Luck the main ingredient of Turnbull’s economic success

Malcolm Turnbull in the dressing room of the Sydney City Roosters. It’s a pity his own locker is bare.

I’m not sure I really care if Malcolm Turnbull loses 30 Newspolls in a row. But I do care he has failed to live up to the promises he made when he deposed Tony Abbott.

This is the man who mentions jobs and growth at every opportunity. This is the man who started an ill-disciplined discussion about tax reform only to kill it off and with it the formal inquiry initiated by Joe Hockey.

Let’s not forget Turnbull also killed off a potentially constructive review of federation. He also decided the deregulation program had gone far enough and scrapped that. Since then, the regulatory imposts on businesses have grown like Topsy, driven by short-term political imperatives.

Let’s talk about industrial relations. Turnbull thinks the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the Registered Organisations Commission are important victories. It remains to be seen, particularly whether these institutions will be able to rein in the lawless behaviour of the Construction Forestry Mining Maritime and Energy Union. That would be the new super union, the creation of which the Turnbull government has lamely sat back and watched. To refuse even to put the bill to the Senate that might block the creation of this well-resourced and potentially destructive new union tells you a lot about this government’s lack of courage.

There is no doubt the Turnbull government has had a lot of economic luck. Commodity prices have recovered to an extent few forecast. Employment has been boosted by the wads of taxpayer money being spent on the NDIS and by the states and territories.

The budget is slowly repairing but it is telling that government spending as a proportion of GDP remains above 25 per cent.

So forget all that twaddle about Turnbull being committed to economic freedom and reform. He has failed to explain the rationale for the Enterprise Tax Plan, a drawn-out affair that will still render Australia uncompetitive at the end of the transition. But the real kicker is that there is nothing else in the locker when it comes to economic reform.