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AREEA to advocate IR reforms to Productivity Commission this week

ON behalf of our members across Australia’s national resource industry, AREEA will this week lodge an important submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into ‘Increasing Australia’s Future Prosperity’.

Announced in November 2016, through a 30-page discussion paper, this inquiry is seeing the Productivity Commission (PC) investigate options for micro economic reform in Australia over coming years.

In its discussion paper, the PC notes there is ‘there is a justified global anxiety that growth in productivity — and the growth in national income that is inextricably linked to it over the longer term — has slowed or stopped’.

“Since 2004, multi-factor productivity has stalled, here and around the developed world. This is a long enough period to suggest something is seriously awry in the economic fundamentals and the consequent generation of national wealth and individual opportunity,” the PC says.

“If we were waiting for a crisis to indicate that government should act, there is none — just an inexorable slowing towards reduced opportunity, greater dispute over shares of a smaller than expected pie, and selective protection.”

With one of the key terms of reference to investigate how government policy making can better support productivity in Australia, AREEA is using this opportunity to advocate for workplace relations reforms which we and our members have long said are critical drivers – of barriers – to be labour and multi-factor productivity.

“How we work, and how we regulate work is critical to all the ‘factors’ of productivity. As such, we will urge the PC to include workplace relations as one of the key areas it focuses on to improve Australia’s productivity performance,” explains AREEA’s director industry services, Tara Diamond.

One of the primary areas of workplace relations policy that AREEA will draw to the PC’s attention is that of the agreement making framework, and how enterprise bargaining should be a key driver of productivity through our workplace relations system but is increasingly failing Australia.

We will note that the PC made a number of important recommendations on enterprise bargaining in its report on Australia’s Workplace Relations Framework and that these recommendations should be implemented.

“The system ‘repair’ the PC identifies in its 2015 report should be implemented as a critical measure for Australia’s future productivity performance,” Ms Diamond continues.

“The time has come to act on concerns in our workplace relations system.  Whether one wants to characterise the job as one of replacement or repair, it is clear that improving how we regulate work is important and must be part of improving our future productivity performance.”

AREEA’s submission to the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into Increasing Australia’s Future Prosperity, will be available on our website later this week, following lodgement.

For any information about this inquiry or AREEA’s recommendations in the meantime, contact Principal Industry Policy Adviser, Tristan Menalda via [email protected]

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