Three days to turn up ideas for three budgets: Jim Chalmers has big roundtable ambitions

By Thursday evening you should know what the Albanese government wants to do with its next three years in power.

At least, that’s the best case scenario for Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

But the wooden bugs inlaid in the ceiling of the Cabinet room have heard a lot of hot air and ideas in their decades.

So, too, the old political hands who suspect next week’s economic roundtable will be another in a long line of ambitious talk fests that lead to minimal change.

The money man and his hand-picked roundtable participants are sifting through hundreds of suggestions for how to fix poor productivity, a budget mired in red ink and bolster economic resilience.

They’ll spend three days next week in the sacred Cabinet room, locked away from distractions and prying eyes, aiming for genuine conversation to thrash out potential solutions.

Dr Chalmers has promised a late and lengthy press conference on Thursday evening to relay the next steps to the public.

But he insists that even if only a handful of concrete pledges emerge the intense consultation over the past several weeks has already made the exercise worth it.

“We’ve shaken the tree. There’s a whole bunch of ideas. We’ve got people grappling with the big trade-offs that governments have to make in economic policy,” he told Agenda during a one-on-one interview this week.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer unleashed the beast in June when they announced the roundtable in twin National Press Club speeches delivered a week apart.

The Government has expressed surprised at just how many ideas people had stashed away and were willing to voice.

Treasury has received almost 900 submissions and the Productivity Commission another couple of hundred for its “five pillars” reports feeding in to next week’s talks.

The core group of 22 attendees spending the whole three days next week in the cabinet room, and the 25 others invited to attend individual sessions, will bring their own thoughts.

Regulators have also offered up 140 new ideas to cut red tape.

Dr Chalmers has met with more than 75 of the nation’s top business leaders over the past month, while ministerial colleagues have collectively heard from more than 700 people across 41 pre-roundtable meetings in their own portfolios.

In fact, the sheer onslaught of suggestions has led the Government to tamp down expectations over the past fortnight.

“I see this as three days to help inform three budgets,” Dr Chalmers said.

“There’ll be a lot of work that begins on Thursday, not ends on Thursday.

“I’m pretty confident that the directions that people are encouraging us to take, that there will be elements of that that we’ll be able to pick up and run with.”

Mr Albanese has also been keen to emphasise that the talks might be in the Cabinet room, but they are not Cabinet discussions.

His Government will pick and choose what it does with the suggestions that emerge — and that will take time.

“There will be some things that are put forward that can be done immediately. Some things can be the result of legislation, some things will feed into next year’s Budget, some things will feed into a future commitments about future terms,” he said this week.

Many of the core participants are reluctant to outline their thinking publicly ahead of the roundtable, but there is clear consensus already building in areas such as speeding up environmental and planning approvals and reducing duplication across State and Federal processes.

This was reflected in leaked Treasury advice obtained by media this week which set out options for speeding up approvals and clearing a backlog of housing applications as possible outcomes from the talks.

Dr Chalmers, who has been briefed weekly on all the submissions, said his interests lay in making the Federation work more effectively, better regulation and faster approvals.

“My broad view, as you know, is that if it’s good for Western Australia, it’s usually good for the nation,” he said, talking about whether the States would get on board.

“WA plays a key defining role in our national economy, and so we work closely with Rita and Roger and the West Australian colleagues to find these win-wins and to make progress.”

State treasurers, meeting on Friday, agreed to work across jurisdictions on faster approvals for major projects, cutting red tape and reducing overlap, boosting competition and building more homes faster.

They also agreed to continue work on a model for road user charges — needed to replace fuel excise as more people start driving EVs — but cautioned that would take time.

Independent MP Allegra Spender has been speaking to fellow roundtable participants and said there was clear recognition across the board that environmental laws were failing to protect nature and stymieing progress on renewables and housing.

“Reforming these in line with Graeme Samuel’s recommendations is an urgent priority for almost everyone I’ve spoken to,” she said.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has also pointed to housing supply and the energy transition as key priorities, while unions back a “fast to yes, faster to no” approach for renewables projects.

“We think there is a growing consensus on the need to tackle intergenerational inequality in Australia. We hope the roundtable participants work together to help address this,” ACTU secretary Sally McManus said.

ACCC head Gina Cass-Gottlieb has also been speaking with other participants and a spokeswoman said there was a shared interest in competition, innovation and “right fit regulation”.

Red tape is also in the sights of business participants. Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chair Matthew Addison said that “regulatory burden and complex compliance obligations (were) impacting businesses of all sizes”.

The Business Council of Australia, representing some of the nation’s largest companies, this week estimated red tape cost the country more than $110 billion a year in compliance costs and called for a target to cut this by 25 per cent by 2030.

The idea is similar to one put forward by the Productivity Commission as well as that being pursued in the UK by Keir Starmer and is in line with Dr Chalmers’ thoughts about the “Abundance agenda” (after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s influential book).

Better regulation aside, artificial intelligence and tax are proving to be more contentious topics.

Take the proposal from the Productivity Commission to lower company tax rates for all but the 500 largest businesses, partially offset by a new “cashflow tax”.

Big business rejected the whole plan, but COSBOA backed the company tax cut element, although it signed on to a BCA-led statement against the cashflow tax element.

Mr Comyn said of course the Commonwealth Bank would like a tax cut, “but I don’t think that’s the highest priority”.

Last week, Dr Chalmers warned participants that he wanted them to start talking before gathering in Canberra and that any ideas costing money had to come with suggestions on how to offest the extra burden.

His message has been heeded in part. Not the money part, though.

“We need to make sure that the ideas that people put forward are affordable, and I see that our political opponents and others have criticised that,” Dr Chalmers said.

“But the alternative to that is telling people to bring unaffordable ideas. The alternative to this roundtable is to involve people less.”

One person — involved in preliminary discussions but not heading to Canberra — thought Treasury should simply reject any proposals that didn’t detail where the money would come from.

Ms Spender says she believed there was appetite for a proper tax reform process, while the BCA called for a snap three-month review.

“Everyone acknowledges that we can’t fix our tax system in a single afternoon, but there’s appetite to kick start a reform process that can examine the many interesting proposals put forward to date,” she said.

But shadow treasurer Ted O’Brien indicated in a speech on Friday that taxes were a red line for the Coalition.

“From recent media reports, it looks like the roundtable has been engineered to rubber stamp a doubling down on Labor’s failed tax and spend strategy,” he said.

“Let me be crystal clear: the Coalition will be no such rubber stamp. And we reject any suggestion Labor has a mandate to hike taxes.”

He also likened the roundtable to Willy Wonka’s famed chocolate factory, with Dr Chalmers as the candy man himself offering up “the tasty temptation of higher taxes mixed with big doses of debt”, in a speech that might leave the Treasurer reconsidering Mr O’Brien’s invitation.

Nevertheless, Dr Chalmers said he had an “overwhelming sense of gratitude” that people had largely approached the talks in the right spirit.

“I don’t see my role as … banging heads together. I’m trying to draw the threads together where there is sufficient common interest and sufficient common ground for the Government to do further work,” he said.

“Our job is to make the most of this opportunity before this window of opportunity shuts.”