Productivity Commissioner Michael Brennan says destructive rent seeking and a lack of entrepreneurship by business has stalled productivity and wage growth and that trying to fix the issue won’t be helped by reform nostalgia or economic pessimism.

While business groups have already called upon governments to make urgently needed economic reforms to lift productivity, which has fallen from 2.2 per cent in the 1990s to minus 0.2 per cent now, Mr Brennan will say, in one of his first major public speeches delivered on Thursday, that a lack of investment and risk taking by business is where the problem begins.