Gareth Spence

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154 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 31 Oct

Gareth Spence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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NAB Morning Call · Weekend Edition: The Tasman Divide · 31 Oct 2025 podcast

you need to build five thousand kilometers of transmission lines, right?

So we're a big place and we've got to you know do a lot of investment in not just the generation but the transmission.

And you know, while we're certainly advocating

As economists and the productivity is l commission's looking at this, you know, how do we really drive that pickup in in business investment and investment more more broadly?

Because we know that that's what you know embodies the the technological advances as well and brings a bit of productivity um you know is is kind of a challenge.

Um I think the supply side, probably more in my mind, right at the minute for for for Australia is you know, we know it's growing, population growth is is still growing.

Knowing um there is some productivity growth, or at least most of us hope that it it will pick up and normalize a little bit.

But I think really it's kind of the starting point.

So um, you know, you look at our business survey and we kind of look at the labor market, and despite, you know, as we said, that that kind of uptick in unemployment or that gradual, you know, loosening in the labor market over over the last couple of years, um, you know, still a very high level reported kind of difficulty in

finding suitable labor.

So particularly when we ask them, is it a significant constraint, you know, that's still about thirty percent of firms and that's, you know, as high as it was in the lead up

uh to the GFC in Australia, where actually we know things were quite tight across, you know, all industries, particularly construction, mining, uh, and the unemployment rate was, you know, a little bit below where it is now at uh closer to four percent.

But it is quite interesting that that that still comes through, right?

So for us I think it is it is a challenge in kind of the labor supply issue and uh, you know, taken alongside the productivity outlook, um, it is probably that we can

only grow a little bit more uh slow we we can only grow bit more slowly than what we previously had, right?

Probably closer to two or two and a quarter percent as opposed to that two and a half or almost three percent if you if you go a little bit further back.

So um for us, you know, I think it's that that kind of starting point.

And you certainly saw it out of the RBA this week in in a few ways.

But you know, kind of we think the labor market's broadly imbalanced, but the framing there is still

a little bit tight or at least some residual tightness.

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