Ross Garnaut's prescription for prosperity: lower dollar and wages "Celestial economic policy looks ordinary, and ordinary policy diabolical": Ross Garnaut. Aggressive cuts in interest rates, a dramatically lower dollar and wage freezes for the lowest paid are part of a radical manifesto being put forward by economist Ross Garnaut. His new book, Dog Days: Australia after the Boom, argues that during the China resource price boom in the late Howard years and the early Rudd years, "poor policy looked good enough, and ordinary policy celestial." These days, Professor Garnaut says, "celestial economic policy looks ordinary, and ordinary policy diabolical." Professor Garnaut is one of Australia's leading economic advisers. As a confidant of Labor prime minister Bob Hawke he helped float the Australian dollar, dismantle tariffs and set up Australia's system of offshore resource rent taxation. As an adviser to the Rudd government he prepared the way for Australia's emissions trading scheme. The book, launched on Thursday by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, says the Australian dollar will need to fall 20 to 40 per cent from the "giddy heights" of $1.05 recorded early this year. The prescription implies a further fall of 10 to 30 per cent, taking the dollar down to US84¢ to US63¢. Sustained aggressive interest rate cuts would be required to get it there. Professor Garnaut suggests the Reserve Bank Act be changed to make that responsibility clear. Because increased government revenues were "mostly being spent as they arrived," Australia has little to show for the boom apart from a grossly high dollar which maintaining a standard of living that will have to fall if exporting and importing competing businesses are to become competitive. In order to ensure the lower dollar results in lower real wages, the minimum award rates would be frozen. "Minimum wages of unskilled workers, high by international standards in the 1990s, are further out of line with other countries now," he writes. At the exchange rates of early 2013 they were twice what minimum wages are in the United States and one and a half times those of European countries with similar systems. Corporations too would suffer, with electricity companies no longer permitted to charge for infrastructure which had already been paid for. The change would result in a "once and for all" reduction in electricity prices. Dog Days: Australia after the Boom is published by Black Inc. An extract will appear in the Herald on Saturday.