Productivity report highlights Rudd’s failure

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics report into Australia’s productivity growth rate highlights the ongoing failure of the Rudd Government, with the massive spending spree it embarked on since coming to office have little productive benefit for the Australian economy.

In particular Recommendation 6 of the bipartisan report highlights the failure of the Government to stand by a commitment to have an ‘evidence’ based approach to policy. The recommendation calls on the Federal Government to introduce a cost benefit analysis of all policies aimed at improving aggregate productivity growth. Unfortunately for Australian taxpayers this requirement was not applied to the billions of dollars spent on Julia Gillard memorial school halls, the laptops in schools programme or for the cash splash.

It was also revealed to the Committee during the period we took evidence that the National Broadband Network has not had a cost benefit assessment conducted in relation to its impact on productivity. Just this morning we have seen the Minister for Communications claim that the NBN is ‘crucial economic infrastructure’ yet there has been neither a business case nor any assessment of the productive benefit of the forty three billion dollar investment.

The Committee’s report calls for the Government to ensure that massive government spending like the NBN has had analysis conducted and the Rudd Government should immediately ask for this assessment to be conducted on the NBN.

Prior to the election Kevin Rudd made it very clear that he believed in ‘evidence based’ policy yet on the NBN he has failed to even ask for the evidence to be collected blindly committing billions of dollars.

While the Coalition members on the Committee support a majority of the recommendations, we had pushed for recommendation 3 to be scrapped and replaced with:

“The Australian Government at the beginning of the 43rd Parliament presents a progress report from the 42nd Parliament, together with a national productivity

growth agenda showing a short, medium and long term plan for future productivity growth.”

Our concern is that the Rudd Government will use this recommendation to create another talkfest in lieu of action. Unfortunately a hallmark of the Rudd Government has been that they prefer summits and reviews rather than action.

The report will make an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Australia’s productivity agenda.

In particular the report highlights the issues associated with a growing population putting pressure on our productive performance. This reinforces the need for the Rudd Government to ensure that population growth in managed in an environmentally and economically sustainable fashion.

Media: Jamie Briggs – 0419 850 146

Productivity report highlights Rudd’s failure