Knock on Wood
Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood and Treasurer Jim Chalmers are looking for incremental reform and consensus, as debates swirl around tax and productivity.
Danielle Wood has been choosing her words particularly carefully over the past few weeks.
At the National Press Club on Monday, on the eve of the government’s three-day Economic Reform Roundtable, the Productivity Commission chair made clear that while the age of big bang reform may be over, the age of reform itself is not.
To her, success will be “less Oppenheimer, more Everything Everywhere All At Once” in the new era. Fewer big changes and many small improvements, or as Wood hopes to see, a process of “continual boundary pushing”.
“The nature of what we do is we put policy ideas out into the world, some of them are challenging. We’re looking to shift the window sometimes and that means governments won’t take them all up, or they certainly won’t take them all up right away,” she said.
