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Danielle Wood, Chair of the Productivity Commission, came with answers at the 2026 All Actuaries Summit keynote session. Her message was direct: the reform agenda is broad, the window for action is narrowing and the actuarial profession has a distinctive role to play.
Why does productivity growth matter to every actuary?
Australia's productivity growth has averaged just 0.3% per year over the past decade, less than a quarter of our 60-year historical average. Danielle Wood made the stakes concrete. For the first time on record, late millennials who entered the workforce in the 2010s are showing little income progress compared to the generation before them.
Productivity, as Actuaries Institute CEO Elayne Grace noted in her introduction, is not an abstract economic measure. It shows up in living standards, health outcomes, cost-of-living pressures and the quiet anxiety many Australians feel about what the future holds for the next generation.
Danielle took that framing and put numbers to it. Five structural forces are driving the slowdown:
Danielle Wood speaks at the 2026 All Actuaries Summit, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Australia is not alone. Almost every Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nation is grappling with the same pressures. These were Danielle's insights.
It is clear that productivity is not solely a government problem. Business dynamism, risk appetite and investment decisions all matter. But government creates the ecosystem within which productivity is realised and it has three levers:
The Productivity Commission was asked by the Commonwealth to identify practical, implementable reforms across five pillars : economic dynamism, net zero transformation, data and digital technologies, workforce skills and delivering quality care more efficiently. The full reports are worth reading in their own right, but there are three areas with the most direct relevance to the actuarial profession.
Regulation is rarely introduced with bad intent. But, the cumulative effect has become a significant drag on productivity. According to research by the Australian Institute of Company Directors, ASX boards now spend 55% of their time on compliance issues, up from 25% a decade ago, time that could otherwise go toward technology strategy, workforce development and the decisions that actually drive business performance.
The Productivity Commission's recommendations address the full chain of how regulation is made, tested and enforced:
So how did things get this way? The build-up of overlapping, piecemeal rules as "regulatory hairballs" — a problem nobody designed but everyone is now stuck navigating. Housing is a telling example: layers of approvals accumulated across departments and jurisdictions, each individually justifiable, have combined into a system that works against the very outcomes it was designed to protect.
However, there are encouraging signs in the recent Federal Budget. Tell-us-once reforms to reduce the burden of dealing with multiple government agencies; digital business records to cut administrative overhead; faster approvals to address the backlog that has stalled housing and infrastructure projects and a renewed push on national competition policy to streamline regulation across states and territories.
Attendees listen to the opening keynote session at the 2026 All Actuaries Summit, Melbourne.
The care economy – health, aged care and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) – are all expected to grow considerably as a share of the Commonwealth budget over time.
The productivity challenge in care is as much about measurement as efficiency. When health sector productivity is adjusted for improvements in life expectancy and health outcomes, the picture is more positive than raw figures suggest. Quality is real, even when it resists easy counting.
The Productivity Commission's key recommendation is investment in prevention and early intervention. The evidence base is stronger than ever. Linked administrative data and a stronger evaluation culture now allow policymakers to identify programs that deliver genuine long-term returns, whether that is early intervention for disadvantaged children, support for people experiencing homelessness, or preventive health measures that reduce downstream costs. The barrier is structural. Four-year budget cycles and portfolio-based accounting mean government is not set up to capture returns that land in a different portfolio or a different term of government.
The contribution actuarial evidence can make here is building the case for prevention-focused governance reform. The Commission has recommended a dedicated fund and inter-governmental agreement to enable this work across Commonwealth and state governments.
Net zero deserves more attention than it currently receives. Even a successful global effort to hold warming below two degrees will not prevent growing costs from natural disasters and the Commission's work centred on housing — the sector at the front line of climate risk and one where practical, cost-effective interventions can make a real difference. But none of it works without better data.
The equity dimension matters too. Those most exposed tend to be in regional and remote areas on lower incomes and are the households least able to fund their own adaptation. The Commission's modelling found that roof tie downs in climate-prone areas, removing flammable insulation, clearing bush near bushfire-prone properties and improved land use planning could together reduce cumulative expected damages by around a third over 75 years. Yet, most of these households have no reliable way of knowing what their property-level risk actually is.
The Commission has recommended a national climate risk database to aggregate hazard risks at the property level, and a climate resilience rating system modelled on the energy efficiency star rating, outcome-based and responsive to the interventions households actually take. The Actuaries Institute research helps make the case for long-term modelling and getting the discount rate and timeframes right is not a technical detail; It changes the answer entirely.
The rigour, the long-term focus, the instinct to reach for evidence — these genuinely set actuarial contributions to public policy apart. Danielle’s advice: pick issues that matter to government, communicate clearly across different audiences and keep going long after it feels comfortable to do so.
Danielle Wood and Elayne Grace in conversation on stage at the 2026 All Actuaries Summit, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
"Keep going, keep saying something until you want to vomit, you are so sick of it. And then say it again. Only then are you cutting through. Policy advocacy is a long game." - Danielle Woods
"The rigorous thinking, the long-term perspective, the instinct to look at evidence rather than noise — that's exactly what's needed right now. The great recalibration isn't just a conference theme. It's a call to action, and this profession has a role to play in finding the solutions Australia needs." – Elayne Grace
The Productivity Commission's reform agenda spans regulation, care, climate, data, economic dynamism and so much more as it undertakes new inquiries — terrain actuaries work across every day. Read the Commission's full findings at pc.gov.au .
Danielle's keynote raised questions the profession is well placed to answer. What does the reform agenda mean for your practice area? Where do you see the biggest opportunities for actuarial input?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives CC BY-NC-ND Version 4.0.
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