The concern was etched clearly on Michele Bullock’s face.

Just an hour earlier, the Reserve Bank had cut official interest rates for the third time this year. Such a decision would normally dominate the governor’s post-meeting press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

Bullock attempts to get attention back on interest rates at her Tuesday press conference, which was ultimately dominated by productivity questions.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Instead, Bullock was fielding questions about a change to the bank’s assumption on productivity growth used to underpin many of its medium economic forecasts.

“The main news here is actually the reduction in interest rates,” she said, almost pleading to be asked about monetary policy and its direction.

That a Reserve Bank governor couldn’t corral a room full of journalists to talk about an interest rate cut says everything about how the economic and political debate has shifted to productivity, its link to living standards, and Anthony Albanese’s roundtable next week to address the issue.

Across three days, some of the nation’s brightest – and best connected – minds will sit in the federal cabinet room to thrash out ways to lift the economy’s speed limit.

Productivity growth has slowed around the world since the advent of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

Even before the crisis, there were signs the global surge in productivity from the early 1990s to around 2005 – driven by personal computers and microeconomic reform – was starting to temper.

Low inflation and official interest rates through the 2010s, then COVID, the post-pandemic inflation explosion, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently the war in Gaza all diverted attention away from the productivity slowdown.

But with inflation subsiding and Donald Trump upending the global trading order, most governments – including the freshly re-elected administration of Anthony Albanese – are revisiting ways to get their economies back to health.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who will sit through all roundtable sessions, and whose department will be driving much of the analysis of the various proposals put up by participants, has cautioned that those looking for instant results on Thursday evening will be disappointed.

“[The point of] this economic reform roundtable is not to make decisions, it’s to inform the government’s decisions,” Chalmers told ABC Radio National Breakfast on Wednesday.........

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