The Productivity Commission’s latest report trips over its own assumptions
It looks like we’ll be waiting a while for solutions to disadvantage, or productivity
There’s a gaping hole in the latest Productivity Commission report. Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a clue: it begins with “p” and ends in “roductivity”. The report, an interim release from the Fair Chance for All inquiry, opens with a list of “commonly used terms.” It takes the trouble to define the obvious—“assumptions”, we are told earnestly, are “things that are generally accepted to be ‘true’”, while “social norms” are “implicit, unwritten rules, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that are considered acceptable”. But nowhere in this list will you find “productivity”. Search the report for the term, and all you will find is vague hand-waving in the direction of productivity helping to achieve better life outcomes, the Commission’s own name, and exhortations to pay less attention to productivity. All of which begs the question, if the Productivity Commission doesn’t care about productivity, who does? And, less rhetorically, what’s the point of the Commission?
This isn’t the only blind spot in the report, which comes from a Commission under relatively new management. To be fair to the Commission, Finance Minister Grant Robertson set the terms of this inquiry, and perhaps its other inquiries into economic resilience and frontier firms will demonstrate more care for the thing the Commission is supposed to care about. But this one caught my attention because I couldn’t for the life of me see why the Commission would be looking into providing “a fair chance for all”, which it describes as people living “fulfilling lives” or obtaining mauri ora, when there are already so many other enquiries and initiatives into exactly this. And while the Government set the terms, you can’t help but feel that the Commission could have done more to stick up for productivity. After all, one of the report’s few references to it notes that “encouraging productivity” was a priority for Robertson’s first Wellbeing Budget in 2019, so it seems unlikely that a more robust treatment of productivity would have put the Commission out on a limb. But enough of that. Let’s turn to the other major blind spots in the report.
Despite the report’s concern for “fulfilling lives” and mauri ora, it treats actual people as bloodless abstractions. In a section titled, “Getting a good start in life is important” and noting that “adverse experiences” in early childhood lead to poor outcomes later, the report asserts that, “This discussion is not about the failure of parents to support their children. It is about factors beyond the control of parents that lead to inequitable access to the things children need to thrive”. Not only is this article of faith hard to reconcile with other statements in the report—that parental abuse or neglect have devastating effects on children, for example—it reduces people to mere cogs in a machine. By this logic, nothing’s ever our fault; we’re just products of the system, in which case nothing we do matters. Of course these are complex issues with systemic elements, but stripping agency from the very people you profess to help, even in the name of non-judgmental compassion, does no-one any favours.
This is the inevitable result of the report’s overpowering emphasis on the system. Its prescription—of “joined up” services and whole-of-government approaches—is nothing new. It’s been the language and the goal of policy-makers for years, an objective that regresses infinitely out of reach, which might tell you something about its attainability and its ability to make a meaningful difference to the people who need it. But the report forges on, unabashed, proclaiming that, “The purpose of government spending is to ensure citizens’ health and life satisfaction” and that “The complex challenges we now face … are well beyond the capacity of individuals and markets”. The solution, apparently, is “the social state”, which hasn’t noticeably made things better in my lifetime, but which will apparently ensure that the undifferentiated mass of humanity is able to “survive and thrive” beneath the benevolent and unblinking eye of the technocrats.
Despite the report’s early commitment to defining assumptions, it seems ignorant of its own. The report tells us, over and over again, that sole parents and broken families are more likely to experience persistent disadvantage, but you will search its recommendations in vain for any reference to this fact or any ideas to address it. Likewise, the report tells us that Māori and Pacific peoples are more likely to experience persistent disadvantage, but also that “Approximately two-thirds of sole parents and nearly three-quarters of Māori or Pacific peoples did not experience persistent income poverty or persistent exclusion in 2013 and 2018.” This intriguing finding could open a rich vein of inquiry. Why do some people become disadvantaged while others in the same group don’t? Are there clues here about resilience, about helpful behaviour, about effective policy? Who knows? The report prefers to talk about factors like colonisation, systemic racism, power imbalances, redesigning the public management system, and the new holy trinity of diversity, wellbeing and inclusion. There’s a horrible irony in an approach that professes so much concern for assumptions but is so lacking in self-awareness.
You’d have to have been asleep for several decades not to have heard the story the report tells so ponderously. People’s lives are more likely to go pear-shaped if they don’t have any qualifications or their relationships break down; Māori, Pacific peoples and people with disabilities are more likely to be disadvantaged than others. This shouldn’t be news to anyone, and it isn’t. Report after report after report has told us this. The real news is why the Government and the Commission should have invested so much in repeating this, and why the authors should labour so hard to tell us such obvious things (newsflash: “Where a child is placed into state care, they do not have a lot of power or agency”). I hate to think how much this inquiry is costing, and what else the money could have been spent on. If you can bear to wade through the turgid prose and force your way through the thickets of repetition, you will have learned very little—except, perhaps, that on this evidence the problems of poverty, and of productivity, are likely to remain unsolved for a while yet.