Australia’s growth problem will need more than tax tinkering to fix — Capital Brief
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Ideas
Tax reform is important, but it won’t fix Australia’s productivity problem. We need to focus on energy, innovation and long-term investment.
Sven Rogge
Sven is the Dean of the Faculty of Science at UNSW.
Clean energy could be Australia’s next great industrial advantage, but only if we move faster on investment, infrastructure and innovation, argues Sven Rogge.
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Australia has spent years relying on population growth, property wealth and commodity exports to keep the economy moving. Those engines are now losing serious momentum, and we need to think about what comes next.
Deloitte Access Economics now expects the economy to grow by just 1.3% in 2026–27, followed by 1.9% growth in 2027–28 — the longest run of consecutive financial years below 2% since the recession of the early 1990s.
Global conditions are undeniably challenging right now. But Australia in particular has become more prone to inflation at lower levels of growth because productivity has been too weak and investment in productive capacity far too thin.
And yet our current reform focus is ill-suited to fix those problems. Recent debate has mostly circled capital gains tax, negative gearing and housing affordability.
Ideas is where we publish opinion and analysis from external contributors on the most important topics in the new economy.
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