The treasurer claims the economic reform summit has already been a success – despite it not beginning until Tuesday and facing scepticism from some critics – because it has “focused” Australians on productivity and red tape.

Staring down “grumps and cynics” in some political and media circles, Jim Chalmers claimed the three-day roundtable would help build the next three federal budgets and lead to greater cooperation between important voices in Australian public life.

But even as he claimed the roundtable would “build some consensus and build some momentum” toward reform, the treasurer downplayed any prospect of immediate major changes from the meeting. Chalmers said even reforms to road user charges for electric vehicles – which has widespread support among states and territories, with an outcome on the proposal expected to come from this week’s meeting – didn’t have a settled model or proposed start date.

“I’m confident that the effort put into this economic reform roundtable is already worth it,” Chalmers told a press conference on Sunday.

“We’ve focused the country on the productivity challenge. We’ve gotten people accustomed to dealing with the economic and fiscal trade‑offs that governments deal with every day.”

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The summit will run from Tuesday to Thursday in Parliament House, with a focus on productivity, resilience and budget sustainability. But with the government already having ruled out large changes to tax, spending or contentious settings like negative gearing, some critics in the Coalition and media have said the summit risks devolving into a talkfest without the chance of meaningful outcomes.

“The usual suspects that will want these kinds of efforts to fail, that’s pretty obvious,” Chalmers told Sky News on Sunday.

“There will always be the usual kind of grumps and cynics who say the usual grumpy and cynical things about this. Their argument essentially is to involve people less, which would seem to me to be a strange way to go about things.”

Chalmers said there were no pre-ordained outcomes for the summit, despite a leaked document showing the Treasury department was preparing for potential changes to the national construction code, speeding up housing approvals and cutting environmental red tape.

He said it was “entirely unsurprising” that Treasury was considering advice about some significant proposals, and that those ideas would be discussed during the meeting.

The shadow industry minister, Alex Hawke, said the opposition doesn’t “have a lot of expectations” for what comes after the summit, and said the government was short of ideas.

“[Jim Chalmers] talks about his big productivity agenda, but what is it?” Hawke told Sky News.

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“After four years in government, he’s basically saying, let’s have a roundtable and I’ll hear all the best ideas and we’ll come up with something. But they’re already ruling out most of the productivity measures that you would take in this economy if you wanted to do something about productivity.”

Anthony Albanese said ideas from the summit would feed into government decision making.

“There’ll be some measures that can be done immediately if the government adopts them,” the prime minister said in Perth. “There’ll be some that feed into budget processes, but there’ll be some about the long term challenges in the global economy, the impact on Australia and how we deal with those issues.”

But despite signalling earlier in the week that a long-awaited outcome on a road user charge to replace the fuel excise could be in the works, Chalmers said important details were still to be decided.

“We haven’t settled on a model or on the timing of implementation … we don’t have a concluded view on the best model, we don’t have a settled view on the best timing, but I think there is appetite,” he said.

Chalmers noted the government had spoken about a road user charge for some time, hinting that he could pursue such a change in this term of government, without seeking a fresh election mandate.

“I know that there’s appetite amongst the state and territory treasurers to progress this agenda. We did talk about it publicly before the last election. We have been working on it for some time.”