The Albanese Government hosted an important meeting, trying to leverage off arguably the greatest reforming government in Australian history — the Hawke-Keating era of the 1980s. But this new age meeting missed what Paul Keating nearly always brought to the table, that is, he’d throw the switch to Vaudeville.

When the then Federal Treasurer deregulated banks and airlines, cut tariffs and even took on the unions, it was all big ideas, with big promises and he made a big song and dance about it. It was pure Vaudevile!

On the other hand, this get-together hosted by NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey “behind close doors”, as the SMH’s Shayne Wright put it,

has kicked off in a very low key manner.

It makes you wonder how committed this mixed team of federal and state government reformers  will be, though I wish them luck because better competition will give lower prices, lift real wages, create jobs, boost our exports and add grunt to the economy.

It’s a magic pudding but reform doesn’t come cheap. Someone with guts, like Hawke and Keating, has to step up and push for significant changes.

John Howard and Peter Costello did it with taking on the wharfies and introducing the GST, while cutting income taxes.

As George Bernard Shaw once said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Of course, George lived in an age when women weren’t given a fair go, so in the modern context, you have to know that unreasonable women can do just as well as Maggie Thatcher, Christine Lagarde, Gina Rinehart, Greta Thunberg and Taylor Swift have proved.

But these are all very high achievers, whether or not you like what they’ve done. So I want this matching of the minds of our key governments to come up with something real and economically positive and not just political hot air.

This comes as this week’s economic growth numbers stumbled to 0.2% for the December quarter and 1.2% for the year, though productivity did lift over the past six months. That said, it is down compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Other recent economic facts include Australians working more hours, and that could be because they need more money to pay home loan repayments. However, business investment fell. There could be many reasons for this fall but maybe inflation, 13 interest rate rises, employees demanding to work from home, surging power prices, wage demands backed by the Federal Government and big businesses charging higher prices like there is no tomorrow, might have made a lot of business owners and big business boards decide to not ‘risk’ their money by investing.

“Many economists believe the global and Australian slowdown in productivity is partly due to a lack of competitive pressures, which force businesses to find new ways to lift output or better employ their staff,” Wright rightly pointed out. “A suite of competition reforms started under the Hawke government, from breaking up state monopolies to cracking down on collusion between businesses, was found by the commission to have delivered a 2.5 per cent boost to GDP. In today’s dollars, that is equivalent to $62.5 billion.”

Those guys did more than that. One of the big things they did, especially for a Labor Government, was to get business onside, so the Accord that cooled down demanding unions made reduced tariff protection for local businesses more acceptable.

So, what’s on the table from this meeting? Right now? Not much. But we have to give them some time. I was disappointed that the Federal Competition Minister Andrew Leigh came with a lot of vision of unlocking structural action to deliver lasting cost-of living relief, but there doesn’t seem to be a big shopping list.
The did talk about more electric vehicle charging stations, efficiency with NDIS providers, and the growth in non-compete and no-poach clauses in workplace contracts or agreements.

“Australian Bureau of Statistics research last week revealed 47 per cent of businesses imposed at least one form of restraint clause on their workers. Non-disclosure clauses were the most common, but 25 per cent sought to bar staff from soliciting clients if they left a firm, 21 per cent had non-compete clauses while 18 per cent had non-solicitation of co-worker clauses,” Wright reported.

Seriously, a business asking workers not to steal its clients is holding back the economy? If this is the best these guys and gals can come up with, then we should expect little out of this get together.

People who run businesses would be more likely to invest if:

1. They were able to sack genuinely bad workers without being fined or made to pay compensation.
2. The Federal Government assisted to stop the price gouging by oil, energy and airline companies.
3. Stop big business exploiting small business and actually give teeth to the ACCC to name and shame big business behaving badly.
4. Give money to the ACCC and ASIC and tell them to go after the exploiters and competition killers.
5. More incentives for entrepreneurs to build tech businesses here but make sure they can’t simply sell it overseas. We need to keep some of what we create here, if taxpayers have bankrolled the early days of success.

That would be a decent start to get business owners and companies with money risking their dough on the future of the Aussie economy.