This year, Crispin Hull has emerged as Fairfax’s rising star, demonstrating that unlike his colleagues Peter Martin, Jessica Irvine and Michael Pascoe, he actually understands the key issues afflicting Australia.
Below are some key examples of Hull’s excellent work.
Back in January, Hull argued that the main solution to making housing more affordable rests with winding-back Australia’s mass immigration program:
The principal cause of housing unaffordability is population growth and the principal cause of that is high immigration. Immigration quotas are set by the federal government. The great majority of immigrants go to Sydney and Melbourne where the highest dwelling prices are to be found.
Yet premiers rarely if ever tell the feds to rein in the immigration quotas so they can have some hope of keeping up with demand for housing, schools, roads, hospitals and so on…
So let’s first go to our property developer, the founder of Meriton, Australia’s most prolific apartment developer, Harry Triguboff.
He was quoted in the Australian Financial Review late last year as dismissing concerns there might be an over-supply of apartments.
Triguboff was asked, “But might rents fall in Sydney and Brisbane when all the new apartments are completed in the next two years?”
He responded, “Then I will bring in more migrants.”Whoops, I must have got in wrong when I said above that the federal government sets the migrant quotas. Apparently, property developers set migrant targets in Australia. Or at least federal politicians are so beholden to them and their donations that, in effect, they determine migration quotas.
In March, Hull penned a thought-provoking piece arguing that Australia is “still plagued by destructive policies of John Howard, our worst prime minister”:
Howard led us into Iraq just to please the Americans and that the decision was based on a falsity. That decision cost a lot of blood and treasure and sucked Australia into the vortex of terrorism…
On housing affordability, Howard introduced the capital-gains-tax concession; bolstered the first-home buyers’ grant; and boosted immigration – all putting pressure on housing demand. Investor entry into the housing market took off from the moment the capital-gains-tax concession began. We wallow helplessly in the backwash of these idiotic decisions.
Speaking of tax, Howard introduced the over-60 superannuation tax holiday, other super concessions, family payments to middle-income households, age-based tax concessions, and lots of income-tax breaks for middle to higher-income households. These have been difficult if not impossible to wind back and have increased inequality in Australia.
In short, Howard squandered the mining boom on buying votes and allowing miners to be lightly taxed…
In education, he dramatically increased federal funding to private schools… He starved public schools…
In health, Howard’s government corroded Medicare by misdirecting money into tax deductions for inefficient private health insurance…
With infrastructure, Howard was a master of the pork barrel. The regional partnership program was biased towards Coalition and marginal seats… The misspend is still sounding in infrastructure deficits today…
Howard politicised the public service when he sacked six department heads upon coming into power…
In April, Hull penned a great piece explaining why Australia’s near record run of uninterrupted economic growth is largely a mirage. Hull explained in detail the flaws inherent in GDP as a measure of welfare, namely:
- It does not account for population growth;
- It does not account for worsening inequality;
- It does not account for Australia’s ballooning household debt;
- It does not account for environmental destruction or the repair bill from natural disasters;
- It does not account for financialisation – i.e. the growing share of non-productive financial flows across the economy;
- In Australia’s case, it does not capture the falling real national income and wages since 2012.
Hull’s first point about population growth was particularly apt:
In the Netherlands’ boom of 1982 to 2008, its population increased by just 13 per cent. In the Australian boom from 1991 to 2017, on the other hand, the population rose an astonishing 42 per cent. So we may have had an ever-increasing size of the cake, but there were so many more mouths to feed it to that often many people were not getting any more cake than they had in the past.
Indeed, when you adjust for that factor alone, Australia has not had 103 quarters without a recession. On a per head basis, Australia had recessions (two or more consecutive quarters of GDP contraction per head) in 2000, 2006 and 2008.
In those years people, on average, went backwards.
In October, Hull questioned why the Productivity Commission’s (PC) latest report, entitled Shifting the Dial: 5 year productivity review, failed to address Australia’s mass immigration settings:
This week’s Productivity Commission report… delves into seemingly intractable problems of congestion, urban sprawl, development entanglements, renewing and adding to infrastructure, and so on, suggesting all sorts of better processes, incentives and disincentives.
Don’t get me wrong. The suggestions are well-thought-out and try to weed out the worst sort of rent-seeking and political machinations. But they are all curative of problems without mentioning one of the main underlying causes: rapid population growth.
It is astonishing that one of the most-respected economic institutions in the country can do a five-year review of productivity without some detailed discussion of population policy and what effect the ramping-up of immigration since the Howard years, including Kevin Rudd’s “big Australia”, has had and will have in the future…
Australia needs to build the equivalent of a city like Canberra every year to accommodate this growth.
So what’s the point of delivering an immensely detailed five-year review if all its recommendations are compromised by a population non-policy, under which, every year, the government plucks a figure from the air with precious little concern about long-term economic effects.
It is completely negligent for those such as the Productivity Commission, nearly every federal and state politician, and a raft of greedy special-interest lobbyists to couch the issue as “What do we do to accommodate this population growth?” instead of “How can we reduce the population growth?”.
For example, the commission says we should impose road-use charges, the equivalent of a congestion tax, to deal with traffic congestion and its huge economic costs. And state governments should build more expensive roads in a futile attempt to catch up. This Band-Aid, treat-the-symptoms approach is not just negligent, it is outright dangerous.
The danger lies in opportunist political figures like Pauline Hanson linking the ills of overpopulation (congestion, hospital waiting times, housing prices, stalled wages growth and the like) to Muslim immigration. The more that people who profit from high population growth and do not suffer the consequences (business, lobbyists and the politicians they fund) blithely ignore the infrastructure and other stresses it causes, the more chances there will be for opportunists…
In Australia, we should celebrate the wonderful things immigration has done for our economy and society in the past. But we should not put that in jeopardy with too much immigration now…
The important thing now is for the main parties to forget the wishes of their donors and concentrate on the wishes of voters – before One Nation, the Australian Conservatives and others exploit the discontent in an ugly way.
And key parts of the bureaucracy should not take high population growth as a given and advise only on how to cope with it, but also advise on its downside and how it can be checked.
And over the weekend, Hull pinned the blame for One Nation’s rise squarely on the federal governments mass immigration program:
The real question should be: why is One Nation getting so much support now? Are there any parallels, albeit on a much smaller scale, with 1930s Europe?
Well, to some extent, yes. After a couple of decades of neoliberal economics, privatisations, social-security cuts, austerity, stagnant wage growth, cuts to working conditions, outsourcing, factory closures, economic disruption and so on, there is obviously the same sense of alienation, anger and disaffection felt in Germany for the same reasons in the 1930s…
In Australia, this is compounded by extremely high immigration and a sense (indeed, a reality) that employers are permitted to import cheap labour at the cost of existing residents. And this is compounded by the accusation that “Australians are not willing to do these jobs” when in fact they are, but not at the wage-slave rates on offer.
This is perhaps the greatest unnoticed irony in Australia. John Howard said he needed to be tough on refugees so people would stomach and not rebel against his mega-high immigration program, which benefited the Coalition’s well-heeled donors to the detriment of most Australians.
The truth is the reverse. We should have been more circumspect on economic immigration, with all its unseen attendant costs, so that we would be in a better position to improve to our humanitarian and refugee intake.
And now national-socialist Pauline Hanson riles against being swamped by Muslims, when the real cause of the disaffection and alienation of her supporters – even if they don’t recognise it – is being economically swamped by British, New Zealand, Indian and Chinese immigrants who impose an unsustainable burden on infrastructure provision and drive up housing costs.
But anytime anyone mentions that, they get accused of xenophobia, so they don’t mention it – a xenophobiaphobia (to borrow Clive Hamilton’s phrase). It’s very convenient for the very few people who benefit from high immigration.
So to overcome the ghastly swing to One Nation, the Coalition must address the sources of alienation: reduce economic immigration; stop the downward pressure on wages through unfair labour laws (which in any event are harming, not helping, business by shrinking demand); and bring big corporations and public-utility monopolies into line.
Malcolm Turnbull said: “A vote for One Nation is a vote of Labor.” Well, yes, but only because he made it so…
Crispin Hull is one of the few commentators outside MB that correctly sees One Nation a ‘one trick pony’ whose popularity rests on its solitary commitment to reduce immigration. If the Coalition merely committed to reducing Australia’s immigration intake back to the historical average, thereby it would cut One Nation off at the head and eliminate it as a political threat.
Crispin Hull deserves a promotion.
