Daniel Mulino - Labor appoints one of the most qualified assistant treasurers ever
John KehoeEconomics editor
Daniel Mulino, the economist appointed assistant treasurer, has inherited a long list of overdue reforms on cryptocurrency, superannuation, financial advice, media and payment systems.
Mulino, 55, is one of the most qualified people to ever hold the role of assistant treasurer and minister for financial services, according to industry participants.
Inspired by the major economic reforms of Labor’s Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s, he studied and taught economics at the Ivy League Yale University in the United States, where he earned a PhD.
Mulino worked as a policy adviser to Bill Shorten when he was assistant treasurer.
He was elected as a state MP in 2014 in Victoria, where he rose to parliamentary secretary to state treasurer Tim Pallas.
Mulino drew on his economic background to use markets via parental preferences to pilot a school bus program to cut travel times for students with a disability.
He made the switch to federal politics in 2019.
During the pandemic lockdowns, the policy wonk wrote a book, Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia, outlining that applying an insurance mindset to the social welfare safety net would deliver participants better outcomes and more value for taxpayers.
The government’s budget-constrained welfare system needed to focus less on income redistribution and universal service, and more on investing for the long term in vulnerable people, he wrote.
Unfinished business
Former Reserve Bank of Australia deputy governor Guy Debelle has taken questions from Mulino at parliamentary inquiries and spoken to him privately on economic and finance matters.
“He’s a smart and thoughtful guy who is a good economist and well qualified for the job,” Debelle said on Monday.
Mulino inherits a long list of unfinished business from Labor’s first term, initiated under the retired former assistant treasurer Stephen Jones.
These include strengthening financial advice laws, regulating the crypto sector, and overhauling tech giant Apple’s control over the payments system. There is also the development of the media bargaining incentive to force Facebook and Google to pay traditional media publishers to display their stories, which could put Australia on a collision course with the Trump administration.
Mulino was promoted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to the outer ministry on Monday, after a factional brawl led Victoria to gain a ministry spot from NSW, which led to the dumping of former industry minister Ed Husic from cabinet.
Albanese said Mulino was well qualified to bolster Labor’s economic team of Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher.
Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh, who also has a PhD in economics, had productivity added to his responsibilities of competition, charities and Treasury.
Chalmers said on Monday that the government wanted to strengthen the economy and make it more productive, competitive and dynamic.
Another PhD economist, Andrew Charlton, was appointed to the senior administrative role of cabinet secretary and the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy.
Mulino was promoted from chairman of the House of Representatives economics committee, where he oversaw the country’s top financial regulators, commercial institutions such as banks and superannuation funds.
He chaired two major inquiries into insurers’ responses into floods, and economic dynamism, competition and business formation.
He impressed industry and regulators with his thoroughness and diligence chairing the inquiry into the floods on the east coast in 2022.
Insurance Council of Australia chief executive Andrew Hall said Mulino would ask questions that showed a real depth of knowledge on complex issues and interest in understanding the problems and potential solutions.
“He’s one of the most qualified people in the government’s ranks to take up the role of assistant treasurer.”
Former Australian Prudential Regulation Authority executive John Trowbridge, who has known Mulino since 2011, when Shorten was assistant treasurer, said Mulino was a “first-class” appointment.
“He’s a very measured and capable person, and has a track record of consultation with interested parties. He’s a very accomplished individual and has one of the best understandings of insurance in the parliament.”
Mulino completed degrees in law and arts (history and maths), but became more interested in economics while working as a graduate lawyer at the Attorney General’s Department and, later, the Department of Finance.
“I realised that I didn’t want to be a lawyer and that a lot of the questions economics was answering for public policy was what interested me, because it looks at the whole society,” he told The Australian Financial Review in 2022.
He then studied statistics and economics part-time at night, before shifting to post-graduate economic study.
It was a period of great economic transformation under the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating from 1983 to 1996.
“A lot of us in the right of Young Labor were really animated by the whole Keating agenda of opening up the economy, floating the dollar, free trade, free flows of capital, creating the national electricity market, and dovetailing it with the social wage of superannuation, increasing year 12 retention and Medicare,” Mulino said three years ago.
“It was an exciting package of reforms.”
Mulino said his political philosophy was to support economic reform that can drive economic growth, innovation, productivity and lift people’s living standards.
“That also gives us the means as a society to achieve on other fronts like the environment, social insurance and increasing leisure time.”
After the “whole-of-economy” reforms by Hawke and Keating, Mulino said the next round of reforms should be to increase productivity in delivering services, which now account for 70 per cent of the economy.
Part of that vision involves better identifying and measuring productivity in services such as aged care, childcare, disability support and health.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s going to be more sector-by-sector in driving productivity growth and getting better outcomes for people,” he said.
University of NSW economics professor Richard Holden, who hails from the old university “debating mafia” Mulino also belonged to, said he was an extremely well-trained economic thinker.
“He’s very intellectually curious and wrote an interesting book. During his time as house economics committee chairman, he was interested in getting some serious economic thinking into issues, which is refreshing.”
The elevation of Daniel Mulino and Andrew Charlton is giving policy watchers renewed confidence that economic reform is on the cards.