Productivity Commission report is doomed to a dusty destiny — thank heavens

You really have to wonder what possessed the Treasurer to think that commissioning the Productivity Commission to undertake a productivity review every five years was a good idea.

After all, he has his own department with more than 1000 staff, now bizarrely and expensively located across Australia, to advise him. And a new section dealing with structural adjustment has been recently added to the activities of the Treasury. But I guess if you are out of ideas, then commissioning a PC report may seem a worthwhile diversion, particularly if said report can come up with something useful and politically saleable. Sadly, this report fails on both scores.

It’s not entirely the PC’s fault that virtually the whole report is about what governments can do to boost productivity growth. Note that productivity, particularly multi-factor productivity, has languished here and in other developed economies for over a decade.

Just take a look at the terms of reference: assessing the impact of major policy changes and prioritising potential policy changes are given prominent billing. Nothing is said about governments getting out of the way, reducing regulation or insisting that individuals take responsibility for their actions.

All that stuff about imposing land taxes or road-user charges adding billions to the economy is essentially made up. The modelling results add nothing to the report as they are entirely assumption-driven.

And where did the PC get that guff about preventative health, although it has been there before. By a miracle of modern medicine and public health campaigns (which are known not to work), Australians with poor health will be transformed to Australians with reasonable health and the economy will boom.

We’ve heard about shared care and patient-centred management before. There have been experiments which have come to not much. And let’s not forget the government’s digital health records scheme as a disaster.

Making the federation work better would be useful but there are no signs this government — or a Labor one — has the least interest in removing the chains of tied funding. Check out the “accountability” measures in the new dubious version of Gonski school funding. Fixing the distribution of the GST seems also to be beyond the Treasurer.

My guess is the immodestly titled Shifting the Dial report (who dreamt that up?) will be gathering dust more rapidly than most PC reports — and quite rightly so.