders committed to work together on a set of policies which the IMF estimated would boost global output by $US4 trillion and create 52 million jobs.

What happened? As we now know, the requisite policies weren’t adopted and growth fell well short of the stated mark.

As Callahan says, having a growth target and a plan to get there is only meaningful if the plan is implemented.

He points out that the necessary reforms identified by the IMF and OECD are politically challenging.

In Australia’s case, they include improving the efficiency of the tax system by lowering corporate taxes and relying more on the GST; improving the regulation of infrastructure by expanding user charges and congestion charges; improving childcare support; and reducing the stringency of the scrutiny of foreign investment. As Callahan observes, this is “tough stuff”.

The Abbott Government has already made clear that it has no appetite for taking on the sort of economic reforms that the country is screaming out for, particularly an overhaul of the tax system.

The Commonwealth is over-reliant on income taxation for revenue, and the country needs a broader tax base, of which a higher consumption tax is a key part.

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry developed a credible and valuable blueprint for tax reform that should be the starting point for the Government.

But, just like the G20 growth commitment, it is hard to see it happening.

Even invoking The Secret won’t make it so.