Economic summit in danger of becoming a bureaucratic gabfest

The Albanese government’s upcoming economic reform roundtable should seize the opportunity to reset Australia’s future agenda. Instead, it looks in danger of turning into a bureaucrats’ jamboree with the usual suspects pontificating on a system they are by and large responsible for creating.

We know that tax will be the big ticket item at the August 19-21 summit and the heavily curated roundtable invitees certainly know their taxes, budgets and politics. And economic resilience, productivity and budgets are on the agenda. But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s refusal to consider changing the GST is already tying one of the government’s hands behind its back and the exclusion of those major players in taxation and deregulation, states and territories, is a further handicap.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers are preparing for an August summit on productivity.Credit: Getty

As the Herald’s senior economic correspondent Shane Wright has pointed out, it is not tax that will lift living standards and Australia’s ability to pay for goods and services – it will be technology. The telephone, the internal combustion engine and the lightbulb were three of the most transformative pieces of technology. Now 150 or so years later AI is poised to change lives. Yet, there are no scientists or creative minds invited to the roundtable. Rather, Wright says participants are policy wonks reared in a culture that believes problems deserve a “policy” solution when the real and most far-reaching solutions come from people who think differently.

Adding some variety to the mix, the Productivity Commission is expected to release a series of reports on productivity that will provide data and ideas to the summit outside tax issues. And business has established an umbrella organisation to put forward recommendations, including on investment, innovation, reducing red tape, planning and approval processes, tax, education and employment.

While incoming Coalition governments stay well clear of such talkfest, this is the fourth stab Labor has had at post election summits.

The first, Bob Hawke’s April 1983 economic summit, discussed economic strategy, the approach to unemployment and inflation, and a prices and incomes accord and was deemed an extraordinary success. Twenty-five years later, prime minister Kevin Rudd’s talkfest, when 1000 of Australia’s better thinkers gathered to ponder the future, is generally considered to have amounted to little and is mainly remembered for Rudd’s awkward love-in with actors Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman.

That said, good ideas came out of both the Hawke and Rudd summits, but more went missing in action at the hands of compliance. The challenge facing next month’s roundtable is to ensure that the reforms are not lost in bureaucracy.

After a tepid first term record on policy innovation, including a 2022 jobs and skills summit that stampeded business with its union-friendly re-regulation of the workplace system, we would have thought the Albanese government could afford to have been more adventurous with its roundtable summit.

Labor is unlikely to enjoy such a massive mandate again. In such circumstances, timidity is not an option and the Albanese government cannot hide behind bureaucracy but should use the summit to promulgate wide-ranging and much needed reforms.

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