The treasurer claims the economic reform summit has already been a success \u2013 despite it not beginning until Tuesday and facing scepticism from some critics \u2013 because it has \u201cfocused\u201d Australians on productivity and red tape.<\/p>\n
Staring down \u201cgrumps and cynics\u201d in some political and media circles, Jim Chalmers<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n But even as he claimed the roundtable would \u201cbuild some consensus and build some momentum\u201d 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<\/a> \u2013 which has widespread support among states and territories, with an outcome on the proposal expected to come from this week\u2019s meeting \u2013 didn\u2019t have a settled model or proposed start date.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m confident that the effort put into this economic reform roundtable is already worth it,\u201d Chalmers told a press conference on Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve focused the country on the productivity challenge. We\u2019ve gotten people accustomed to dealing with the economic and fiscal trade\u2011offs that governments deal with every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n 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<\/a> and media have said the summit risks devolving into a talkfest without the chance of meaningful outcomes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe usual suspects that will want these kinds of efforts to fail, that\u2019s pretty obvious,\u201d Chalmers told Sky News on Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He said it was \u201centirely unsurprising\u201d that Treasury was considering advice about some significant proposals, and that those ideas would be discussed during the meeting.<\/p>\n The shadow industry minister, Alex Hawke, said the opposition doesn\u2019t \u201chave a lot of expectations\u201d for what comes after the summit, and said the government was short of ideas.<\/p>\n \u201c[Jim Chalmers] talks about his big productivity agenda, but what is it?\u201d Hawke told Sky News.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cAfter four years in government, he\u2019s basically saying, let\u2019s have a roundtable and I\u2019ll hear all the best ideas and we\u2019ll come up with something. But they\u2019re already ruling out most of the productivity measures that you would take in this economy if you wanted to do something about productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthony Albanese said ideas from the summit would feed into government decision making.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019ll be some measures that can be done immediately if the government adopts them,\u201d the prime minister said in Perth. \u201cThere\u2019ll be some that feed into budget processes, but there\u2019ll be some about the long term challenges in the global economy, the impact on Australia and how we deal with those issues.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t settled on a model or on the timing of implementation \u2026 we don\u2019t have a concluded view on the best model, we don\u2019t have a settled view on the best timing, but I think there is appetite,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI know that there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The treasurer claims the economic reform summit has already been a success \u2013 despite it not beginning until…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-73390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}