Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has comprehensively blown the whistle over Australia’s 20-year slumber on tax reform. Dr Henry led the last big review of tax, ordered by then-treasurer Wayne Swan, mentor to today’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers. The fate of his review was to be kneecapped from the start by keeping GST reform off-limits, and then cherry-picked by the Rudd government when it was finished for what Dr Henry says now was the “easy, populist” grab of a mining super profit tax.

Dr Henry’s blunt message to the Tax Institute yesterday was that such a piecemeal, tinkering approach – as replicated in last month’s paring back of super tax breaks – is simply not up to the task of turning around the decline in Australia’s productivity performance needed to support growth in living standards. Dr Chalmers has defended his “staged, methodical approach” to change. But as the Treasurer releases a 1000-page, five-year review from the Productivity Commission on Friday, Dr Henry has confirmed the magnitude of the needed repair job.