Anthony Albanese prefers small steps, not Jim Chalmers’ giant leaps
Anthony Albanese is offering no blank cheques or immediate announcements from his government’s economic reform roundtable vortex as he seeks incremental change over big-bang reform.
Amid a flurry of demands and recommendations from unions, business and the Productivity Commission, the Prime Minister on Monday talked down the influence of Jim Chalmers’ hand-picked roundtable of chief executives, chairs, unionists, bureaucrats and investors. Channelling John Howard’s doctrine of underpromising and overdelivering, Albanese said: “(A) roundtable isn’t a substitute for government decision-making … it’s not a meeting of the cabinet. Government will make decisions as the government. We’re not contracting out our decision-making processes. We’re open for ideas. Our focus in government is on delivering what we said we would do.”
Despite speculation of splits between Albanese and his Treasurer, they are in lock-step in not wanting to over-egg reform announcements after the roundtable hosted at Parliament House from August 19 to 21.
Warwick Smith, one of the country’s most respected business leaders who was a key figure in building the Australia-China relationship, has a long association with driving productivity. Smith, a Howard government minister who led Kevin Rudd’s 2020 summit productivity panel in 2008, told The Australian substantive tax reform discussions should learn from the lessons of Howard’s incremental GST rollout.
Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chair Matthew Addison, whose former chief executive infamously signed a memorandum of understanding with the ACTU during the 2022 jobs and skills summit hijacked by the unions, also offered smart advice ahead of the roundtable.
Addison said the roundtable should be a “point in time to launch future discussion about productivity gains in Australia” and that any tax review should be holistic rather than randomly picked “from a shopping list of ideas”.
AiGroup chief executive Innes Willox, a veteran of roundtables and summits, said: “If the roundtable is to be successful, some of the extreme positions already put into the public square will inevitably need to be tempered.”
Another glaring omission observed by key players associated with the roundtable is the lack of younger people invited to attend.
For a government that gears many of its policies to the under-40s and talks about the big intergenerational challenges, some participants have questioned the merits of having the same types of people around the table and excluding youth. The youngest of the invitees is 43-year-old NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, followed by Atlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar, 45, and Allegra Spender and Chalmers, who are 47. Most of the others invited are aged 50 to 80. Industry participants include banking, investment and super executives, industry lobby chiefs, politicians and mandarins.
At Spender’s tax reform roundtable in Parliament House last month, there was a strong focus on how tax concessions had created an intergenerational wealth gap and that reforms should focus on areas such as capital gains tax and superannuation concessions.
As Albanese and Chalmers talk down immediate major reforms, the Productivity Commission on Tuesday night will release the third of five pillar reports that will be released before the economic reform roundtable.
Chalmers must strike a balance of rallying consensus around key reforms and not allowing the roundtable to conclude with no basic agreement on priority issues that will drive Australia’s sluggish productivity.
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049
