EDITORIAL: Work is just starting on Australia’s productivity challenge

You can be guaranteed that whatever outcomes emerge from this week’s much-vaunted economic reform roundtable, they will be markedly less significant than the amount of time and energy that has been expended talking about it in the lead-up.

In the two months since the forum was announced by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, we’ve seen five papers from the Productivity Commission with recommendations ranging from the logical (such as a national screening clearance for workers in aged care and child care sectors) to the lunatic (give tech companies free access to copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence models). There’s been countless op-eds and column inches devoted to the topic as the country goes all in on boosting productivity.

It’s enthusiasm bordering on desperation.

Because Australia’s productivity challenge is a substantial one.

This isn’t a problem just for those in Australia’s boardrooms but for every person trying to make a living and support a household. Living standards are going backward as per capita growth stalls.

So it’s little wonder those picked for Dr Chalmers’ roundtable have enthusiastically answered the call, keen to help arrest Australia’s productivity free fall.

The relatively short list of invitees includes politicians, public servants, union leaders, heads of peak bodies and a small handful of actual business leaders.

Those business leaders could have been excused for RSVPing with their apologies, given the bruising experience of the Albanese Government’s previous much-feted event, the 2022 jobs and skills summit, which turned out to be a smokescreen to push through pre-ordained and union-approved changes to Australia’s industrial relations regime.

Would the Government have the cheek to try to pull the same trick off again — potentially with new taxes on business? Floating ideas at a meeting isn’t the same as being given a mandate by the Australian people.

The Prime Minister has sought to allay some of those fears by hosing down the prospect of major tax reform, in the short term at least.

“The only tax policy we’re implementing is the one we took to the election,” he said last week.

That hasn’t stopped submissions from pouring in, urging the Government to cut taxes, hike taxes, create new ones or axe old ones.

That’s another sign of the great enthusiasm with which Australia is taking up the challenge of reviving our moribund productivity.

The Treasurer says that’s a sign his roundtable is already a winner, before the first urn of coffee is even rolled into the Cabinet room.

“I’m confident that the effort put into this economic reform roundtable is already worth it,” Dr Chalmers said on Sunday.

“We’ve focused the country on the productivity challenge. We’ve gotten people accustomed to dealing with the economic and fiscal trade‑offs that governments deal with every day.”

He’s right — that’s an achievement in itself. But if he wants to be a true reformer, the work is only just beginning.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore.