The Treasurer’s Productivity Roundtable is not nothing … but it could become very little if there is no follow through for the next decade. That may be the verdict from what is sometimes a highly sceptical nation and electorate, which is still saner than most.

First, there are no additional income tax cuts promised, although ordinary taxpayers should not support more than half of the federal government’s expenditure on ‘free stuff’ paid for by their wages. Nor are there tax reforms to help business invest.

Second, unlike the 1984 Hawke summit, the government did not appear to have a clear understanding of what to do. The Hawke government had the ‘Accord’ which led to a decade of wage restraint after the disastrous ‘wage explosion’ of 1981 lifted wages well beyond capacity. The real minimum wage fell from $820.35 in 1984 to $709.80 in 1996 (FWC The Minimum Wage and Fitter (Trade) Rate Since 1906 in $2025).

Workers were compensated by the ‘social wage’. Every aspect of the economy was restructured to promote competition and efficiency in two decades of difficult decisions, including by the Howard government, and wages recovered. Higher wages were always the goal.

Prime Minister Albanese did say at the start of the Roundtable that making ‘the economy more productive over time’ is ‘the best way to lift living standards and make people better off’.

The government must now implement this commitment for the long term, while it is there.

The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and others list measures, such as a moratorium on new updates to the Construction Code, which the government has now approved, and was the Opposition’s suggestion. But the list is just a beginning.

Third, first-world nations, the nations that provide the most prosperity for ordinary people, stress the importance of the free market. The one that does this the most, the US, is also the richest in GDP per head, although perhaps not in inequality. The US tops the crucial ‘Hamburger’ index (McWages, The Economist), the number of hamburgers that each citizen can buy on their wages. Australia is number four, after Switzerland and Denmark.

Applying the hamburger free market test, the Roundtable may not lead to much that worsens the regulatory and cost environment for small, medium, and large business. This may seem a strange point to make about a Productivity Roundtable – but in today’s climate of elastic words the point has to be made.

Although there are areas such as AI, which were always going to lead to difficult negotiations as jobs are restructured. A range of harmful ideas put forward do not seem to have been adopted, although something damaging might come through such as a new superannuation tax.

The Roundtable may even improve the regulatory and cost environment for industry. If approvals of new housing and mining are streamlined, time shortened, and duplication removed. Still, power prices will remain high because of a preference given to renewable energy.

It is difficult to see that a ‘fair go’ for young people in the housing market can succeed without restraint on our immigration intake, which should also be more carefully screened, given the willingness of some to bring violent language and attitudes onto our streets.

Fourth, less than appears may come of it. NDIS costs may not go down or only marginally, unless the Albanese Cabinet acts to restrict entitlements and the Senate passes amendments.

The Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland predicted eighteen new committees to tour the country and report on ‘the community interaction between growth expectations and social concerns’.

This may no longer be a serious contender. It may be possible to find voluble people who can serve on such committees, if the sitting fee is good. But there is not yet a decision to go down the endless talk shop path.

Our best hope is for what a fixated technocratic government would produce – a better governmental and community understanding of what budget discipline looks like, and why economic growth has to be the priority, with follow through.

Perhaps such a transformation is hard to imagine, given our well-established preference for unrealistic and probably undesirable social goals, to be a bit mean about it.

The priority is not hyper discussion of the eligibility details for new welfare programs. As Alexis de Tocqueville tended to think, when charity becomes a right, it becomes a vice.

We do not need to hear again from the Keynesians, those who believe that any new government spending drags the economy into growth. The government does need to borrow and expand the money supply. But elasticity of the economy is limited. It has to be productive spending. The Australian way of some states for example, drags us into crippling debt for the next generation to pay.

But a Roundtable talking about economic growth, budget discipline, and productivity still took place. Such things were barely discussed during the 2025 ‘river of gold’ election.

We are still a comparatively sane country, despite the hostile attitudes of overseas hotspots brought to our streets, the influential vandalising statues party that lives in a different universe, odd notions from overseas which undermine a policy lens on ‘we the people’ as opposed to some only, and a small but growing number of fixated persons.

But we need to also implement budget discipline and economic growth priorities.

It would help if the Australian historical achievement of a booming private sector from successful land use, and early working democracy, and its origins in an early and hard-fought 19th Century liberalism was not ignored but recognised for what it was.

It was the precursor of prosperity for ordinary people, and a guide to what can be achieved now. Our 1850s leaders saw the possibilities and took them.

Meanwhile, our political parties should not be forgiven if they are faithless to their promises and their country. It is not enough to be ‘faithful in my fashion’ as the faithless poet Ernest Dowson admitted.

By the Hon. Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University