Roundtable is doomed if voters and experts are not on the same page
Day three, with its focus on budget sustainability, is the acid test for whether the exercise is grounded in the real world and today’s political economy.
Why? Because while productivity is a back room job for business and bureaucrats, budget repair is in voters’ faces and in their pockets.
It’s fair to say most Australians are unaware of this week’s gathering of policy experts and advocates in the cabinet room, hosted by Jim Chalmers.
But voters know in their bones that something is amiss in the way the nation’s economic engine is running.
Incomes have been stagnant, and while people may have accumulated more stuff, they don’t feel like they’re getting ahead.
The Treasurer’s job is to explain the reason behind this malaise is that, collectively, we don’t produce enough goods and services with our tools and hours of toil, and we need to change that.
Ahead of the Canberra roundtable, Chalmers declared the government had firmly established the narrative that the priority for this term was productivity.
Far from it. In Voter Land, cost of living, especially the price levels for food, energy and housing, are front of mind.
But if Labor is going to pursue major economic reform, beyond its slimmed-down mandate, then voter research suggests productivity and resilience aren’t viewed as the highest priorities.
According to polling a fortnight before the roundtable for McKinnon by JWS Research, the two most important considerations for the federal government in deciding which reforms to prioritise are about how Canberra spends taxpayers’ dollars.
The top consideration is efficiency, which is to get better value for taxpayer money and do things faster, followed by sustainability, to help make sure the federal budget can continue to pay for the things Australians need, not just now, but into the future.
Treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson will brief the gathering on Thursday morning about the budget; the incoming government brief to Chalmers said a mix of tax rises and spending cuts were needed to fix a budget set to remain in the red for a decade.
As JWS Research’s Tom Cameron sees it, here’s the rub, as he poses the two key questions for whether this week’s policy festival will yield a dividend.
First, are Chalmers and the roundtable participants conceiving economic reform in a manner that is consistent with what voters expect them to prioritise?
Second, do voters properly understand the problems the wonks, pols, lobbyists and community leaders are seeking to solve?
“If the answers to those two questions are anything other than ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ this whole thing is not going to work after the roundtable ends,” says Cameron, a former Labor adviser.
Meanwhile, down the hill from Parliament House, Health and Ageing Minister Mark Butler, who also has responsibility for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, found the rhetorical sweet spot, where sound policy intention meets the electorate’s desire.
In a speech to the National Press Club, Butler vowed to return the NDIS to its original purpose of servicing people with permanent disabilities, and will aim to limit spending growth in the scheme to 5 per cent in coming years.
That’s heroic, and necessary, given the current plan with the states is to trim the $52bn NDIS to annual growth of 8 per cent, down from the 20 per cent expansion in recent years.
The McKinnon-funded research shows that voters’ top concern about the nation’s economic challenge was about delivering quality health, aged and disability services more efficiently, followed by its ability to fund them in the future.
Squib the budget challenge, by spending more, taxing more and borrowing more, and everything else becomes the stuff of fiscal fantasy.
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The Albanese government’s economic reform roundtable, with its aim of making the nation more resilient, productive and financially stable, can succeed only if elite opinion and voters land on the same page.