Varun Ghosh (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the answers to the questions asked by Senator Canavan and Senator Dean Smith in relation to productivity and inflation.

By way of context on productivity, I think it's fair to accept that we haven't had significant productivity reform in the two decades to this government. That's a conclusion that's reaffirmed by the comments of the Productivity Commission. The Productivity Commission also told the Senate Select Committee on the Cost of Living in June 2023 that improving productivity growth in Australia requires applying a productivity lens across the entire policy landscape.

Boosting productivity is difficult and takes time. It takes consistent investment. It requires us to improve skills in our economy. It requires us to provide incentives for capital deepening across the economy and it requires competition reform in Australia.

To that first point on education and skills, we need to increase the size of the skilled workforce in Australia. That's both in terms of productivity gains that come from that and also in terms of some of the capacity constraints that are driving some of these inflationary numbers.

One of the things the Reserve Bank have told Senate committees and House committees in the last six months is that while demand remains higher than they expected, it's slightly higher, and public demand's not the main game in that. They've also said that there are significant capacity restraints in the Australian economy, it's that mismatch between supply and demand that drives up inflation.

There are a number of measures that the government's implementing in order to improve productivity through upskilling the Australian workforce, but the best example and the most recent one is the fee-free TAFE program which has been in place since January 2023 and had 508,000 enrolments to 30 June 2024. That's 508,000 new skills put into the Australian economy. To break that down a little more specifically, 131,000 of those placements were in care. 48,900 were in the digital and technological part of the economy, 35,000 were construction related and 35,500 were in early childhood education and care. Six out of 10 of those enrolments went to women and one-third went to regional and remote Australians. That's a policy that improves skills in our economy and that's a policy that the coalition opposes. They oppose it even though they see it's working. They call it wasteful spending and then they have the temerity to come in here and complain about productivity when they oppose one of the main measures that would improve productivity in a fair way in our society.

The second thing I want to talk about is competition reform. This government's approach to a revitalised national competition framework and policy has the potential, according again to the Productivity Commission, to return an additional $45 billion to our GDP and reduce prices across the economy by 1.5 per cent. That's a potential and it's an estimate; I accept that. But there are two things I want to tell you about today. One is merger reform. That is making mergers in our commercial sector quicker, simpler and easier. That's by first removing unnecessary barriers to low-risk mergers—mergers that don't have a significant impact on competition in the market—and second—