Cis Podcast

Australia’s extraordinary modern prosperity, built on the supply-side economic liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s and boosted by the China-fuelled resources boom, is being squandered. In Our Prosperity is Slipping Away: Submission to Economic Reform Roundtable, Michael Stutchbury writes that urgent reform is needed to stop the slump. “History shows such periods of relative affluence are rare and temporary, as seen in the 1850s–80s, early 1950s and late 1960s–early 1970s,” Stutchbury says. “Australia’s most recent peak in prosperity occurred in 2011–12 and has been in decline ever since.    “Rather than taking the policy decisions necessary to sustain growth, the political process has descended into a contest over redistributing shrinking wealth.   “The Reserve Bank’s downgrading of productivity forecasts confirms an unacceptable low-growth future.”  The paper urges the Economic Reform Roundtable to reject this trajectory and commit to making Australia “an aspirational and enterprise-driven high-growth nati