QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

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) (14:42): I thank Senator Whitten for the question. I don't agree with him. I know that One Nation would like to lay, at the feet of all migrants in this country, every issue or every gripe that One Nation has, and they would like to blame migration for that.

There are productivity challenges across most advanced economies at the moment, Senator Whitten. It's an issue that all advanced economies are dealing with. Our lowest productivity decade was, I think, the one that the coalition oversaw when they were in government.

We revised down our productivity assumptions when we came to government in recognition of that, but we've also, in this budget, got a very strong focus on driving productivity, and the Treasury advice to us is that those combined measures I've outlined—all 15 of them, which we talked about last week—give them confidence on achieving the productivity assumption in the budget.

They go across a whole range of areas across government, whether it be in approvals reform, in encouraging business investment around how we regulate, reduce or improve better regulation in a whole range of areas, and the adoption of technology and artificial intelligence. We can see that already improving productivity in some other economies. There's an opportunity here, and we have been very clear in the budget about driving that change.

No, we don't blame low productivity on the fact that Australia has for many, many decades relied on support from overseas workers to come and support our economy. The PRESIDENT: Senator Whitten, first supplementary.