Ian Verrender

speaker

3,682 appearances 32 recordings 5 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 3d ago

Ian Verrender’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 32 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 10.

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ABC Business Daily · What will it cost to live longer? · 22 Sep 2026 podcast

So why have it why has our productivity declined so much?

And this is where look, it's it's it's a really difficult question to answer because nobody really understands.

productivity.

Um and it's really hard to measure as well, and particularly for an economy like Australia, which overwhelmingly is becoming a services economy.

You can improve productivity in factories, you can improve productivity in mines, you can improve productivity over a whole range of different industries.

But when it comes to service industries, uh, you know, like for instance with uh with aged care or or hospital, let's say take hospitals, do you improve productivity by halving the number of nurses or making nurses cover twice as many patients as they would before?

That would be a productivity.

Productivity gain, but would it be um beneficial?

Probably not.

Do you um halve the number of teachers and say class sizes now have to be 70 per class of instead of 30?

Um that might be a productivity gain on paper, but it would be detrimental to to the society as a whole.

So there are difficulties there with productivity.

But I think what you've got to do is look back.

The in as to why we've landed in the situation we have now.

And from my reading, a lot of the problem gets back to the idea of how we managed to become the miracle economy, you might recall, from about 2000 to uh just beyond the well to till we hit the pandemic.

We had about almost a quarter of a century.

of uninterrupted GDP growth.

No one in the world had ever seen anything like this before, and there were stories right across the world, you know, America, Europe, about how Australia was the miracle economy.

Well, were we?

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