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The case for complacency
She'll be right
After 20 years of success, reform is a hard sell
May 26th 2011
 
SOME POLITICIANS WIN power and do not know what to do with it. Others come to office determined to change everything and end up doing nothing. A respectable case can be made, in certain places at certain times, for concentrating on good management and making only a few big changes, but making them well. In Australia, this case rests not just on the thoroughness of the 1983-2003 reforms but on the fact that the economy has recently passed a stress test that all other rich countries’ economies to some degree failed. The global financial crisis did not pass Australia by, but neither did it drive it into recession.
The first reason for that was the strength of the four big banks. They were strong partly because Australian banking had already been through some bad times. Two had almost gone under in the 1990s, when several state-owned banks foundered and others were taken over. That episode, and the Asian crisis of 1997, made them tighten up. Then came the collapse of HIH Insurance in 2001, which led to a revision of regulatory oversight. As a result, Australia’s banks in 2008 had higher capital ratios than their counterparts in America and Europe and were watched over closely by an active and conservative regulator.
Even so, the banks were potentially vulnerable, because they were dependent on offshore borrowing and thus exposed to British and American banks. However, the big four were, by bipartisan agreement, though not by law, forbidden to take each other over. That meant they had no incentive to pump up their share price or earnings through dealing in dubious products. Nor, with plenty of domestic lending opportunities, did they need to make unduly risky loans and, though they held securitised (asset-backed) debt, they did not go in for the fizzing-firework variety, elsewhere passed so recklessly from hand to hand. In the last four months of 2008, when foreign lending dried up, the banks needed and got government guarantees, but had no need of the rescues required by their foreign counterparts.
The public finances were as sound as the banks’. Mr Howard’s government had been running budget surpluses of 1-1½% of GDP for a decade and had all but abolished the national debt. This allowed his Labor successor, Kevin Rudd, to provide two big fiscal boosts when crisis struck, putting the equivalent of nearly 3% of GDP into the economy in 2009. The government pumped out money to encourage public building, home insulation, car purchases and house-buying by first-time owners in schemes that many economists now see as excessively generous. The most effective stimulus, though, was the cheque for $900 that almost every taxpayer except the richest received in December 2008, of which about half was spent in two months. (All dollar figures in this special report are A$, unless otherwise indicated.)
The central bank moved fast and never fell behind events. Formally unshackled from government in 1996, though free in practice since the early 1990s, it had shown its independence by raising interest rates in the middle of the 2007 election campaign. Now it showed nerve too, quickly making dramatic cuts in interest rates, reducing the cash rate from over 7% to 3% in the four months from September 2008. It was able to do so because of Australia’s structurally high rates, caused by the current-account deficit, which, in a country that always has to look abroad for capital, tends to run at 3-7% of GDP. The government’s and the bank’s actions, along with the reassuring speeches of its governor, Glenn Stevens, helped to damp down the early panic. And, once it became clear that Asia, and especially China, was going to rally, Australia was out of the woods.
The tyranny of distance, so long Australia’s enduring curse, has been turned on its head. It is now the Antipodean advantage of adjacency
In this crisis, as in the Asian one, the Australian dollar took much of the strain, dropping from about 98 American cents to about 60. It is now worth more than its American namesake—a vote of confidence in an economy that seems set to stay strong. And that is because of the demand for Australia’s minerals.
Treasure island
Scratch around and you can find valuable stuff all over Australia. Olympic Dam, in South Australia, has the world’s biggest uranium deposit, as well as copper, gold and silver. Victoria has quantities of brown coal. In New South Wales lies Broken Hill, whose silver, lead and zinc gave rise to a business that now, as BHP Billiton, is the world’s largest mining company. Tasmania has tin and gold. But Queensland and Western Australia are causing the most excitement.
Coal is still Australia’s main minerals export, and Queensland produces about a third of the world’s coking variety, the kind used to make steel. The hot new product in Queensland, though, is coal-seam gas. When Queensland in 1998 mandated that 13% of its electricity should come from natural gas, companies went out to look for it and found enough in the state’s coal seams, they believe, to power a city of 1m people for 1,000 years. The country’s main industrial research organisation thinks Queensland and northern New South Wales together have about 200 years’ worth of gas at current rates of production.
Most of the country’s gas, however, lies under the seabed, from which it is now being energetically extracted. Whereas Australia’s oil production, worth well over $30 billion a year, has declined since 2000, gas is growing. Most of it comes from off the coast of Western Australia, and most of this, like the coal-seam gas, is destined for Asia. The richest field is Gorgon, on Barrow Island in the north-west, on which Chevron is spending US$39 billion. It is the biggest project of any kind in Australia and the biggest Chevron has undertaken anywhere.
Asia is eager to buy natural gas, and Australia is well-placed to supply it. It takes seven to ten days to ship liquefied natural gas from Western Australia to customers in Asia, which is about half the time it takes from the nearest alternative suppliers, in the Middle East. That gives Australia a decisive advantage.
The advantage is even more important for Western Australia’s other booming export, iron ore. Unlike gas, iron ore is plentiful: most countries have it. The stuff that abounds in the Pilbara, the apparently endless expanse of baking low hills that extends across the north of the state, is relatively high grade—and relatively close to its Asian markets. It does not cost much to scrape it up; the expense comes in moving it from mine to market. Even so, Australia can produce iron ore for $25 a tonne and sell it for $150.
The Pilbara has been exporting since the 1970s, when Australia overcame its antipathy to the Japanese and started selling them iron ore in a big way, so expensive rail lines have now been laid and harbours built. Demand seems assured. Australia’s central bank thinks another 300m-400m Chinese will move into cities by 2030 to join the 400m who have already done so in the past 30 years. And India, Vietnam, Indonesia and other Asian countries are also growing richer, building railways, making cars, urbanising. All will need iron ore. A typical Chinese apartment needs about six tonnes of steel and a kilometre of underground railway about 7,500 tonnes. Each tonne of steel needs 1.7 tonnes of iron ore and more than half a tonne of coking coal. Australia has plenty of both. Brazil’s ore may be superior, but Qingdao in China is 35 days’ sailing (round the Cape) from Tubarao in Brazil; from Dampier in the Pilbara it is 11. When freight rates are low, as they are today, the cost saving is US$12 a tonne. Three years ago it was US$40. And no one expects the Pilbara to run out of iron ore for at least 30 years, maybe much longer.
These statistics reflect an astonishing transformation of Australia’s fortunes. For most of its short history—the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay on January 18th 1788—the terms of Australia’s trade have fluctuated, and bust has followed boom. For 35 years after 1950 the trend was remorselessly down, even taking account of improvements in the 1950s after the Korean war and the oil shocks of the 1970s (see chart 1). Now the terms of trade have reached new heights. As the central bank’s Mr Stevens has put it, five years ago a shipload of iron ore would have bought about 2,200 flat-screen television sets; today it buys about 22,000. That is partly because import prices have fallen, but more because export prices have risen. Neither trend can continue indefinitely, but the average terms of trade over the next two decades are likely to be higher than over the past three.
This big change coincides with another: Australia’s economy—and with it inflation, interest rates and house prices, though not the stockmarket—has decoupled from America’s. A decade or so ago Australia’s GDP growth closely matched America’s, but the correlation has become much less marked, whereas that with China’s has got stronger. It all points to a rosy period ahead for Australia. Even if Chinese growth stutters, runs the thinking, even if China goes through a period of political upheaval, the appetite for development will not disappear, either there or in most other Asian countries. Billions of Asians are eager to join the middle class, and Australia is on their doorstep, ready to provide not just iron ore, coal and natural gas but all sorts of other minerals, and beef and mutton to boot.
So Australia’s position on the world map is no longer a handicap. Indeed, the tyranny of distance, so long bracketed with drought as Australia’s enduring curse, has been turned on its head. It is now the Antipodean advantage of adjacency. |
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