Black: The 2020s on Track to Be Australia's Weakest Decade for Productivity

Black: The 2020s on Track to Be Australia’s Weakest Decade for Productivity

23000 Series — Scope & Inclusion Criteria

The Australian Property Network’s (APN’s) 23000 Series is the attributed opinion layer of the APN Codex. It presents the recorded perspective of an identified practitioner whose observations bear on active node conditions, without constituting APN’s own analytical position. Policy Commentary & Critique (23400) carries perspectives on the structural consequences of policy. Productivity growth sets the pace at which incomes, and so the capacity to pay for housing, can rise, and construction productivity bears directly on how quickly the dwelling pipeline converts to completions. This short interview sets out the business community’s case on both the diagnosis and the remedy. The speaker’s statements are presented as his own attributed analysis, not as verified fact.

Attributed Perspective — Bran Black, Chief Executive, Business Council of Australia

Black says the council’s analysis shows productivity declining by an average of about 0.1% a year so far in the 2020s, against positive growth of 1.2% a year in the 2010s, which he describes as the weakest decade on record until now. The gap between the two, he says, is already large, and it matters because low productivity reduces the country’s capacity to raise living standards. He attributes the decline to a long-running absence of productivity reform over successive governments, which in his view has left Australia without the competitive settings that drive business investment elsewhere, business investment being the main source of productivity growth.

His remedies are three. He calls for a 25% reduction in the value of regulation on the economy, for tax reform addressing company, income and consumption taxes, and for changes to a workplace relations system he describes as out of balance. Asked about the government’s emphasis on fee-free TAFE and artificial intelligence, Black agrees that better access to skills and the use of AI can both lift productivity, but cautions against putting all of Australia’s productivity eggs in the AI basket: competitor economies, he says, including the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada, are pursuing AI while also making their tax, regulatory and workplace settings as competitive as possible.

Asked for an initial response to a proposal announced that day by One Nation to reduce immigration by 750,000 people over three years, Black describes it as a very significant cut that would, in the council’s view, harm economic growth. He sets it against Treasury’s projection, as he cites it, of a $140 billion annual gap between revenue and expenditure by 2060, arising largely from an ageing population and a shrinking share of working age. The best response to that gap, he argues, is to grow the economy, and that requires skilled migrants as well as training at home, with one in three occupations currently reporting a skills shortage. The starting point for a migration debate, in his view, should be how to deliver growth, not a numerical target for cuts.

Source: Bran Black, Chief Executive, Business Council of Australia. Television news interview — ABC News (Australia), “Australia on track for worst-ever decade of productivity growth”, on or about 14 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026. Close paraphrase throughout; the broadcast is the authoritative record of exact wording. Context: the council represents large Australian employers, and the reforms it advocates, including lower company tax and changes to workplace relations, bear on its members’ interests; the speaker was presenting his organisation’s own analysis.

APN Clinical Reframing

The perspective contains a diagnosis and a programme, and they rest on different evidence. The diagnosis, that measured productivity growth in the 2020s is running well below that of any earlier decade, is a claim about published statistics, and its exact figures depend on the measure and the end point chosen. APN’s own Growth Per Person output of 15 September 2026 used a related but different measure: GDP per person, not output per hour worked, averaged −0.06% a year over the four years to June 2026 and remained 0.37% below its December 2022 peak. The direction of the council’s diagnosis is consistent with APN’s published per-person figures, though the two measure different things. The programme, which includes lower company tax, less regulation and workplace relations change, is the council’s policy position, and its link to the diagnosis is the council’s argument rather than an established result. The attribution of the decline to successive governments is restated here in structural terms: the claim is that reform has not kept pace with competitor economies.

The migration answer is a first response to a proposal announced the same day, and is presented as such. Its substance is structural: an ageing population narrows the revenue base, and the council regards skilled migration as part of the answer. For housing, the productivity question and the migration question meet in construction, where the capacity to convert a record pipeline into completed dwellings is the binding constraint APN has identified in earlier outputs. This perspective is an exploration candidate for Employment & GDP (21230), which currently reads +0.5947σ for the June quarter 2026 on output and employment measures but carries no productivity input. No figure or characterisation in this piece may be treated as an APN-certified position for any 21000, 22000 or 24000 Series node.

Disclaimer

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