Danielle Wood on the Productivity Commission, public integrity, and Australia’s productivity challenges

So if you think back to all of the quote-unquote great economists or renowned economists or whatever economists, I suppose you sort of start with Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

His name is sometimes taken in vain and sometimes

held up as this

and that, and it comes through in more modern times.

People of my vintage, or my parents' vintage, in a sense knew about JK Galbraith because there was depression economics.

What do you do when you're faced with a depression? I get the impression it's largely with us.

Then Milton Friedman came along and seemed to tie in with the Reagan administration period in the US.

And that seemed to be about smaller government and freer markets, as I generally recall.

In recent times, you have Thomas Piketty, the the French guy who's worried about inequality.

I downloaded it onto my Kindle and read it with great interest.

It raises the question for me, how political I mean, there must be some people who hate you.

And likely, let me further preface my question by saying the Productivity Commission, and you brought out a very civilised, thoughtful report recently about the sharing of GST revenue in Australia and the Premier of Western Australia in the face of a recommendation WA should lose their large proportion, referred to you all as East Coast clowns.

I was rather astonished, I have to say.

But it shows you that it can be political.

Look, I think economics, at the core of economics, is thinking about trade-offs.

And so the types of decisions we feed into and advise on are often big decisions with trade-off, therefore with losers, and therefore inherently political and likely to capture attention.

And in a way, that's... why it's extraordinary, really, that the Productivity Commission exists.

You think of it, we are

funded by government, but we're set up to be independent of government.

We're providing advice, which is about the kind of long-term national interest.

And from time to time, through history that has not been in line with maybe the political interests of the government of the day, but both sides have kept us around.

And I think that's because they can see the benefit of having that advice, having some of the accountability of having people say what they think the national interest is.

So, yeah, I think it's actually probably a tribute to both sides that we exist in that world where it is often political and you do often get strong feedback.

The East Coast Clowns was a particularly strong form of feedback.

And, you know, I talk a little bit actually in the oration about... why I think it's really important that we always play the ball and not the man.