Treasurer Joe Hockey as he presented the 2015 Intergenerational Report on Thursday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen On one hand, Hockey's IGR is too politicised to be of much use, but on the other, if you overlook the fiddling, it also could promote too much complacency. My colleague Peter Martin has exposed the dodgy assumptions used to deliver the political message while Laura Tingle in the AFR has neatly summarised why it's turned out to be a bit of yawn really, not so scary at all. If you believe the IGR, the previous government had locked Australia into bankruptcy, while the present government would make us comfortably well off almost painlessly, if the Senate just passed everything in the last budget. No, it's never that simple.

There are some good figures in the IGR that should be helpful in that national debate, if we had one, but they are not new. The key statistic is that our dependency ratio, the ratio of people aged 15 to 64 to those aged 65 plus, was 7.3 some 40 years ago, is 4.7 now and is predicted to drop to just 2.7 over the next 40 years. But anyone who cared already knew that. It will present a challenge, yet on the IGR's assumptions of population and GDP growth, it's hardly insurmountable. Like the commission of audit, the IGR effectively uses bracket creep to solve many of our problems – something that at some point becomes less than ideal. That is politically spun into a headline about no tax cuts in the foreseeable future, letting the coalition off the hook for all the nods and winks and nudges about being the party of low taxes.

Yes, we are giving back last decade's eight consecutive years of income tax cuts. Looking beyond its failings, what the IGR really does is underline again the importance of taxing smarter as well as a bit more. Yes, the Henry Review was right and farsighted. And anyone who cared already knew that too. Perhaps typical of how the IGR failed to rock us is the headline finding that Australia will need 9 million more homes in 40 years at a population growth rate of 1.3 per cent. That sounds like a lot of homes, but it's actually not much of a stretch from what we're doing now. On the latest building approvals trend figures, we're doing a bit more than 17,500 a month – 210,000 a year, Which makes 8.4 million over 40 years. We only have to build another 15,000 homes a year to make the 9 million, about a 7 per cent increase.

If governments at all levels were just a bit smarter, a little less greedy, a little less NIMBY, a little more into investing in our future, it'd be no biggy. Just like the fourth IGR. Follow us on Twitter @BusinessDay





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