Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)
If nothing else, the release yesterday of the latest Intergenerational Report served to demonstrate that we re locked into the same useless debate about economic reform that s been going on for years.
The report s assumption of a return to annual productivity growth of 1.5% over the long-run has been universally derided as an act of wild optimism, especially given Treasurer Josh Frydenberg s professed attitude that all the big reforms have been done and the road ahead is about eking out lots of small improvements. You can t float the dollar twice, he says.
That s elicited what is now the almost ritualistic demands for more (big e, big r) Economic Reform, and lamentations that the current crop of politicians aren t a patch on previous generations like Hawke and Keating, with both sides portrayed as too timid to propose reforms. It s everywhere today in
Fact or fiction: a 40-year budget deficit burden?
29 June 2021
This Intergenerational Report (IGR) released by the
Federal government (https://treasury.gov.au/intergenerational-report) is a classic economic work that either
sends people asleep or turns them into a Homer Simpson, who simply would look
at it and say: “Boring.”
Potentially it’s a chance for younger generations
to complain about older ones, which is an issue I’ll get back to after summing
up this work produced by the number crunchers in Treasury.
In a nutshell, it looks at what we’re doing right
and wrong today that will have an impact on generations in the future.
AIST chief executive, Eva Scheerlinck, said: “As younger generations retire with greater superannuation savings, the total proportion of older Australians receiving the Age Pension will continue to decline. It is a very significant to see that the number retirees drawing a full-age pension is expected to halve by 2060”.
Similarly, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) chief executive, Dr Martin Fahy, said: With more Australian retirees having higher super balances, the proportion of retirees reliant on the Age Pension will decline and ASFA expects half of all Australians to be self-funded in their retirement by 2050. Our strong superannuation system will allow Australia to lower the burden of the Age Pension from the current 2.7% of GDP to 2.1% in 2060-61 making it the lowest among our OECD peers.”
Date Time
Intergenerational Report offers chance to reflect on need for sustained investment
The 2021 Intergenerational Report (IGR) was published yesterday, laying out a 40-year projection of the Australian economy, the age and size of the population, and the long-term impacts of Budget measures on Australian life. Needless to say, COVID-19 is the economic linchpin of much of the document’s direction, an event it refers to as “the most severe global economic shock since the Great Depression”.
While the pandemic will certainly have lasting effects on the national economy, we can also look further ahead to the challenges that will no doubt be presented by the crucial post-recovery period.
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at 10:00 am on June 29, 2021 | 13 comments
Professor Gary Banks – the long-time former chief of the Productivity Commission (PC) – has shredded Treasury’s Intergenerational Report (IGR), claiming that the case to reboot Australia’s mass immigration program post COVID does not stack up economically or socially. Instead Banks recommends a level of net overseas migration (NOM) of only 90,000 annually:
Australia’s relatively high rate of population growth – among the highest in the OECD – has been a key driver of the growth in aggregate GDP. Unusually for an OECD country… it has been due to historically high net immigration, accounting for two-thirds of overall population growth, before COVID brought things to a halt.