20 ideas that are practical and would make a difference

Dear ,

Australia needs to break the deadlock in the Senate where the ALP allies with micro parties and the Greens to defeat common sense policies. That requires a change in thinking about some basic ideas.

We have identified electricity, the budget, immigration, housing affordability, free speech, education, health and indigenous rights as areas needing a reboot, and where a different approach could bear fruit. The whole document is attached, but I have summarised some of our approach below.

Electricity

The most immediate problem is the cost of electricity. Australia used to have the cheapest electricity in the developed world, and now has the most expensive.

Some of this is due to the system costs of increasing reliance on unreliable power, and some of it is regulatory self-harm in the way we subsidise renewables and allow utilities to charge for distribution networks.

But underlying it are poorly conceived international carbon-abatement agreements like the Paris Accord which have seen no decrease in emissions but selectively damage first world economies, and allocate resources towards technologies like wind and solar, which are not viable for baseload power.

No wonder most countries will not meet their Paris commitments.

Our prescription is to stop subsidising renewables directly and indirectly now - their proponents claim they are the cheapest form of generation, so the subsidies are unnecessary – and accept the ACCC recommendation to underwrite some new despatchable power generation.

Further we suggest measures that would make engagement at an international level more meaningful, such as calculating carbon emissions on the basis of consumption, not production.

Budget

The solution here is to get national agreement on just what the size of the Commonwealth government should be, and to then work the budget back from there, as most households do with their budgets. If the opposition parties in the senate will not do that, then at least the country will know that they stand for higher taxes and/or higher borrowings.

And just as with household debt, there needs to be a clear path to pay back government debt. Some debt is inevitable in a strongly growing country to finance infrastructure and other expenditure which earns an income. But debt that does not return income above its rate of borrowing must be eliminated.

Immigration and infrastructure

We note that there is no link between national wealth and population size, and recommend a stocktake of the current situation with a view to crafting an immigration policy that is generally acceptable across the community.

This should take account of differing attitudes and needs in the various regions of Australia, the skills that Australia requires, and our ability to build and finance infrastructure to cope with the added population.

In terms of infrastructure we note that Australia has no coastal shipping, and that this puts tremendous strain on our highways.

Conclusion

The new government doesn’t need to change the substance of what it is trying to achieve, but it does need to abandon some of the old arguments. They have led to drift. While the economy is going well at the moment, it is momentum from decisions made more than a decade ago that are the cause, rather than any decisions made in the last few parliaments.

Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director