Ordinary Australians robbed of half a million dollars each: Henry

The Age

16-07-2025

Working Australians had been robbed $500,000 since the turn of the century by the failure of the country to find ways to get businesses and people to work smarter, the former head of the federal Treasury has revealed, saying the situation will only get worse without substantial reforms.
Before the federal government's productivity roundtable next month, Ken Henry, who headed a review into the tax system under the Rudd government and was pivotal to the introduction of the GST under the Howard government, said the nation's children were being short-changed by a current generation afraid to make hard decisions.
Henry, the chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, used an address to the National Press Club to argue the nation's poor productivity performance would become worse if environmental laws were not overhauled to both reduce red tape and protect nature.
As Treasury secretary, he oversaw the first intergenerational report, released by then-treasurer Peter Costello, in 2002. After a sharp lift in productivity through the 1990s, the report assumed it could continue to grow over the next 40 years at around 1.75 per cent annually.
Instead, productivity has slowed both here and around the world. In Australia, it has averaged less than 1 per cent since the turn of the century and has been negative over the past two years.
Henry said as wages usually grew in line with productivity, the drop in productivity over the past 23 years had resulted in smaller pay packets for ordinary workers.
'The average full-time Australian worker has been robbed of about $500,000 over the past 25 years because of our failure,' he said.
'When I hear people say, we cannot do this to enhance productivity, cannot do that because it will hurt somebody, I think – give me a break. Who are we talking about here?'