Insider blows whistle on Fair Work Commission

We all know there is a bi-partisan agreement today on the fact that there should be no change to the Rudd-Gillard wage-fixing apparatus. It is even something that unites both the liberal and the conservative wings of the current Government.

This Country puts little focus on enhancing productivity and puts little effort into structural reform. One of the criticisms Kevin Rudd made of me when he was posing as an “economic conservative” in the lead-up to the 2007 election was that our Government had lost energy and the rate of growth in productivity was falling. I predicted his election would not improve it. It did not. In fact it killed productivity growth.

But nonetheless back in the early 2000s it was thought that slow productivity growth was an indictment on an incumbent Government - by both sides of politics.

These days there is little debate about structural reform or micro-economic reform. We do not focus on enhancing the drivers of productivity growth.

This is where the people of “ideas” become important. The political class needs people who can think and explain ideas to it, who can challenge it and nourish those who want to do something about it.

At the moment we are in a populist political cycle. Somebody needs to keep the flame alive for policy because we will have to come back to these issues – how to make our economy more productive, how to improve economic growth, how to develop economic prosperity.

Our political class is not focussed on this at the moment, but if things continue as they are it will be forced, by crisis, to re-focus on it.

Someone, somewhere, should be doing the work to be ready when they finally realise they have to do something.