By Greg Jericho

Photo: The best we can hope for are pamphlets that are more about marketing than policy.

The Coalition's Real Solutions document promises to "unleash" Australia's potential, but it doesn't come close to providing the level of economic detail demanded this close to an election, writes Greg Jericho.

This election both the Coalition and Labor have built their economic policies around pillars. The Coalition has five; the ALP has seven.

But pillar metaphor aside, the two policies have a quite different focus. This week I'll have a look at the Coalition version.

The Coalition's five pillars are found in its "Real Solution for all Australians" document. It says something of how things have changed that "Real Solutions" can be pushed forward as some weighty policy document when it clocks in at 50 pages with lots of photos of Tony Abbott and precious few numbers.

Back in 1991 the Fightback! policy document was a truly weighty 650 pages and so full of detail that I can recall that year writing a 2nd year university political-economics essay on its contents.

Hewson's defeat in 1993 consigned such depth of policy detail to the dustbin, and thus, now, the best we can hope for are pamphlets that are more about marketing than policy.

The Coalition's pillars effectively refer to five industries: manufacturing, advanced services, agriculture exports, education and research, and mining (specifically boosting their exports).

'Advanced services' is a pretty gormless title that isn't actually defined anywhere in the documents, so presumably it refers to 'Information Media and Telecommunications', 'Financial and Insurance Services' and 'Professional, Scientific and Technical Services'.

Focussing on five industries is a sensible way to go about things.

Manufacturing, though considered "dying", remains the fourth biggest employer after health care, retail trade and construction. The five pillar industries together account for around 45 per cent of the total gross value added, and the advanced services and mining industries are the two growth sectors of the economy:

When examining any policy documents, one key to determining whether it is about policy or about politics is the use of meaningless phrases. Unfortunately, in "Real Solutions", meaningless phrases get a pretty big work out.

For example, all of the pillars involve "unleashing the real economic potential".

The first pillar involves building on "our strengths in manufacturing innovation" by getting rid of the carbon tax and cutting red tape costs by $1 billion a year. Naturally, the benefits of the carbon tax ending occur throughout the Real Solutions document. Similarly, it doesn't appear that the $1 billion a year saving just applies to the manufacturing industry, because the document says cutting red tape for the services industries will save the same amount.

The red tape savings line is line is easy to say; harder to calculate. Indeed the Productivity Commission's 2011 Report on Identifying and Evaluating Regulatory Reforms has a 41-page Appendix devoted to trying to work out how best to calculate the costs of red tape. Suffice to say there is no standard approach, and all ways require different assumptions.

The Coalition suggests in its specific policy of Boosting Productivity and Reducing Regulation that it will link senior public service pay to reductions in red tape. This not only brings with it the assumption that quantum of regulation is the best way to measure the cost of red tape, but also that the Coalition wants to create an incentive for public servants to agree with the party's ideology.

They also propose setting aside two parliamentary sitting days each year, similar to "The Correction Calendar" introduced in 1995 in the US Congress, for the express purpose of repealing counterproductive or unnecessary legislation. How this will be defined will no doubt be in the eye of the beholder. One issue however is that, as noted by Politifact, the number of regulations each year grew more in 2005, 2006 and 2007 than in the 2008 and 2009, so arguing red tape is growing faster than ever gets a bit dodgy.

The Coalition also pledges to "get business costs down", though it's unclear if this will be done by getting rid of the carbon tax and cutting red tape, or something else. If this is more than just a padded bullet point, it is not explained how.

The document does however suggest that the Coalition will "get productivity up by ensuring Australian businesses have the right incentives to invest in Research and Development".

What these incentives are remains rather unanswered. When we get to the pillar of "education and research", we discover that (again) it "will unleash the real economic potential", but that this will be done by encouraging "modernisation and the development of world-class Education and Research capabilities and support the use of new technologies, particularly digital and IT".

What this encouragement entails again goes unanswered. Currently the only research policy announced related to medical research, which hardly relates to manufacturing.

Similarly there are lots of claims of creating "better links" between government, business and research institutions, though it isn't clear if this is in addition to ensuring business have incentives to invest or if doing this will actually create the incentive.

Moreover, it is unsaid whether claims that a LNP Government will "create the environment to revitalise Australian industry's international competitiveness" involves more than getting rid of the carbon tax and cutting red tape.

When we get to mining exports, we find that one of the "real solutions" is merely to "declare Australia open for business" and that it will "build on our strength as one of the world's rich resource-based economies". It appears this will be done in two ways: firstly, "abolishing the carbon tax" (of course), and secondly, by "establishing a one-stop shop for environmental approvals".

This would involve the states in effect operating legislation like the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. When asked on ABC's 7:30 whether this would mean that state governments such as Campbell Newman's would be able to approve any project without the Australian Government being able to ensure environmental standards were being met, Mr Abbott replied, "Well, um, it might be and if the people don't like what happens under the Coalition, they can take appropriate action at an election."

"It might be"? I think that means, "Yes".

The five pillars form the basis of the Coalition's claim that it will "deliver one million new jobs over the next five years and two million new jobs over the next decade". The modelling for that claim has not been sighted, perhaps because as happened to Mitt Romney when he claimed he could create 12 million jobs, it didn't add up. But this is the case for most of the five pillars. There are lots of good intentions behind them, but trying to actually work out just what will be done, and what actually will cause the desired outcomes to occur, is difficult to comprehend.

The entire document smacks of a hope that no one will look at it too closely for fear of noticing the repetition.

But now, with the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook released, it's time we started seeing the meat added to the policy bones. The "in good time" period before the election has certainly arrived.

Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. His blog can be found here. View his full profile here.

Time to add meat to the policy bones - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)