In the long run, productivity is the key driver of real wages growth. Alas, Australia’s productivity over the last decade (i.e., 2010-2020) grew at its lowest rate for 60 years. But it could be worse: “Turkey has had no total factor productivity growth or technological upgrading for over 15 years.

You can ‘live to work’, or ‘work to live’. The latter is definitely the case in France, where there’s now “a twelfth nationwide day of protests against a bill that will make the French work longer”: “Some trains will be cancelled, and strike actions can also be expected among refinery workers, garbage collectors and teachers, at a time when opinion polls show a wide majority of voters still oppose pushing retirement age by two years to 64.

Former chair of Australia’s Productivity Commission (1998-2013), Gary Banks, took aim at a couple of the nation’s recent “policy sore thumbs”: “We have a tax system that is more about redistribution than growth and looks set to become even more so. Much infrastructure spending seems to be about short-term politics rather than long-term economic benefit.