For a country obsessed with improving productivity, we have quite a few blind spots. Our defence anti-productivity policies go unexamined. The poor quality of Australian business management receives minimal attention. The outsized, unpredictable impact of mining productivity is never mentioned outside Productivity Commission reports.
You can add to that list infrastructure construction, an area of vast government expenditure and abysmal productivity. It’s nearly a decade since Marion Terrill, who has waged a long and lonely battle on infrastructure spending, pointed out the extraordinary extent to which Australia’s big infrastructure projects tended to run persistently and substantially over budget.