Jim Chalmers

It's a no regret set of issues that we're working out for the budget.

And that's why we continue to develop them between now and the 12th of May.

I don't think it's reasonable to say we're fiddling or tweaking.

One of the things I'm proudest of, really, since the election, in fact, since the day after the election, talking to your ABC colleague, David Spears, both of us with bleary eyes on the Insiders program the day after the election, was to make productivity front and centre.

not just in the work that I do, but the work that the government does more broadly.

We've already done a heap of work out of the reform roundtable, abolishing nuisance tariffs and reforming the EPBC Act, a whole bunch of stuff, which I think ordinarily people would consider to be substantial changes.

Now, I obviously understand that the Hawketting period was the gold standard in this regard, but you can't do those things twice that Paul and Bob did so well.

There are new frontiers now, the energy transformation, the technological revolution, how we respond to ageing, how we respond to geopolitical fragmentation, how we change and broaden and deepen our industrial base, how we attract more investment.

These are the equivalents in the 2020s, this defining decade in the same way that the 80s became 2020.

a defining decade.

And so Paul used to describe that the third economy that he built, the first one, every 40 years or so, Australia builds itself a new economy since Federation, between Federation and World War II, you know, colonial economy, largely agricultural between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1980s.

still agricultural, but more and more industrial and protected than the economy that Paul and Bob built, opened up to the world, greater reliance on services.

The equivalent for us is to build an economy which is powered by cleaner and cheaper energy and which makes people beneficiaries, not victims of the technological revolution.

That's our agenda.

That's our frontier.

And it's different to what Paul and Bob had, but it builds on it.

And so I don't accept the characterisation of our efforts.

I do know that we've got more to do and we will build on that stunningly successful work of our predecessors.

Now, on the productivity data, again, acknowledging there's heaps more to do here and it's nowhere near good enough for what we need to lift living standards for people and deliver on our intergenerational responsibilities.

But productivity last year was 1%.