Australian economy: Treasurer Jim Chalmers must not accept a low-growth future

Dr Chalmers told day one of The Australian Financial Review Business Summit that the idea behind the report’s projections – which warn that Australia’s annual economic growth will slump to just 2.2 per cent in the next four decades compared with an average of 3.1 per cent in the previous four – was to send exactly the kind of “warning sign” he had read in our editorial.

The centrepiece of the “reform package” the treasurer unveiled at the Summit was a worthwhile but relatively minor clean-up of “nuisance” import tariffs 40 years after the protectionist walls of Fortress Australia began to crumble.The announced streamlining of resource project environmental approvals and moves to ease the regulatory burden on financial institutions appear to be worthwhile initiatives as far as they go.

As the last treasurer to implement the last major productivity-enhancing reform – the introduction of the GST package 24 years ago – Peter Costello told the Summit that the world had given up on the “hard stuff” of structural reform to drive growth and prosperity.

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