[Peetwo]

M&M: Reformation?-Forget it! We're all doomed...   

A follow up to the last two posts, via the Oz:

‘Economic reform a hopeless cause’


Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development secretary Mike Mrdak

The Australian12:00AM September 4, 2017

DAMON KITNEY
Victorian Business Editor Melbourne
@DamonKitney

One of the nation’s most senior public servants has made an ­extraordinary outburst lamenting the inability of state and federal governments to deliver on economic reform, claiming the current public appetite for change is the worst he has seen in three decades in public life.

“I have not known a time in my 30-odd years in public policy when the authority of government, both at the federal and state level, to even raise a reform agenda is so cynically attacked,’’ Michael Mrdak, secretary of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, said, adding that the current environment had made any discussion of reform almost impossible.

He told a forum convened by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia that such an environment made it “very hard as a nation to take hard decisions on the way forward’’.

A day later, in a speech to the Institute of Public Administration in Canberra, the former PM&C deputy secretary and commonwealth co-ordinator-general also criticised the centralisation of decision-making at the state and federal level. “If you want to see a reform agenda killed early, hand it over to the PMO, PM&C or premiers’ departments, and you’ll not see it ever come to fruition,’’ he said, noting it was the responsibility of the bureaucracy to focus on long-term planning and evidence-based decision-making to overcome the short focus of governments.

His comments echo those of Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe, who recently lamented the lack of economic reform in areas including tax, competition, education and the provision and pricing of infrastructure.

Business leaders have also questioned the federal government’s decision to abandon meaningful reform of the tax system after its company tax cuts for big corporations were opposed by Labor and the minor parties.

Mr Mrdak was commenting specifically at the IPA forum on the issue of road funding and whether fuel excise and registration fees should be scrapped and replaced with a system that charges drivers for how much they use the roads.

Transurban, the Australian Automobile Association and the IPA have been pushing road-user pricing as an alternative to the current system of funding new highways with petrol excise.

Dynamic road pricing has been implemented in some of the world’s major cities to ease congestion and improve the efficiency of road networks.

“The people will not get the information they need on an issue as complex as this through a tabloid headline or talkback radio,’’ Mr Mrdak said, before criticising the way “the tabloids’’ consistently portrayed discussions around tolls and road pricing as simply “new taxes’’.

The federal government has committed to hold an independent inquiry on the potential benefits and impacts of road market reform as an opportunity to build consensus within governments, industry and the community.

Mr Mrdak said the debate on road pricing was finally heading in the right direction after too often being “put in the hard basket’’. “This is no longer a theoretical concept, there is practical work happening across the country to provide the baseline information. Things are changing ... this is a reform that can have great social and economic benefit,’’ he said.

“We need to recognise for the community that the way we are operating is unsustainable.’’

He applauded Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher, who has announced the government will investigate moves towards road-user pricing to manage congestion. He said Mr Fletcher had been prepared to argue to his colleagues that this micro-economic reform needed to be progressed.

At the same forum, Adrian Dwyer, executive director of policy and research at the federal government’s infrastructure advisory body, Infrastructure Australia, urged the government to introduce a road-pricing mechanism on electric cars before their uptake increased.

Stressing his comments did not represent official IA policy, he said the move was not about imposing a new tax on electric vehicles. Rather it was about moving to a fairer and more sustainable system of funding.

Retiring Infrastructure Australia chairman Mark Birrell echoed Mr Dwyer’s concerns about electric cars, telling the forum “the owner of a Tesla electric car pays no fuel excise at all, yet he or she shares the road with motorists paying hundreds of dollars a year in a tax that is meant to fund road maintenance’’.

 
M&M's doom & gloom attitude for reform coupled with the fact that the aviation industry has the most inept, self-centred, NFI, Muppet of a minister ever to pull on the jersey; all we need now is for ICAO to bump us down to category 2 and as Chicken Little said - "The END is NEAR!"

      

MTF...P2