The top 10 reforms Bill Shorten must do with Ben Chifley’s majority

We don’t know how big it will be but Labor’s majority will be historic. Big enough to guarantee two terms of government. How should Bill Shorten spend this massive electoral windfall? Here are my suggestions in order of priority.

1. Fix energy. To do this there is no need for extravagant new policy measures like CPRS or NEG or even carbon pricing. Not even I think that these are possible any more. Boost the RET and include storage to provide the price signal for rising renewables. But spend most of the effort on fixing the east coast gas market. Until that is done there is no sustainable energy solution because all of them will be greeted with rising prices. Fixing the gas market will deliver much lower gas and power prices and take all of the pressure out of decarboisation. Do it by using fixed price quotas for domestic supply for the export cartel or just ban all third party gas exports that were never intended for offshore markets, including STO’s older assets.
2. Deliver negative gearing reform irrespective of house price falls. This is the nucleus of structural change in the Australian economy. It will permanently smash the specufestor class, reduce house prices forever and, most importantly, crater land prices. These will flow through to lower consumption and a much lower currency.
3. Cut immigration. Do it in a series of steps if you prefer. But it also needs to happen to take pressure off housing markets permanently, as well as wages and city lifestyles. As house prices fall and the economy transforms towards tradeables, wages will have enough pressure on them already. This is a much better way to restore wages bargaining power than fiddling with industrial relations laws.
4. Do not dismantle offshore detention. Instead, as you cut immigration, significantly raise the refugee intake as much as is needed to process asylum seekers swiftly into the community. Do not jail children.
5. On foreign policy do not kowtow to China. It is not the powerless autocracy of the Whitlam years. Nor is it the hoped for liberalising giant of the Keating years. It is a nasty and power-projecting autocracy with hegemonic ambitions that will change Australian history very seriously for the worse. Embrace ANZUS and hedge with continental defence projected into the Pacific at the same time. Nuclear power must be considered.
6. Throw the book at banks post-royal commission. Launch a new inquiry, headed by some incorruptible boffin, into how Australia’s failed financial regulators should be reconfigured. The RBA/APRA separation is a terrible failure. The RBA is corrupt and needs to be flushed. ASIC is a standing joke. The ACCC is the most ineffective body in Australia. You might include Treasury which is broken.
7. Deliver imputation credit reform and tax cuts but go much further on Australia’s world beating tax concessions. The superannuation system is a giant tax parasite. All of the concessions are distorting and inefficient and inhibit Budget repair.
8. Restore petrol excise and remove the diesel rebate. The first should never have been removed and the second is a way of lifting taxes on grotesquely under-taxed miners. Both are environmental winners and will also help a great deal with Budget repair.
9. Bring back TAFE and get the unis off the demand-driven quotas system that simply devalues all degrees. Better still, launch another inquiry into how education exports can be better managed in a way that doesn’t destroy pedagogical standards such as they are now.
10. Recognise indigenous peoples in the constitution but do not go for a republic. Attachments to Anglospheric tradition has never been more important than it is today as a variety of ethno-political systems vies for global domination or, at least, multi-polarity.

Finally, probably at number one though not really a specific task, restore Australia to itself. This can be done with the above reform platform but it will need to be woven together into a broader narrative to be held together. Labor’s present “fair go” narrative is OK to win power but it will not carry a broad reform program. For that Australians must be rallied to a collective task of national repair. That cannot be done with the identity politics that has run amok through the left. This must be abandoned and replaced with a deliberate national consciousness that has a utilitarian core, the most good for the most number of Australians. That does not mean abandoning social justice. It means pursuing it as a part of national justice not splintered identity states.

That should keep you busy for six years.