Australia’s unfinished economic reform goal should be to make Australian capitalism work better by directing capital towards productive enterprise and away from dependence on asset inflation.

With the 2020s being seen as Australia’s weakest decade for living standards since Federation have come familiar calls for higher productivity. Economists debate tax reform, deregulation, competition policy and workplace flexibility. Governments promise another productivity agenda. Yet productivity is better understood as the symptom than the disease.

The deeper question is whether Australia ever completed the economic transformation that began in the 1980s.

The Hawke and Keating governments deserve credit for recognising that the old protectionist settlement had reached its limits. High tariffs, tightly regulated financial markets and an increasingly insulated manufacturing sector were becoming barriers to economic renewal. Australia needed to open its economy and expose itself to greater international competition. That reform........

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