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This Budget won’t help productivity, skills gap, or made-in-Australia future
BUDGET REACTION – Australian CEO and author, Jarrod McGrath has slammed the 2024 Budget for doing “nothing to help fix our stifling productivity, growing skills gap, or ensure a future made in Australia”.
Mr McGrath, who founded and heads up Smart WFM – a global workforce management (WFM) and human capital management (HCM) consultancy – said successive governments had made an already complex industrial relations, union, and payment system more complicated, “to the point that it’s become too hard to correctly pay people”. 
He said political leaders had avoided investing in, or even discussing, this issue as “it’s not easy to fix and frankly, worryingly, most of them don’t understand it”.
“This Budget will do nothing to help fix our stifling productivity, growing skills gap, or ensure a future made in Australia,” Mr McGrath said.
“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,” he said.
“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 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,” Mr McGrath said.
“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.”
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