QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator SHARMA (New South Wales) (15:20): It was a year ago today that the Economic Reform Roundtable kicked off in this building in Canberra. It feels like an eternity ago because nothing has happened since. That was the time when we had CEOs and trade union leaders and industry groups—the great and the good—file into Canberra to be geed up by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and to be told by them that they wanted 100 flowers to bloom and they wanted to hear all ideas on the table about how to boost productivity.

I was just familiarising myself with the concluding press conference that the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, gave at the end of that. He said in that press conference: … higher living standards is the holy grail, and a more productive economy is how we deliver it. We haven't heard much on the one year anniversary of this Economic Reform Roundtable from the Labor government.

I would have thought they would be championing their achievements and highlighting the gains that have been made. Jim Chalmers, in his closing press conference, talked about 29 hours of discussions, 327 different contributions and the spirit of camaraderie and constructiveness that characterised the conversation. Here we are, one year later, and, if you look at the scorecard, things are worse on every metric.

Productivity is lower. Productivity was growing at 0.8 per cent annually at the time of the Economic Reform Roundtable. It's now down to 0.3 per cent.

The Reserve Bank expects productivity to actually go backwards for this calendar year by 0.5 per cent, and the Reserve Bank has downgraded its long-range or medium-term productivity forecasts for Australia to 0.7 per cent. We've got inflation which is eating workers' nominal wage increases and inflation high at 3.8 per cent. We just got the figures from the ABS about the wage price index, and it confirmed, as Minister Watt acknowledged, that it shows real wages have gone backwards again over the past year.

In fact, real wages have been underneath the level last seen in June 2022, now, throughout the life of this government. We've got government debt larger—gross government debt was $935 billion at the time of the Economic Reform Roundtable last year. It's now $985 billion.

And we've got weaker economic growth weaker. We've got, in the one year since the summit that was meant to kickstart the Australian economy, get productivity moving again, we've got worse productivity. We've got higher inflation.

We've got slower growth. We've got larger debt, and we've got real wages falling and declining. That is some scorecard.

I did seize upon one particular mention that was made there by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, in his concluding press conference where he talked about some of the easy wins or the quick wins, as he described it. One of those was to 'reduce complexity and red tape in the National Construction Code'. He said: … we've asked Clare— that's the housing minister, Clare O'Neil— to do that work relatively swiftly.

One year later, we just had Senator Sheldon say the Construction Code shouldn't be touched and needs to remain north of 2,000 pages. Apparently, the housing minister was instructed, tasked, at the national Economic Reform Roundtable one year ago, to simplify the National Construction Code. Nothing has happened.

As my colleague Senator Hume said earlier, one of the results of that is that housing has become more expensive to build and that rents are going up. This isn't a scare campaign. This isn't fanciful.

In my own city of Sydney, rents have already gone up by $50 a week, or 6.3 per cent, since the budget was announced. The last time that negative gearing was removed for investment properties by a Labor government in the mid-1980s we saw house rental prices in Sydney go up by 43 per cent over a 27-month period. It was so bad the government had to reverse those changes.

The government has changed course on its widows tax. It should change course on some of these other changes in the budget. (Time expired) Question agreed to.