Public submissions to the Governments Productivity Roundtable closed yesterday. All that is left for the public to consider are the outcomes. Ultimately the Productivity Round Table is unlikely to achieve all that much because it isn’t set up to achieve anything, and is set up to provide a spectacle in lieu of effective policy. Therein lay its tragedy.
The biggest single driver of any nation’s national productivity is its ability to discern and implement good policy. Australia is in desperate need of good policy. For the last 25 years, Australian policymaking has been a desperate stroll across a parched wasteland.
The view from where we are is not pretty. We have discarded good policy, adopted ad hoc expediency in the face of change, peddled ideological nonsense to ourselves in policy development and implementation, and generally not seen the forest for the trees since the late 1990s.
