They are:
- Domestic gas reservation with quotas if necessary. This would crash the gas price to $5Gj and halve electricity prices, boosting household income and industrial competitiveness overnight, plus end the climate wars as gas took its place as the “transitional fuel”. Losses to the gas cartel and GDP would by tiny in context.
- Negative gearing reform to take pressure off house prices and deflate the tax-distortion bubble. This would cause some harm to household wealth in the near term but it would also sink the AUD and, in time, structurally adjust the economy away from borrow and consume to earn and export as it freed capital from the yoke of housing misallocation.
- Halve the immigration intake. This would also do the above plus shift more of the subsequent adjustment to capital from labour ensuring fairness is intact.
- Ban all donations to political parties and fund them on a tax-payer model. This would liberate objective and evidence-based policy making.
- Unleash unadulterated productivity reform across federal and state governments including breaking or regulation of monopolies, rebooted privatisation models, streamlined horizontal fiscal equalisation including scrapped stamp duties and land taxes, GST reform, taking back most of the egregious tax concessions and huge new mining taxes, plus much more.
That’s it folks. Five very simple steps that would fix Australia. We’d see a period of adjustment of a few years as house prices sank with wages and the AUD then we’d come out of it remade as a fighting fit and equitable meritocratic export powerhouse on the doorstop of Asia.
The Australia we’re supposed to be.
