Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

In the 1980s, every parrot in pet shops across the country was an expert in microeconomic reform. Now, it seems as through everybody is a productivity pundit—and fair enough, productivity is very important. But what we see today is the worst in cherrypicking and looking at numbers completely out of context. Those opposite have taken a one-off number and suggested something systemic. In fact, when you look at this number, it is a classic case of not looking at the cyclicality and not looking at the context.

What happened, of course, is that a couple of years ago we had COVID, and the entire shape of the economy changed artificially. Rightly, a number of sectors of the economy were shut down for quite some period of time. What that meant was the sectoral change in our economy led to higher-productivity industries taking up a greater share of economic activity. There was always going to be a rebalancing of the economy as the COVID restrictions unwound. There was always going to be a shift back towards lower-productivity industries as they opened up. So these short-term figures reflect, by and large, cyclical factors that were always going to happen.

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