Melinda Cilento's address to CEDA's 2024 State of the Nation

Our theme this year is Accelerating Productivity.

Yes, we are still talking about productivity and for very good reason.

Productivity is the secret sauce that drives rising prosperity and living standards for all Australians. Yet it has become a word so maligned that it did rate a mention in the Treasurer’s Budget speech last month.

From our perspective, we simply cannot let productivity, and with it innovation and investment, drop from the top of our nation’s to-do list.

Despite the recent and welcome post-COVID pickup, productivity is growing at its slowest pace in 60 years and other measures of our economic dynamism have been deteriorating.

I suspect none of this is going to be new to many of you in the room.

We’ve been polishing this policy problem for a long time now.

The first Intergenerational Report sounded the warning more than 20 years ago.

We’ve had four reports since then. That’s a generation of Intergenerational reports.

We’ve also had two five-year productivity reviews from the Productivity Commission.

But so far nothing has shifted the productivity dial in a meaningful way.

As a nation we have become more focused on the short-term and seemingly more risk averse.

Now is the time to change course.

We must aspire for more Australian businesses to be at the forefront of global productivity.

As new opportunities emerge through AI, decarbonisation and the transition to new sources of energy we can deliver better products and services more efficiently – and we can grow our own success stories.  

And with demand and expectations set to keep growing for crucial services like aged and healthcare amid chronic worker shortages, we need investment, innovation and productivity to deliver the outcomes that the community will expect.

So how can we be more ambitious as a nation?

And how can we tell this story in a way that resonates and engages widely, that brings everyone along with us?

This is precisely the sort of conversation that sits at the heart of our work at CEDA.

In discussions over the past year, our members have been very clear with us -  as an independent cross-sector think tank we need to be brave in our ambitions.

We need to be building the evidence base, convening the conversations, inspiring the curiosity and enabling an awareness of collective influence that is unlikely to happen without us.  

Right now, we are focused squarely on this opportunity, building not just a new agenda but a new way of working focused on the next generation of policy reform that Australia needs.

Looking 25 years ahead, first to 2050 and then beyond, to define what success looks like as a nation and the critical issues and reforms that we must address to get us there.

Through our Progress 2050 agenda we will be holding ourselves at CEDA to account for progress.

And we’ll be holding governments and business to account as well.

It seems pretty clear that we are not going to nickel and dime our way to a more productive and prosperous future.

We need to be bold, we need to be ambitious, if our rate of productivity growth is going to be closer to two per cent than one per cent or less, we need transformation and we need transformative thinking.  

All sectors and all businesses have to be thinking about how they double the rate of their productivity performance.  

Sensing and seizing opportunities to innovate and to transform their businesses.

Working differently, working smarter, working together.

One of our first priorities will be looking at how we can lift productivity in our construction sector.

Productivity in the construction sector, that accounts for around seven per cent of our economic output, has been flat for decades.

The urgency of this issue has been clearly highlighted to us through our members and was made very clear through our most recent infrastructure conference.

And we heard some ideas about how to get started and what we need to be looking at and we are onto it.

Improving construction productivity is quite literally a nation-building priority.

It will be crucial to delivering the outcomes needed when it comes to housing, to infrastructure, to decarbonisation, to climate adaptation, to the energy transition.

We’ll be working with our members over the coming months, just like we did in our energy precincts work and in our immigration work to identify priorities and workable solutions.

For more than 60 years CEDA has been harnessing the collective curiosity of its members to achieve long-term prosperity for all Australians.

Our Progress 2050 work is carrying on this tradition.

Through this work we are looking forward to inspiring your curiosity about what is our future could be.

And there’s no better place to start than our very next session on A more innovative economy.