Don’t mention the P word
Productivity. A topic guaranteed to kill dinner party conversation or suck the oxygen out of your next family barbecue. As reluctant as we are to drop the P word in polite company, it might well become de rigueur over the next four years.
Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers has put it on the agenda stating, “… the first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity, the second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation.”
Newly crowned Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth is convening a meeting of national union leaders and business groups acknowledging that “…we all need to be working on the productivity agenda.”
Rishworth is a South Australian, so I took the opportunity to meet with her recently and stressed the impact the Closing the Loopholes IR legislation was having on business – particularly around, you guessed it, productivity.
Australia’s flagging productivity has been well documented with average annual growth barely registering. South Australia had a spike in productivity coming out of Covid, as suppressed industries kicked back into gear, but the underlying trend of the previous decade has us performing well below the national average.
Ask businesses what can be done, and the well-worn response will be to cut red tape. It’s been said so often and for so long that it fails to resonate.
Yet we know that when the shackles are lifted to fast track a project, things can and do move quickly. Unfortunately, the catalyst for this is generally an emergency.
What if this was the rule, rather than the exception?
What if the government made a commitment? A commitment to review by sector or department at state and local level, the approval processes that affect business. A program that when completed allowed the Premier to say hand on heart “South Australia is the easiest state in the country to do business”.
I say “commitment” because this process would need to be driven from the top and take the full term of government. It’s an elephant that can only be eaten one bite at a time.
A taskforce of business owners and operators working with state and local government to walk through processes and identify the roadblocks, question why a form is required, or certain information is being requested. The goal being to remove complexity, cut timeframes and reposition government as the enabler rather than the handbrake.
Top of the list could be reducing planning approval times, removing duplication of federal, state and local government requirements; streamlining the number of agencies dealing with the same project to a single source; consistent state-wide planning codes; fast-tracking environmental and heritage assessments and prioritising essential service infrastructure.
There are other more micro barriers that small business owners would love to see tackled, but if we broke the back of these opportunities, South Australia would have a significant competitive advantage, and the productivity and economic benefits would flow.
Underpin this with favourable policy settings and business impact statements accompanying all new legislation, and it can become entrenched as the way government and business work together in this state.
When we consider risks around delivering on the opportunities that lie in wait for South Australia, workforce and housing take centre stage, but productivity is the sleeping giant and it’s time to rouse it from its slumber.
