This opinion article by Business Council of Australia Chief Executive Bran Black was published on Capital Brief on 18 August 2025.
This week I will join the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable to canvass ideas on how to make the economy work better for all Australians. There is a huge amount at stake for everyone, particularly our younger generations.
Over time our quality of life has become more precarious, and younger Australians can no longer take for granted things like the opportunity to buy a home.
A key reason for this, and what we need to fix, is our productivity.
Growing productivity means working smarter, with better tools and processes, so we can spend more time on the things that matter to us. It means creating more to share around without more sweat.
But productivity is going backwards. It has languished for the past decade, and if we don’t fix it Australia will fall behind other countries — and all Australians will be worse off.
At the heart of the solutions we raise in coming weeks must be an agenda that makes doing business in Australia far easier than it has become.
Productivity only increases when businesses feel confident to invest. Concerningly, non-mining business investment has shrunk 3.2% as a share of our economy since the end of the GFC — a statistic we must turn around.
The Treasury and the Reserve Bank pointed to this fact as recently as 2023, noting that since the 1970s more than two-thirds of our productivity gains have come from investment in machinery, technology and infrastructure.
Examples are abundant. BCA member Dulux introduced automation at its Melbourne facilities, enabling employees to focus their time more productively on higher-value activities.
Patrick Terminals has invested more than $1 billion over the past two decades in its shipping container processes. Truck turnaround times improved by 60% and the volume of containers it could handle rose 35%.
These investments lifted productivity, delivered some of the best wages in the industry, and created benefits for the wider consumer supply chain.
We can make these kinds of leaps again. And we have to if we are to avoid being the first generation of Australians to leave our children worse off.
We need more business investment, and we must ask hard questions about what it will take to get it in a world where businesses have plenty of choice about where to spend.
That is why this roundtable matters so much. We need to take decisive steps and draw thick red lines if we are going to get those dollars invested.
There are positive, practical steps we can take, and ones I believe have significant potential to build broad consensus, based on the work I have done with a wide range of stakeholders.
We can make it easier to do business without sacrificing the important protections and rules we value in our economy.
We can cut the useless, unnecessary regulation that gets in the way and helps no one. Like the UK, we should aim to reduce it by 25% by 2030.
We can speed up planning and approval times for important national projects and Australian housing, with decision-making that is fairer, more transparent, more consistent and time-bound.
We can allow tradies to carry qualifications back and forth over state borders.
We can give businesses a real carrot to invest in Australia with an investment allowance and R&D incentive, rather than relying on the stick for growth and expecting them to come back for more.
These are the kinds of measures this week’s roundtable must look at seriously. Anything less is a distraction, not a productivity fix, because productivity will only rise when the private sector invests.
Equally, there are red lines we must draw against actions that will drive critical industry away from Australia.
First, if we are to avoid moving from precarious to catastrophic levels of investment, there can be no increase to the heavy tax burden on Australian businesses.
Our company tax rate is the third least competitive in the OECD, ahead of only Portugal and Colombia.
After all the special taxes and levies, I have members who are being taxed at almost 50%. I know of companies that can no longer justify investment in Australia to their boards.
The second red line is any further tightening of the industrial relations straightjacket that prevents businesses working constructively and flexibly with employees. Watch global investment in our nation shrivel if we cross this line.
When all the proposals are put before the court of public opinion, there is only one test to apply: will this increase business investment, or reduce it?