Jim Chalmers

And that's because productivity obviously is the best way to lift living standards over time.

And so in every budget, in all of our thinking for four years, there's been some focus on productivity, some focus on inflation.

And because of the way that our economy was evolving last year, there was a bigger focus on productivity.

Then we get the war in the Middle East and makes

turbocharges inflation again in ways that complicate the story.

And so why that matters for the budget, you know, we've had this challenge in productivity in our economy for a really long time, a couple of decades, and productivity growth's been extremely weak.

Last year, we actually saw some green shoots, market sector productivity about one and a half,

1% overall higher than the 20 year average, but still too low to deliver the kind of living standards that we want for our people.

And so we have made productivity a big focus, including in the budget because of the contentious tax changes, because of the big effort we've made on savings in the budget.

It hasn't got a lot of attention, but in ordinary times, the breadth and ambition of the productivity package would be a bigger feature in the way that people think about this budget.

Yeah, I've got to be careful here because I can't give financial advice for obvious reasons.

Vince licenses me.

You might be covered.

I'm not convinced that I'm covered on this front.

I mean, people will make their own decisions.

My job is to make sure that the tax system and the overall investment environment makes it easier for more capital to find its most useful, advantageous purpose.

For example, in superannuation,

we've got some changes to the performance test on the way so that there are fewer deterrents for people, for super funds to invest in areas like housing and energy, but household by household, I'm a bit reluctant to give advice.

Yeah, we haven't considered it seriously.

It gets raised with us from time to time.