Australia's economic, social and environmental future

While a nation can indeed succeed with higher taxation levels, as indicated by Sweden which both reduced its national debt to GDP ratio from 80 per cent in 1995 to 41 per cent in 2017 and maintained a trade surplus (aided by high-tech manufacturing products), it remains to be seen whether Australians will support a higher level of government revenue.

With the Bureau of Meteorology's State of the Climate 2018 report stating that climate change "had led to an increase in extreme heat events and increased the severity of other natural disasters", it may well be that Australia will eventually build immense water infrastructure to both help its food production and fight fires.

Although the financial cost would be considerable, and perhaps signal the further erosion of Australia's environmental credentials as dams and pipes take greater precedence, water infrastructure would probably be more beneficial than the very expensive National Broadband Network (NBN) which cost $51 billion by 2019 and has received considerable criticism.

While Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation provides a vision for Australia to achieve both higher economic growth and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, the reality is that it will take an extraordinary effort for any society to improve its economic, social and environmental policy mix given global economic realities that force all nations to give adequate attention to government spending, taxation levels and labour costs.

For Australia, the growing importance of service jobs to the economy is also subject to the effects of an increasingly global workforce, with major Australian companies (often included in Australian superannuation funds via the share market) prone to job losses offshore due to high domestic wages.

During 2018, Telstra announced the loss of 8000 jobs with most of the proposed 1500 new roles "to build new capabilities required for the future" to be based in Bangalore (India), while also indicating in 2019 that 10,000 contractors would go over the next two years, thus reducing its workforce from 40,000 to around 24,000 by 2022.

While job cuts also reflected a shift to automated service systems, the reality is that any failure to reduce costs against competition will diminish a company's ability to survive or prosper against external competition, perhaps a reality indicated by Telstra's share price rising steadily in 2019 after a 3½-year downward spiral.

Tougher times for many Australians are evident throughout its society.

With regard to housing, while Australian governments look to that sector to boost Australia's domestic economic fortunes, with the Reserve Bank in late 2019 observing that a decline in housing prices alone was enough to reduce consumption and construction activity, many Australians are struggling to purchase and pay off a home with 2018 research by the Grattan Institute estimating that the proportion of 45-54 year olds owning their home outright had declined from nearly half in 1996 to just 17%.

Not surprisingly, it was noted by housing academics in 2018 that Australia needs to dramatically increase its small stock of social housing over the next 20 years to meet existing and new demands due to homelessness, increasing home unaffordability and high rents.

The authors suggest that a tenfold increase is needed to match the 14% public housing share of Australian housing in the decade to 1955 at a time when state and territory governments (financially supported by Canberra) built 8,000-14,000 dwellings a year from 1945 for half a century.

In contrast to Australia's high reliance upon private housing, housing providers with a social purpose still account for 20-31% of all home building in the United Kingdom, Finland, France and Austria, with Asian countries such as Singapore having an even higher rate. In 2017-18, England's not-for-profit housing associations completed 42,000 of the total 161,000 homes built.