The Turnbulls couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery

Advertisement

It’ s been a long and sad road for the MB narrative. We’ve watched on as consecutive governments have failed to grasp Australia’s contemporary political economy challenges, rendering bad decision after bad policy after stupid idea to snow the economy into a corner from which it will now be near impossible to rescue it.

The answers all along weren’t hard. We needed to recognise that the post-GFC mining boom was short term and manage it accordingly. When it finished we needed to manage a real exchange rate adjustment to improve competitiveness and reboot non-mining tradables. And all along we needed to do some productivity reform to keep incomes growing. That’s it.

Instead we’ve done the complete opposite every time. We reflated when we needed to deflate. We’ve choked instead de-bottlenecked. We’ve lifted the currency instead of dropping it. We’ve guzzled at the trough when adult restraint and planning for the future were the order of the day.

All are responsible. The RBA has become an outright bubble manager. Treasury has made the nation almost ungovernable with its Budget lies. Politicians have flooded the place with mass immigration and illegal foreign capital in a last desperate attempt to keep it afloat.

Advertisement

We were rich. So we’ve gotten away with it. But we are getting less rich every day because of the decline now and coming is the day when that will matter.

Alan Kohler captured some of this in the past few days:

In a press release last Monday, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said: “Consumers and businesses are faced with a multitude of complex offers that cannot be compared easily”.

He was talking about electricity, but he could easily have been referring to the NBN and superannuation as well.

Each of these essential services — energy, retirement savings and communication — have been mangled by politics, and as a result are hopelessly confusing and expensive.

Complaints about the NBN jumped from 10,487 to 27,195 last year, or 75 per day; this week former Liberal Party treasurer Peter Costello effectively proposed nationalising super; and the ACCC reported that electricity prices had gone up 63 per cent in 10 years.

Advertisement

And:

The National Disability Insurance Scheme is like that renovation you embarked on and found, after you were well into it, that the stumps were rotten, the sewers were all blocked and the roof needed replacing. Too late to turn back, you had to tear up the budget and press on.

The cost is what it is. We can’t have new carpet on rotten stumps and a new bathroom with blocked pipes.

When it came up with the idea six years ago, the Productivity Commission said the NDIS would cost $13.6 billion — a net increase on existing state and federal disability funding of $6.5 billion, easily fundable.

Last week the PC amended that to $22 billion in the “first full year of operation”, a 62 per cent increase on the first guess, and not so easy to fund after all. There is little explanation of the difference, beyond wages increases and population growth (which might have been foreseen you would think).

And it’s difficult to be sure because it’s not clear, but that $22 billion could be the new NET cost, not gross. If so, it’s really $28.5 billion — more than double the original estimate.

As said, there are many who are to blame. But responsibility starts at the top and there is one power couple that has hovered over this great national decline more than any other, the Turnbulls.

Malcolm was, of course, personally responsible for the butchering of the NBN as Communications Minister. As PM, he has been a disaster in everything he’s touched:

Advertisement
  • there’s no unified narrative on anything at any time for longer than five minutes;
  • there’s no productivity reform, turning back progress in property, land, taxation, super and horizontal fiscal imbalances;
  • energy remains an unmitigated disaster with a very easy policy fix in domestic gas reservation that is ignored;
  • carbon mitigation has been shredded and only very partially rescued;
  • infrastructure spending is low and poorly directed;
  • banks and the social contract have turned into a circus;
  • house prices have soared to absurd levels driven by Chinese capital that was quietly unfettered from policing when Tony Abbott was dumped;
  • we’re still waiting for reform on Chinese bribes in the parliament;
  • gay marriage has been butchered;
  • a bold innovation agenda passed like rain one the mountainside;
  • wages have been killed by penalty rate cuts and anti-union measures plus flooding the labour market with foreign supply and unaddressed visa rorting;
  • brain fart corporate tax cuts will make the country poorer;
  • electoral reform designed to kill cross-benchers was so badly designed that it expanded their influence and gave life to One Nation and
  • mass immigration has been used to paper over all of this failure and is generating huge resentment in the east coast capitals.

The end result is an economy with a dying private sector. There is bugger all business investment and not much coming. Households are ready to throw in the towel, paralysed by debt, falling wealth and wages and on the verge of killing consumption by saving like mad. Only the tail end of the mining boom – a short term income bounce thanks to more Chinese debt and LNG volume exports – plus endless fiscal stimulus is keeping the economy from sliding into recession.

The political economy is now a running joke, starring in a global laughing stock special series mounted by Bloomberg. Nothing is envisioned. There is no plan. There is no beginning, middle nor end to anything.

Advertisement

It’s all perfectly presented. Beautifully charming. Aaaand…nothing.

And that’s just the husband.

Lucy (Ponzy) Turnbull is a bloodless facsimile. Like some lonely and spoiled child with toy soldiers, she plays with Sydneysiders in her mapped-out fantasy of what the city of the future will bring. Her op-ed yesterday in the SMH was disastrously out of touch:

I’ve been passionate about urbanism and what makes great cities for decades. As an older teenager, that passion was about loving the great buildings of Sydney’s CBD. As a city councillor and lord mayor, my passion was for the fabric and infrastructure of our central business district and the services and facilities for city residents. Now as a grandmother and as chief commissioner, privileged to lead the organisation charged with planning our city’s future, it is about the people of Greater Sydney and what sort of city we want for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.

Greater Sydney has reached a “sliding doors” moment. The city’s current structure is constraining housing supply and affordability, holding back jobs growth where most of the population lives and has seen infrastructure and services fail to keep up.

Sydney will be transformed into a metropolis of three cities under the new Greater Sydney Commission draft report launched by commissioner Lucy Turnbull, Transport Minister Andrew Constance and Planning Minister Anthony Roberts.

The opportunity now, presented by the draft Greater Sydney Region Plan 2056, is to rebalance opportunity for the people of our city, by reshaping it as a metropolis of three unique but connected cities.

For the Greater Sydney Commission this has been a relatively recent strategic planning challenge. But as I learned recently from an elder of the Darug people, this has been the long-standing Indigenous view of the Sydney basin. Our Western Parkland City, Central River City and Eastern Harbour City mirror their engagement with the freshwater, muddy water and salt water landscapes.

This reinforces cities as a collection of places. Taking a strategic view of Greater Sydney’s next 40 years, it needs to be a city of great places; places that meet the needs of the people. who are at its heart and soul.

So, our plans, ranging from the strategic – the draft region plan released at the weekend – and the localised district plans being released later this week – must start and end with how we meet the needs of, and connect, our people.

It’s fair dinkum like some pre-programmed motherhood statement machine that has gone haywire, pumping out platitude in a furiously unfurling toilet role of flying paper, signifying nothing. We all know what 1.7 million more Sydneysiders will deliver. The same thing it has delivered so far. Planning failure, massive waste as rentiers swarm over dis-economies of scale, under-investment, shortages in schools, health, police, water and an abundance of jammed traffic. That is, falling living standards.

Advertisement

The Ponzy Turnbull vision will not deliver three lovely Sydneys. It will destroy the place everywhere west of Strathfield. That’s the real idea, to pile up another 1.7 million coloured carcasses – snort, eh what, jolly good show, pip pip – out in the dust and baking heat while the east creams it in the sea breeze. This is class war masquerading as urban planning. If I were an elder of the Darug people I would be appalled.

Domainfax readers give you the reality of it on the ground:

The rhetoric used in the Greater Sydney Commission’s plan for what used to be called Sydney says it all (“Sydney on the move: a tale of three cities”, October 23). While the “Eastern Harbour City” has its natural harbour, and the “Central River City” its natural river, the deceptively named “Western Parkland City” will have no such natural equivalent, just a blighting, carbon-belching, heat-radiating, noise-generating 24/7 international airport, dressed up as an “aerotropolis”. Spin aside, Lucy Turnbull’s Draft Greater Sydney Region Plan is nothing less than a declaration of war by the big end of town against the people and environment of western Sydney.

Colin Andersen Lapstone

Lucy Turnbull’s boast of achieving a 30-minute city is trumpeted no less than 20 times in the “Our Greater Sydney 2056” document. But not the slightest evidence from anywhere is provided that this is achievable. It implies the systematic fragmentation of labour markets and contradicts the economic justification of large cities. If people change jobs, will they move homes? All over the world as cities get bigger, and become more dense, journey-to-work times increase. The mean journey time to work in Hong Kong and Tokyo, each with wonderful public transport, is 45 minutes, considerably more than 30 minutes.

Tony Recsei Warrawee

Three circles drawn on the map of Sydney each representing a city – Eastern, Central and Western: an inspired design for Sydney’s future, or the outline plan for a three-ringed circus? Turning Sydney into three interconnected cities is a brave attempt to encourage people to stay where planners think they should be, but in a city where the traditional mindset has been to head east this will be a big ask. With prohibitively expensive real estate and rentals in the east, will the workers required to keep the elite east functioning still need to pour in from the west?

Doug Walker Baulkham Hills

It already takes 60 minutes by bus from Annandale to UNSW at Kensington. Whatever route you take by car, drive time is the same. In addition, there is nowhere to park long term. The 30-minute city is a pipe dream.

Congestion will ensure that this trip time blows out further by 2056. The problem is enforced population growth in the absence of an intelligent economic plan for Australia. There are limits to how big Sydney and Melbourne can sprawl before life for everyone becomes intolerable. This will happen long before 2056 if this is the only plan.

Philip Drew Annandale

Looks like Lucy is planning three Sydneys. The very rich, the not so rich, and the rest in the west. As for the regions – has Lucy ever been there?

Peter Hull Hat Head

I read with a high degree of smugness the daring plan for 30-minute commutes in 40 years. Six years ago I moved to Bathurst, 2.5 hours west of Sydney, from the inner west of Sydney. My initial commute once here was 15 minutes, and just recently dropped to less than a genuine five minutes (10 minutes if I walk). I do have one set of lights to cope with on that commute, but all-day free parking makes up for that, not to mention the more than four hours a week saved commuting time. Think of that time as eight extra public holidays every year. We have a nice house on a big block with minimal mortgage and a walk to shops and schools, just a few benefits of selling up from Sydney. Yes, there has been adaptions and some changes in expectations, but the overwhelming sense of community is the absolute highlight of regional Australia. Highly recommended.

Stephen Jackson Bathurst

In the lead-up to Christmas, we have come to expect the inevitable rollout of state government documents for public comment. Now Sydneysiders are invited to “have your say” on no fewer than five draft plans – the Greater Sydney Region Plan and four other plans comprising Future Transport Strategy 2056 – all by the middle of December. The government is evidently fed up with this process of feedback too and intends to do away with “static” five-year plans and replace them with an online “living” strategy that is “regularly updated to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape”. This “planning on the run” approach will mean that communities will not even see the changes coming at them. The department has kindly provided a series of emojis to gauge your reaction to this news; if you care about your city, send them a resounding “nope”.

Renata Bali Strathfield South

We’ve been building motorways for decades. The result is billions of public funds to private interests, less money for public transport and no lasting improvement in travel times. This latest transport plan repeats the failures of the past but somehow expects a different result. Not bloody likely!

Jeffrey Gabriel Gladesville

Advertisement

We don’t need more people. We need more national interest policy. Any national bloody interest policy.

The Turnbulls do not know nor care for Australians. To them, we are denizens in some giant ant farm, secreted in the rear of the estate arboretum, for amusement and self-actualisation, as they experiment upon us with a dropper of this scent or tube of that chemical, perhaps pluck off a leg or two, in a glib experiment of pseudo-science.

Both need to be run out of power post-haste.

Advertisement
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.