Blog | Smart WFM

Budget fails to address productivity, industrial relations complexity

Written by Jarrod McGrath | May 14, 2024

Thank you iTWire for sharing my thoughts on the 2024 budget.

This Budget will do nothing to help fix our stifling productivity, growing skills gap, or ensure a future made in Australia.

The worker carries this country. My Dad’s Dad was a boiler maker, jumping into fire boxes, often while still trying to keep steam trains running. Dad was a motor mechanic. My friends were mostly tradies. From these roots, this country grew along with a complex industrial relations (IR), union, and payment system that successive governments have made more complicated.

Today we live and work in tech-driven knowledge economy underpinned by our history and any Budget and government activity must acknowledge this. If we are going to truly going to have a future made in Australia, we need to simplify the complexities that make it so difficult to correctly pay people. If the Government really wants Australia to lead the world on green energy, it has to make it easier for budding green energy entrepreneurs to get the right people in place.

We need to seriously invest in technology and simplify the complex systems that inhibit its use to drive productivity and efficiency. Political leaders have avoided this for years because it’s not easy to fix and frankly, worryingly, most of them don’t understand it.”

Solving these types of issues are a key focus for Smart WFM and we’re proud to deliver compliance and productivity consulting to some of Australia’s leading organisations. Find out more about what we do.