NSW Productivity and Equality Commission

Peter Achterstraat AM - NSW Productivity Commissioner

Since i was appointed as NSW Productivity Commissioner, my team and I have been tackling a major challenge. If we don't improve productivity soon, then the average NSW resident will be $33,000 a year worse off by the year 2050. That's less money we'll each have in our pockets to spend on housing, to spend on health, to spend on food or even on holidays.

We need to take action now so that our children won't have less than we have.

The mathematics around productivity are quite simple. We just have to produce more goods and services per person in NSW. How do we do that? Two simple alternatives; the first, if we want to keep doing things exactly the same way we are but we want to produce more, then everyone's going to have to work longer hours. The other way of doing it is if we can get new ways of working, new regulation, new skills, we may be able to work differently and still produce more goods and services within the same time frame. So the reality is such that keep doing things the same - work longer hours or less look for a different way of doing it and produce more without actually necessarilyworking longer hours.

Productivity can promote prosperity and progress some people seem to think that for productivity to improve, we need big bang initiatives and that's been true in the past, they've been very successful. But I'm a firm believer that we can't ignore the smaller steps to improve productivity. We know Sir Donald Bradman scored a lot more ones and twos than he did sixes and yet he achieved wonderful results.

I believe the same we can do that with productivity reform. In our white paper, which was recently produced, we've listed 60 recommendations, some big, some small put together. I believe they can have a cumulative effect of dramatically increasing productivity.

Some of the initiatives include, assisting our wonderful teachers to use data better so that they can bring out the very best in our children. Other initiatives center around
regulation, we want to ensure that the regulations that we have do the utmost they can to promote innovation with our wonderful entrepreneurs that are coming up with
new ideas every day the regulation legislation has to keep pace and be flexible enough to allow these people to be able to market and implement their new technologies and their new innovations.

The actions we take today will set us up for a prosperous future tomorrow.