With the federal election now behind us and the government outlining its agenda for the next term, productivity is firmly back in focus as a national economic priority.
This week, treasurer Jim Chalmers described the role of workers' productivity 'not as Australians working harder, but as investing in people and their capacity to add value'.
This reflects a broader conversation: how do we sustain and improve living standards amid demographic shifts, climate change, economic headwinds, and accelerating technological disruption?
While technology will play a role, the real gains will come from building the capability of our people - equipping them with the tools, insights and confidence to make better decisions and deliver greater impact.
Across all sectors, the pressure to lift productivity is playing out in different ways:
- Local and State Government are confronting the combined pressures of an ageing population, housing affordability, and workforce shortages. With limited budgets, the strategic use of local data is critical to ensuring every dollar delivers long-term value for communities. Instead of spending time collecting data, planners can now use tools that surface the insights they need - freeing them to focus on high-impact, value-added tasks.
- Utilities face productivity challenges tied to ageing infrastructure, uncertainty from rapid population growth, and the transition to net zero. Better use of spatial and demographic insights - as we discuss in our
latest report - can help navigate these uncertainties, ensuring infrastructure investments are well-timed and future-proof. - Education continues to grapple with high labour intensity and a reliance on face-to-face service delivery that’s hard to scale or automate. Planners in education face intensifying pressures from demographic change, such as declining fertility rates and an ageing population, and rising housing costs that displace key workers. Data tools help these stakeholders move beyond reactive responses, offering forward-looking insights into student demand, workforce needs, and community infrastructure.
- Retail and Consumer Services are navigating changing consumer expectations, online competition, and just-in-time delivery models. Productivity improvements in this sector increasingly depend on access to timely, granular data, helping operators understand where their customers are, how behaviours are changing, and where to invest for growth.
Across all of this, one thing is clear: improving productivity starts with building people’s capability, not just adding more resources. That starts with giving them access to high-quality, independent data and clear, place-based insights so they can make better decisions.
Our tools are designed to do exactly that - to put useful evidence directly in the hands of planners, policy makers, and service providers, helping them apply it in ways that support their organisation’s goals and deliver real outcomes for communities.
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