Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Women, Minister for Government Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (12:25): The productivity assumption in the budget has a lot of inputs into it. It's not just the tax reform component. I think macro went through how they approached the task of getting all of those various inputs across the economy and the decisions that the government takes through the budget process in terms of having confidence about the productivity assumption that is provided in the budget documents.

It's not something that's done on an individual, smaller measure. It's a built-up model of a lot of different pieces of information that feed into that 1.2 number. So, again, I'm not sure we can take it much further than that.

The budget papers have been published. Treasury have explained how they came to those numbers that are provided in the budget. In terms of productivity and the focus of the government, we've been clear in the documents around the productivity reforms in the budget—including on the regulatory reduction approach, the legislation and other decisions that are being made—about the effort that's going into productivity more broadly and making sure that we are throwing everything we can across government and across the economy to drive productivity growth.

As we know from discussions in this place lower productivity growth has been a feature of the Australian economy for some time, and the decade to 2020 had the slowest productivity growth in 60 years. So this is not a new challenge for our economy. We're bringing new and additional effort into responding to some of those challenges.

But, Senator Chandler, this has been something that's been a feature during your term of government in particular.