JIM CHALMERS:
Thanks everyone for being here for the Investor Roundtable. We know that there are a lot of calls on your time and so it means a great deal to us that a group of this calibre and heft has been able to assemble again. These investor roundtables have been very useful, very constructive from the government’s point of view and I hope that your experience with them has been similarly useful.
I want to thank Ed Husic, Minister Husic who’s here with us today. You’d be familiar from earlier gatherings that we like to make sure that we have Cabinet ministers here for the discussions which are especially relevant to them and that’s why Ed’s here and I’m very grateful to Ed for making the time as well. One of the reasons I’m grateful that Ed has made the time is because we are right in the middle of the last parliamentary fortnight of the year, so it’s a pretty active time in terms of the legislative agenda between those 2 sitting weeks and there’s a lot going on.
From my point of view in the Treasury portfolio, the major focus for us is still obviously the fight against inflation but what we’ve tried to do is to make sure that as we engage in that fight against inflation, and we’re making that welcome and encouraging progress, that we make sure that the economic reform wheels are still turning as well in our agenda and in the economy, and also that we are particularly attentive to investment and the flow of capital in our economy as well and that’s obviously the major theme of our discussions today.
If you think about the last week or 2 alone in terms of our economic reform agenda, we announced the productivity fund that I’ll be discussing I think in this room with state and territory treasurers on Friday next week, we’ve advanced our thinking on the single front door, we’ve made announcements about the retirement phase of superannuation, announcements around cash and cheques and payments reform and obviously as well the announcements that we made yesterday about the future of the Future Fund.
And what unites all of this reform is our objective, our efforts to try and modernise our economy so that we can manage the pressures coming at us and maximise the opportunities that are before us and which you all grapple with on a daily basis as we do. So a big emphasis on investment and on the flow of capital. There are no shortage of challenges in our economy, near and longer term, no shortage of opportunities, no shortage of capital either but we need to make sure that we’re deploying that capital in the most efficient way in the search of great returns, primarily, but also in service of our national economic objectives at the same time.
This is all about the best returns for investors, the best outcomes for Australians and for their economy. And so today’s focus in the agenda is on housing, especially how we finance modern methods of construction, including pre‑fab and that’s the primary reason why Ed is here, and we’ll have a session on that shortly. We’ll talk about the energy investment pipeline, how we advance the single front door, we’ll get an update from the investment vehicles, we’ll get a briefing from Greg on the Future Fund, I acknowledge Greg is here.
We’ll get some briefing from Steven Kennedy on the investment environment as the Treasury sees it in the lead up to the mid‑year budget update. We hope that that spurs a proper conversation about how you’re seeing the investment environment and we’ll hear back from our working groups as well. As always, this is best when it’s a proper discussion. There are elements of briefing, but also hopefully that prompts a proper discussion about these challenges and opportunities.
Thank you again for being here today.