{"id":160833,"date":"2025-08-20T10:15:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T10:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/160833\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T10:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T10:15:10","slug":"ai-doom-nature-laws-and-solving-the-housing-problem-five-takeaways-from-day-two-of-economic-reform-roundtable-productivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/160833\/","title":{"rendered":"AI doom, nature laws and solving the housing problem: five takeaways from day two of economic reform roundtable | Productivity"},"content":{"rendered":"
  • 1. Progress on budget sustainability\u00a0\n

    The government is optimistic about efforts to lower spending, including on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the age pension.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    The social services minister, Tanya Plibersek, on Tuesday announced plans to end the freeze on the deeming rate used to calculate welfare payments. The freeze has cost the budget about $1.8bn. Plibersek said a phased return to pre-Covid settings is appropriate as inflation pain eases for households.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Separately, the health minister, Mark Butler, said the 8% growth target for the NDIS<\/a> was \u201csimply unsustainable\u201d. Growth is now closer to 11%. Butler wants it cut to 5 or 6%.<\/p>\n

    Butler is expected to join a session on efficient and high-quality government services, spending and care at the summit on Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  • 2. The AI era dawns\n

    Business leaders and experts talk up the potential of AI, but the ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, backed a worker-centric approach to rolling out the technology.<\/p>\n

    Danielle Wood, the Productivity Commission\u2019s chair, said AI could lift the average workers\u2019 income by $4,300 per year over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

    While acknowledging AI\u2019s potential, McManus said \u201cwe shouldn\u2019t just say automatically we are all going to be better off because of AI \u2013 we\u2019ve got to make sure we are\u201d.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIt may boost productivity, it may also just boost profits.\u201d<\/p>\n

    McManus said she wasn\u2019t advocating for \u201cover regulating\u201d AI.<\/p>\n

    But she said there was a \u201cdoomer\u201d view of the technology that comes with the fear of a \u201cTrump-billionaire, let-it-rip\u201d approach. \u201cPeople have got to trust AI to deliver good outcomes. You are going to get better outcomes if you involve people in the use of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  • 3. Environmental reforms gather pace\n

    A discussion on better regulation and approvals involved the environment minister, Murray Watt, who is in charge of the rewrite of the Howard-era Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act<\/a> (EPBC).\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Kelly O\u2019Shanassy, the Australian Conservation Foundation chief, said increased productivity was meaningless if the planet was overheated and natural environment was lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    O\u2019Shanassy welcomed signs of consensus on legally enforceable national standards, as well as the establishment of areas for critical developments such as housing and renewable energy. However, there was no consensus about the powers of the planned independent environment protection agency. Business wants the federal government to retain approval powers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \u201cWe went into the room a bit worried that people would have a kneejerk reaction of \u2018just get rid of the EPBC Act\u2019, or \u2018just devolve all the responsibilities to the states\u2019 or \u2018fast track environmental approvals for renewables and housing\u2019,\u201d O\u2019Shanassy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \u201cNone of that was the reality. I think there was support for better, smarter regulation that has increased protections for nature.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  • 4. National Construction Code\u00a0\n

    With most agreeing that we need to make it easier to build homes, Daniel Mookhey, the New South Wales treasurer, and the Business Council of Australia\u2019s chief executive, Bran Black, strongly supported a temporary freeze of the national construction code.<\/p>\n

    Mookhey, speaking on the sidelines of the roundtable, said a pause in adding new federal regulations would \u201ccertainly\u201d lead to more homes being built.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIf the national code is frozen it gives us a bit more time to get the interactions between national standards and state standards clear. But equally, it will give a lot of confidence to people who are looking to build right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Black was more circumspect on whether there was widespread support for pausing the NCC, saying \u201cthere isn\u2019t agreement on that within the room\u201d.<\/p>\n

    The Australian Council of Social Service boss Cassandra Goldie told the meeting a freeze might be bad for vulnerable people and flexibility was required to improve the standards of housing, including in the rental market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Meanwhile, the former industry minister Ed Husic said he was concerned about the proposed pause to the code.<\/p>\n

    Husic said the former Coalition government had frozen new homebuilding regulations, only to rush through a mass of changes in a short period of time. \u201cPeople who\u2019ve lived in older homes with regulations that weren\u2019t as strong understand why livability is such an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  • 5. Productivity critical for living standards\n

    The Productivity Commission\u2019s Danielle Wood<\/a> reminded people that \u201cit\u2019s productivity that drives improvements in living standards\u201d.<\/p>\n

    Average productivity growth in the decade to 2024 had slumped to a 60-year low of 0.4%, she said.<\/p>\n

    According to slides obtained by Guardian Australia, she blamed the slowdown on the waning boost from technology, low rates of business investment, a less dynamic economy, and a lack of interest in pro-growth policy reforms.<\/p>\n

    The shift to more labour-intensive service industries, such as the care sector, has also played its part in the productivity decline.<\/p>\n

    The PC boss then ran through the commission\u2019s \u201cfive pillar\u201d interim reports. She said smarter regulation was needed for approvals for building homes and green energy projects.<\/p>\n

    \u201cAustralia needs 10,000kms of new transmission lines and a six-fold increase in grid-scale renewable energy to reach net zero by 2050,\u201d her presentation slides noted.<\/p>\n

    But the average time for a decision under the EPBC for clean energy projects was more than 500 days, while 45 projects from 2018 to 2022 were still undecided as of November 2024.<\/p>\n

    It was a similar story in housing, where Wood said the time it takes to construct a building is a small fraction of the time it takes to complete a home. \u201cAn apartment complex that takes seven to 10 years to develop can be built in one to two years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. Progress on budget sustainability\u00a0 The government is optimistic about efforts to lower spending, including on the National…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":160834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,79,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-160833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115060573744904239","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}