Evidence and Policy #auspol

I am not normally a big fan of this place - but their paper "Price Drivers: Five Case Studies in How Government is Making Australia Unaffordable" tells the unfortunate story about how Australian's have been ripped off by successive governments. Here is what they propose.

* Bananas - Dismantle the ban on importing fresh hard green bananas from the Philippines into the non-banana growing states of Tasmania, Victoria, ACT and South Australia, if not all
states and territories.

* Books - Repeal the "30 day rule" in the Copyright Act 1968. Allow a three-year adjustment period for the industry before the changes come into effect. Review the changes five years after the repeal.

* Cars - Abolish the remaining import duties to allow commercial importation of new vehicles. Abolish the Luxury Car Tax. Allow the private importation of used vehicles into Australia that are – not older than 10 years and have not been driven more than 120,000 kms – only from the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Japan and New Zealand, and – fit to obtain a "pink slip" on arrival.

* Housing - Increase supply by encouraging councils to take on more residents through local government finance reforms that reward councils for accepting more residents. Policy recommendations are available in the CIS report Australia’s Angry Mayors. Abolish both negative gearing and first home buyers grants. Abolish or at least reduce stamp duty on property transactions. Cap infrastructure levies or replace them with funding streams based on income tax. Alternatively, give councils access to a share of the locally generated GST revenue.

* Retail - Support the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to relax planning and zoning regulations to – increase land supply for retail, and prevent these regulations from being used by established retail-space owners as anticompetitive tools. Abolish commercial viability testing for new shopping areas.

All of these things make perfect sense. The only thing that amazes me is how long it has taken for the expose to become public. Everyone of us ought be asking our MP's to demonstrate what action they are personally taking to put pressure on their leaders to fix these things.

And the fulltime focus of our Prime Minister and her Cabinet should be to deal with them. I do accept that they didn't create the problems but they could win lots of kudos by fixing them. It's not exactly rocket science - all you have to do is look to New Zealand to see how the car proposal has worked out.

Perhaps this is how Julia can re-connect with the people? We can only live in hope.