Running on empty
Falling productivity is a flashing red light that the Government chooses to ignore
Day 22 of the operation to salvage Jim Chalmers’ Budget gave Katy Gallagher her chance to prove her worth as Finance Minister.
She squandered it, stonewalling the Senate Economics Committee with the weaponised indifference of a surly teenager. Like Pauline Hanson, a serial absentee from Senate committees, she clearly didn’t want to be there. Unlike Hanson, however, she had no choice.
Matt Canavan began with an easy question: “What elements in your budget help increase productivity?”
Gallagher rolled her eyes dismissively. “There is a glossy A4 there,” she said. “There are 14, ah, 16 different measures. I was wondering whether or not you had read it?”
Gallagher is a former career public servant who climbed through the ranks to become a career politician.
Canavan, by contrast, is an intellectual policy wonk disguised as a straight-talking Queenslander, which makes him a particularly dangerous opponent for an unserious government led by a dissembling prime minister with little interest in economics.
Labor’s best hope is that no one cares about productivity anymore, that the TikTokification of the policy debate has robbed the word of any meaning it once had. Reform is anything you say it is, neither more nor less.
