Dutton, Taylor must get moving

Labor’s electricity price crisis is a flashing red light warning that Peter Dutton’s small-target reform strategy sells the public interest short. Courage is needed to speak out plainly across a range of policy issues, with credible energy reform front and centre.

Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor has a responsibility to be at the head of the pack. Instead, the message being sent by Mr Taylor is one of second-order management rather than bold and necessary reform.

Where is the plan to confront the misallocation of billions of dollars of resources into a net-zero response that seems designed to send household budgets and private sector jobs to the wall? Where is the reform steel to restore productivity and workplace flexibility to build the economy? What about a proper critique of Jim Chalmers’ inability to tell the difference between productive investment and government largesse?

Instead, this week Mr Taylor offered a list of 34 economic policies that read in part like a shopping list of nanny state expectations. The list includes taxpayer-funded mental health sessions, regulating vaping, increasing student visa fees, investing in ovarian cancer research and reducing the refugee intake.

These measures may be all well and good. But they are not the core business for an opposition Treasury spokesman who must convince voters of the urgent need to restore budget discipline. Mr Taylor’s current approach is a confusion of activity over substance.

Certainly, the opposition has offered a bold initiative on nuclear energy but more detail is needed. It also has acknowledged the need for guard rails on the level of tax collection and government spending as a proportion of GDP. But as things stand there is a clear absence of a coherent alternative economic plan to the one promised by Labor, which is for higher borrowings, bigger public spending and a structural budget deficit that stretches well into the future.

As former Treasury assistant secretary David Pearl wrote on Wednesday, the prescription for today’s ills is the same as it was for Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard and Peter Costello – a more flexible, open and market-oriented economy that allows us to ride out global economic storms.

The lessons of the reform period, Mr Pearl rightly suggested, were cultural and political as well as economic. To succeed, political leaders must tackle head-on the entrenched interests and rent-seekers. Today, this includes the Canberra mandarin class, industry superannuation funds, unions, and renewable energy rent-seekers. The Albanese government remains in thrall to these interests to the detriment of good government and the public at large.

But the Opposition Leader and Mr Taylor have yet to convince that they know what is required or are up to the task. It is a mistake to leave the hard work of convincing the electorate of the need for reform and the details of it to the election campaign. Labor’s energy legacy disaster provides a platform on which to build the case for change.