Peta Credlin: Rival productivity summits reveal stark divide over Australia’s economic future
While business leaders meekly endorsed Labor's productivity agenda, a rival summit hosted by Senator Matt Canavan delivered a scathing assessment of current economic policies, writes Peta Credlin.
The just-concluded productivity summit was emblematic of all that’s currently wrong with the way we’re governed: a Labor Party that’s clever at politics but hopeless at economics invited a bunch of union heavies, leftist academics and gormless business bureaucrats to Canberra in order to gain cover for policies that are slowly destroying Australia’s standing as a first world country.
What our most-left-wing-ever government really wants is a social licence to shift more of the tax burden onto the already hurting middle class via more taxes on those that put money aside for their retirement to avoid life on the pension.
Labor will try and sell this as “inter-generational equity” but, because there’ll be no further tax cuts for younger people, it will simply be a raid on assets dressed up as fairness. And going after aspiration just kills it off, doesn’t it?
To the extent that it had any “results”, the summit produced a coerced “consensus” that compulsory superannuation should be more focussed on financing green energy and housing for low-income earners; plus shifting young people with mild to moderate autism out of the NDIS (currently 300,000 of the scheme’s 740,000 participants have a primary diagnosis of autism, including 16 per cent of six year old boys) – but only by transferring them to a new taxpayer-funded program called “Thriving Kids” that won’t start until mid 2027.
The Albanese government is still dead set on reducing the one comparative economic advantage Australia has ever had, namely cheap energy; and on restoring our worst economic disadvantage, namely high-priced yet uncompetitive labour. It’s still wedded to taxing the unrealised capital gains of retirees; it won’t reduce the regulatory burden on new projects unless they’re about renewable energy; and it remains determined to slowly strangle the fossil fuel exports that help fund Australia’s ever higher government spending to which our politicians are addicted.
Wittingly or not, the business groups that meekly participated have effectively vindicated a turbo-charged version of the policies that have contributed to an eight per cent cut in real disposable incomes since 2022, that have reduced labour productivity to 2017 levels, and that have produced two successive years of declining GDP per person.
The head of the Australian Industry Group summed up the heavily stage-managed talkfest: “Nothing was going to be achieved in three days that was going to be earth shattering or change the world as we knew it”.
So why were the business groups even there? The only point in turning up should have been to challenge the government over all the policies that business knows are acts of economic self-harm, especially the energy policy that is demonising two of our three biggest exports and slowly choking the heavy industries (steel at Whyalla, aluminium at Tomago, and smelting at Port Pirie and Hobart) that now need subsidies if they are to remain in this country.
Why was the federal Coalition there too, in the shape of shadow treasurer Ted O’Brien, if the best he could do was have a mild disagreement with Labor over the lack of any credible government plan to get spending under control?
There was, though, one positive result from the summit. It prompted the former National Party frontbencher, Senator Matt Canavan, to host what he dubbed the “real productivity summit” that did actually offer some credible policies to boost productivity and to arrest the decline in our living standards.
At the Canavan summit, the highly respected former Productivity Commission head Gary Banks said that the Albanese government’s approach would worsen productivity that was already languishing at historic lows. Labor’s approach to regulation has been “more about increasing rather than reducing it, or improving it, and the government’s productivity agenda is mainly a spending agenda” he said.
So-called reforms in the key areas of energy and industrial relations had only added to the regulatory burden, Banks said, while the growth of the so-called “care economy” (eg NDIS) would further reduce productivity.
Last year, one in three of all new jobs was in the public sector while more than half the population now relies on government benefits, government work, or government subsidies for the bulk of their income.
What’s urgently required is a credible economic plan to restore the “miracle economy” achieved after the quarter century of economic reform under the Hawke and Howard governments.
Essentially, this means running the power system to produce affordable and reliable electricity, not to reduce emissions; cutting immigration so that it really is about the skills we need, not just artificially boosting overall GDP; and improving education so that young Australians have the intellectual equipment to compete in a tough world, rather than being brainwashed in the politics of climate and identity.
What was missing from the official productivity summit was a realistic assessment of all the added costs of current government policies. The rival Canavan summit was vastly more credible, if only because participants had no vested interest in pandering to the host.
The pity is it took a passed-over Coalition back-bencher to provide the leadership our country so badly needs.
THUMBS UP
High Court chief justice Stephen Gageler for reminding judges that their job was to apply the law, not to “improve” it by trying to be unelected politicians from the bench.
THUMBS DOWN
The South Australian health bureaucrat declaring that “intersex women and transgender women” had to be included in any discussion of the impact of miscarriage. And this after Premier Peter Malinauskas had earlier said that people were over woke
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Rival productivity summits reveal stark divide over Australia’s economic future
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