How do we steer the economy to higher growth?

Significantly increase immigration!

That’s it. Done and dusted. End of story!

Tony, you seem to miss the most fundamental point: The need to match demand with a healthy ongoing supply capability!

You appear to be totally hooked into continuous growth in both supply and demand.

Surely the single most important thing in our quest for a healthy national economy is to slow down the continuous massive rate of increase in the demand for everything!

ie: slow population growth and head towards a stable population…. which we can very easily do by way of reducing immigration progressively down to net zero or something close to it.

If we did this, we wouldn’t need to be forever chasing rapid economic growth. The rate of growth could actually slow down while the economy actually became healthier at the same time!

We would actually be able to make some headway on improving services and infrastructure, instead of constantly battling to keep up with the ever-increasing burden on existing services and infrastructure and the massive demand for the duplication of everything… all of which chews up a huge part of the national budget, without producing any overall improvements for the existing population!

So please Professor Makin, can we concentrate on what we need to do in order to achieve a sustainable society, with a healthy resource base and a high level of quality of services, infrastructure, environmental health, etc?

Concentrating on how to grow the economy just doesn’t cut it, especially while we have a rapidly growing demand for everything that economic growth is supposed to provide.

Chasing economic growth, in the absence of a goal as to the ultimate size of the demand base, has surely been proven to be one of the major follies of economists and politicians over the last several decades.

If there was any merit to it, we would have achieved our goals by now. But instead we see just about everything actually being worse now than it was in the 60s or 70s!

continued

It’s time for a new approach. And the basis of it is just so simple, with the stabilisation of the demand side of the equation being the most important thing.

Kelvin Thomson has got the right idea. He’s been on about this for years. He was re-elected for the umpteenth time at the last federal election, with the biggest majority of any Labor member. So even though Labor is highly on the nose, he’s got his electorate right onside: http://www.2gb.com/audioplayer/20761#.UneGvvlkNkM

Tony can you tell us how australia compares with those contries for health care, workplace safety and many more other factors that balance some of the things you are measuring.

Would you realy like to see more deaths in the work place to reduce the cost of supply?

Has NZ had to cope with years of the high dollar, we have.

The international monetary system, which for thirty years has been based on debt growth (aka deregulation and credit expansion), is now so crippled by debt that the only means to economic growth is more debt. This is the ‘post-1983 economic consensus’ world that Australia must now operate in. Hockey, Abbott, Murdoch et al pretend to be horrified by debt but in order to be ‘open for business’, they have to be ‘open for much more debt'.

All the huffing and puffing about government deficits were just that – huffing and puffing. In fact, that deficit is making a lot of money for all the 'right' people. The Coalition-Murdoch-RBA troika are not concerned in the slightest about Australia’s household and private debt, which is astronomical compared to our government debt. As long as Hockey is able to protect the banks with the taxpayers' money when the inevitable debt-driven recession deepens, property prices tank and much of the population finds itself in negative equity, Australia will always be ‘open for business’.