🟠 News Club - Squaring up to the roundtable

There's a familiar rhythm to Australian economic policy - every few years, the need for reform becomes impossible to ignore and everyone comes together to find solutions. This week, that cycle begins again.

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Squaring up to the roundtable

This week, Australia's economic movers and shakers will be in Parliament House for Treasurer Jim Chalmers' Economic Reform Roundtable. CEOs, union bosses, policy experts and politicians - all gathering to chart our economic future.

Sceptics have been quick to point out that we've been here before. Big gatherings, grand promises, and the hope that getting the key players in a room will unlock some of the answers. You'd be forgiven for wondering what makes this time different.

But some factors are unique this time around, according to some of our most considered policymakers. They say that the economic headwinds are stronger, and the gap between what needs to be done and what's politically possible has never been wider.

So, to our Club Picks to navigate the week ahead:

1. The former editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review Michael Stutchbury recently delivered a sobering assessment of what's at stake (paywall). He says Australia's per-capita income is 15% higher than Sweden's and 90% higher than Japan's, but our prosperity has been drifting for over a decade. And he’s concerned about the major parties’ approach at the last election, where they “offered to borrow more than $1 trillion from the future" rather than make the hard budgetary decisions.

2. Danielle Wood, the Productivity Commission chair, is something rare in this debate - a policymaker who’s prepared to be unpopular. But as Wood puts it in this profile (paywall): "It's an incredibly powerful thing to be able to shape the policy conversation, because I believe in good policy and better policy for the country." As this piece outlines, as a kid, Wood and a friend used to joke that one would become head of the Reserve Bank and the other head of the ACCC. Nerds…

3. And in case you didn’t know, insiders say PM Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Chalmers aren’t besties… "The tension between Albanese and Chalmers is real," Peter Hartcher wrote last weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age (paywall). Albanese, focused on maintaining his political capital, has been ruling out the reform ideas that Chalmers invited in June - and that’s a tricky dynamic for real reform to be possible.

What strikes me about these perspectives is how they capture the fundamental tension in this debate: everyone seems to know what needs to be done, but the political price of doing it seems too high to stomach.

The roundtable will generate headlines, thoughtful papers, and probably some genuinely good ideas. But will Australia get what it needs? That's a much harder question to answer, but let’s put hope ahead of experience...

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