In 2026 Australian industry confronts five challenges: raising productivity, meeting workforce shortages, raising investment, realising the potential of AI, and navigating the business tax system.
Australian Industry GroupNational Forum 202610 interactive charts
Productivity has stalled since the pandemic, with negative impacts across our economy.
Productivity is the well-spring of Australia’s national wealth. It raises the rate at which the economy can sustainably grow, increases the competitiveness of our industries, reduces the cost and improves the quality of public services, and enables growth in real wages.
Historically, labour productivity has grown by around 1.2% p.a. in Australia. This is driven by the progressive uptake of labour-augmenting technologies, which allows the economy to steadily produce more output per employee.
However, in recent years the productivity engine has stalled. During the pandemic productivity was highly volatile, as public health measures shuttered many industries. Productivity then fell precipitously as the economy re-opened in 2022, and in the years since has failed to return to its normal growth path.
The consequence has been a marked stagnation in productivity performance. In mid-2026 labour productivity languishes at the same level as late 2019, implying a six-and-a-half year run without any growth. If the economy had maintained its pre-pandemic trend, labour productivity would today be 9% higher than it is.
This is unprecedented in modern Australian history. Since productivity statistics were first collected in the 1960s, there has never been a reversal like the one that followed the pandemic, nor a period of more than a year without productivity growth. Understanding why our productivity engine has suddenly stalled is key to addressing Australia’s contemporary economic challenges.
Industry productivity paths
While Australia’s overall productivity has stagnated since the pandemic, not all parts of the economy have performed poorly. Different productivity trajectories are evident amongst different industry groups.
Positively, several industries have achieved productivity growth well above the national average, led by information, administrative and professional services. These are knowledge-intensive industries that make extensive use of digital technologies, and they are delivering strong productivity dividends.
“If the economy had maintained its pre-pandemic trend, labour productivity would today be 9% higher than it is.”
However, these gains have been offset by concerning productivity declines in several clusters of industries:
One cluster are industrials such as manufacturing, construction and utilities, where productivity has suffered material declines. Since the pandemic they have struggled with shortages of skilled technicians, surging energy costs, and volatile market conditions that have disrupted their efficiency and growth.
Another cluster is the care economy. Education and health care & social assistance have both recorded significant productivity declines over the period. These are labour-intensive and highly regulated, making it harder to adopt automation and digital technologies. They have also faced ongoing workforce shortages.
In net terms, the gains and losses across these two clusters have largely balanced out. This points to a productivity challenge that is concentrated in particular sectors, making targeted reforms in these industries critical to improving national productivity performance.
What explains the sudden stagnation in productivity?
Several factors have contributed to the stalling of Australia’s productivity growth since the pandemic.
A contributing factor has been the changing composition of economic activity. Growth since the pandemic has been concentrated in education and health care, sectors that are inherently labour-intensive and typically exhibit productivity levels around two-thirds of the economy-wide average. As these industries have expanded the compositional shift has placed downward pressure on aggregate productivity.
But the compositional change towards care services is a long-term trend. It doesn’t explain why productivity has stagnated since the pandemic, or why other industries have seen it go backwards. For these we need to look to other factors:
Workforce shortages have played a role. Australia has struggled with profound shortages of skilled employees, particularly in technical and trades roles. Businesses unable to fill key roles will struggle to maintain or improve their operational efficiency.
Under-investment - particularly in productivity-enhancing technologies - is another driver. Investment has failed to keep pace with the growth of the labour force, resulting in the amount of capital per employee falling for the first time on record. As labour-augmenting investment is a key driver of productivity growth, it is little surprise that it has been stagnant during a period where investment levels have fallen.
Market disruptions have also contributed. Coming out of the pandemic, industry suffered from persistent supply chain shortages which interrupted normal business operations. These have resurfaced again in 2026 due to the global energy crisis, with disruptions to steady supplies of fuel, plastics, chemicals, metals and construction materials.
The economic and social costs of low productivity
Productivity growth underpins prosperity by enabling businesses to produce more, workers to earn more and governments to fund better services. The negative consequences of weak productivity growth include:
A weaker economy: Poor productivity lowers the potential growth rate the economy can achieve before inflation becomes a constraint. Estimates suggest this upper limit is currently around 2% per year.
Lower real wages growth: Sustainable increases in real wages are funded by productivity uplifts. When it is poor, real wages can stagnate or reverse, as has occurred in the years since the pandemic.
Higher cost and inflation pressures: Poor productivity raises the cost of producing goods and services, stoking inflation and reducing affordability. This is evident in housing, where declining productivity is contributing to higher build costs and lower housing affordability.
Reduced competitiveness: Australia is an open economy that competes globally for investment and markets. If productivity stagnates the competitiveness of our trade exposed businesses can fall, and we become a less attractive destination for investors.
Social services sustainability: Falling productivity in the care sector raises the costs of delivering social services. This adds to pressures on government budgets and threatens the fiscal sustainability of health, education, aged care, childcare and disability services.
Getting Australia’s productivity growth back on track is critical to achieving both our economic and social ambitions. Doing so will require careful consideration of how workforce, investment, technology and tax settings are shaping productivity outcomes across the economy.
An extraordinarily tight labour market poses structural workforce shortages crimping the economy
The labour market has been one of the bright spots in Australia’s recent economic performance. Despite broader conditions of high inflation, low growth and stalled productivity, the labour market has proven remarkably resilient to headwinds.
While there has been some gradual easing over the last year, most indicators remain very strong. Spare labour capacity remains below normal, job creation above normal, while vacancies and wages growth are both elevated. These are the tightest sustained labour market conditions in Australia since the late 1980s.
The strong labour market has provided a critical backstop at a time when the economy has been underperforming. The fact it has remained tight as the economy slowed from 2023 also indicates it is a structural rather than cyclical phenomenon.
Key data
Australian labour market indicators, mid-2026
10.9%
Labour underutilisation
Normal: 13.9%
67.0%
Labour force participation rate
Normal: 65.3%
2.0%
Job vacancy rate
Normal: 1.4%
2.4% p.a.
Job creation rate
Normal: 1.6%
45%
Recruitment difficulties rate
Normal: N/A
3.2% p.a.
Wages growth rate
Normal: 2.7%
‘Normal’ refers to average during decade pre-pandemic
However, the tight labour market has also created workforce pressures for businesses. Employers have faced strong wage growth, elevated vacancy rates and ongoing difficulties recruiting workers into skilled roles.
Many of the challenges facing industry today can be traced back to structural workforce shortages. Understanding the causes of these shortages, and identifying where policy can help ease workforce constraints, should be a central focus of any productivity reform agenda.
Why has the labour market become so tight?
The primary cause is a recent surge in employment in government-funded parts of the economy. Since 2022, job creation has been very high in three industries:
453,000
Healthcare & social
new jobs created
220,000
Education
new jobs created
82,000
Public administration
new jobs created
These industries are collectively called the ‘non-market sector’, given the major role played by government funding in driving demand and employment. Their rapid expansion since 2022 reflects a structural uplift in spending on social services, particularly childcare, aged care, hospitals and disability services.
State and federal governments have also chosen to expand the public service, where headcounts have grown by 10% over the last four years.
By contrast, jobs growth in the rest of the economy has been much more moderate - just 1.6% per year, a third of the rate seen in government-funded sectors. This reflects subdued conditions facing the private sector.
Just over half (52%) of all job creation since the pandemic is due to government funding uplifts in the care and public sectors. This has artificially stimulated the labour above underlying economic conditions and exacerbated the workforce shortages facing employers.
Impacts on industry
While a robust labour market is a positive development, one which is excessively tight or imposes workforce shortages carries negative impacts on industry and employers. These include:
Recruitment difficulties: When employers are unable to fill positions because there are too few suitable candidates. In mid-2026, 45% of employers advertising vacancies reported difficulties, rising to 61% among those recruiting for technician and trades roles.
Excess job vacancies: When employers are unable to staff all the positions they require. While some vacancies are a normal feature of job turnover, current levels are elevated. There are around 334,000 vacant jobs in Australia, approximately 100,000 more than would be expected based on the long-run vacancy rate.
Skills shortages: When there are insufficient skilled workers to meet demand in particular occupations. According to JSA’s latest analysis, 103 occupations are classified as being in either a national or localised shortage. Together, these occupations account for around 29% of the Australian workforce.
Training supply gaps: Where the long duration of training creates a lag between increased demand for an occupation and the supply of newly-trained employees. This particularly affects occupations in the care and industrial sectors with complex training requirements.
While all employers face these problems, they are especially concentrated in certain industries. Around half of the workforce in the health and education sectors are in occupations characterised by shortages, reflecting undersupply of care employees.
Industrial sectors such as construction, transport, mining, and utilities also face shortages for a large share of their workforce, due to their reliance on in-demand technical and trades workers.
The connection between workforce shortages and productivity is clear. Many of the industries experiencing persistent shortages, especially across the industrial and care sectors, have also recorded declining productivity in the years since the pandemic.
Businesses that cannot fill critical skilled roles are less able to invest in new technologies, adopt more efficient ways of working, or implement process improvements that lift productivity. Workforce shortages can therefore become a constraint on productivity growth.
This highlights the connection between the skills system and productivity. As a structurally tight labour market has intensified shortages, increasing the supply of skilled workers to the industries that need them most will be critical to supporting productivity growth.
It also underscores the importance of migration. Recent migrants - those who have arrived in the past five years - now account for 5.7% of the workforce. They play an important role in industrial and care occupations, helping to supplement the domestic skills pipeline in areas where demand for qualified workers continues to outpace supply.
Business investment has been insufficient to drive the productivity gains Australia needs.
Investment is one of the main determinants of productivity growth. By introducing new technology, and supplying employees with augmentative tools, it lifts per employee output. It can also help with workforce shortages, by automating lower skilled tasks and releasing labour for higher value activities.
Since the end of the mining boom, Australia’s investment growth has been muted compared to previous trend. This has reflected both compositional changes in our economy and the impact of policy obstacles to our investment competitiveness.
Our post-mining boom investment blues
As the economy becomes more sophisticated, business investment rates should steadily increase. This is because the uptake of new technologies changes the mix of economic inputs – with more capital being used per unit of labour. Economists call this process ‘capital deepening’, and it is one of the primary drivers of productivity improvements.
We can see this trend in Australia’s economic statistics. In the mid-1990s, there was $5.50 of new business investment per hour worked in the economy. By 2026 the rate had tripled to $14.50. By supplying more and better tools to employees, this has unlocked steady improvements in labour productivity.
In recent years this capital deepening process has slowed. In 1990s and early 2000s, business investment levels grew at a rate around 3% faster than GDP per year. The mining boom of the early 2010s then markedly if temporarily raised investment levels, before they normalised in the latter part of the decade.
“The rate of investment growth in Australia slowed markedly after the mining boom and has not yet recovered.”
But in the decade since the mining boom, that rate of investment growth has almost halved, to only 1.7% faster than GDP. The same slowdown has affected investment relative to the size of the labour force.
In practical terms, this means that rate at which labour is being augmented with capital has been growing slower than normal for the last decade. The consequence has been the steadily declining productivity performance now afflicting the economy.
Why has investment growth slowed?
Slower investment growth over the last decade is a multi-factorial problem, with no single cause solely responsible. However, some of the factors include:
Inter-industry shifts: The composition of the economy has shifted away from industrial sectors like manufacturing towards service sectors. Service sectors are usually less capital-intensive than industrials, lowering the overall rate of investment growth.
Growth of the care sector: Care has been the fastest growing component of the economy, and has one of the lowest investment rates of any sector. There are greater intrinsic barriers to some forms of technology uptake such as automation in care, as well as less flexible regulatory arrangements for innovation in business processes.
Declining R&D performance: Business R&D accounted for just 0.9% of GDP in 2023-24, its lowest rate in twenty years. R&D is a source of investment itself, and creates new products and processes which catalyse further investment as they diffuse across industry.
Tax competitiveness: Australia has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the OECD, reducing our relative attractiveness for foreign investors. Outside areas like mining, this impairs our investment competitiveness.
Permitting and approvals: Many investments require approvals processes which are recognised to have become progressively slower and more restrictive. This is a particular challenge for large-scale industrial like energy, manufacturing and construction.
Regulatory burden: Regulatory regimes are also recognised to have become more complex, diverting business resources to compliance activities. This further reduces our investment competitiveness relative to lighter-touch jurisdictions.
Datacentres to the rescue?
Despite this trend, a recent boost to investment has come from a surprising source: datacentres. As AI technologies mature and see greater uptake, a wave of datacentre builds have been unleashed in anticipation of demand from AI applications.
They have rapidly become a major driver of investment in Australia. Datacentre activity added $15 billion to the economy last financial year, accounting for around half of all investment growth.
And the boom is far from done – 9 additional gigawatts of projects have requested transmission connections from the Australian Energy Market Operator, five times more than are already underway.
“Estimates suggest up to $100 billion will be invested as datacentre projects come online over the next five years.”
These datacentre builds have offered a much-needed tailwind for the construction and technology sectors that contribute to their building. They have also pushed investment growth rates to their highest level since the mining boom of the 2010s.
However, they are not a sufficient investment foundation for the broader economy. Datacentres rely on imports for approximately 80% of their content, and their building generates relatively little employment.
The main productivity uplift will come not through datacentre building itself, but from lower costs and increased uptake of AI technologies that the datacentres will subsequently enable.
There are also complex policy questions around datacentres which are still to be settled:
Where should they be located, given competing land use pressures in urban areas?
How should their energy and water needs be sustainably met?
How can we manage demands on our under-strain energy and skilled labour markets?
How are we going to regulate the AI technologies driving the building boom?
The scale of the datacentre boom is such that getting these policy settings right is critical not just for AI, but for Australia’s overall investment performance.
But it also points to the need to consider how policy settings influence investment across the economy. Datacentre builds are lifting investment levels that otherwise remain too low, and leave us exposed to another fall when the boom is complete.
This warrants a reconsideration of how policy – across areas as diverse as approvals, tax, R&D, regulation and even care sector funding – can create conditions that support robust private sector investment.
The impacts of AI on productivity are highly uncertain, but we can maximise the benefits by driving uptake across industry.
AI technologies are the leading bright spot on Australia’s economic horizon. Recognised as the next general-purpose technology that will push out the global productivity frontier, it promises a turnaround in our lacklustre performance of the last six years.
While much of the public debate over AI focuses on its social uses and their implications, from a productivity perspective the key issue is industry adoption. As businesses integrate AI technologies they have the ability to enhance workforce efficiency, raise investment and transform processes.
Recent trends in AI adoption suggest early efficiency gains are already in train, but the greater dividends will come from deeper applications that transform how businesses operate and the economy is structured.
Industry AI adoption picks up
First, some good news for productivity: AI adoption rates in industry are steadily growing. In our latest business strategy survey taken in mid-2026, 38% of businesses reported adopting new AI technologies over the last twelve months. Within just a few years, AI has become the leading technology being adopted within industry, ahead of cyber and digital management tools.
This data can be compared to an RBA survey taken a year earlier in mid-2025, which found around 30% of firms had moderately or significantly adopted AI.
Around two-thirds of adopters deployed standalone tools (such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude), while a third adopted general business technologies which contained embedded AI elements (such as automation, sales or safety systems).
“AI adoption has achieved a foothold in industry, and is likely to grow as the technology matures and practices diffuse between businesses.”
Adoption rates are one thing, but what is the AI being used to achieve? The initial wave of deployments are primarily focused on raising the productivity of existing business processes.
Two-thirds of businesses reported the AI objective as being to augment efficiency in current tasks, half aimed to reduce routine and risky tasks, and a third were deploying for quality assurance. These are applications directly aimed at raising the productivity of existing business processes.
More transformative AI applications – such as customer service, products development and safety – were less common at around 10-25%. Relatively few were yet to use it for workforce applications such as training.
Objectives for business AI adoption 2026
Augment current task efficiency
66%
Reduce routine of risky tasks
46%
Improve quality and/or reduce errors
32%
Improve customer experience
25%
Develop new products
10%
Improve safety
9%
Fill skills shortages
8%
Workforce training
5%
It is these deeper use cases where much of AI’s industrial productivity dividend lies. Deeper users report applications as diverse as the identification of safety hazards, automated monitoring systems for materials flows, sales forecasting and business planning, and the provision of products and standards advice to technical staff in the field. These applications move from ‘getting things done faster’ to ‘doing new things’ with AI.
To be sure, fewer deep adopters is an expected dynamic in the technology adoption cycle. Businesses will initially implement AI into existing processes, before moving to process transformation once their AI maturity increases. That a sizeable minority are already taking the second step suggests much more is to come.
What’s really holding back business AI uptake?
While the productivity benefits of AI are significant, so too are some of the implementation challenges. 90% of businesses report at least one barrier to adopting AI into their operations. The leading factors include:
Investment cost (43%) – the top barrier. This includes both the upfront cost of adopting AI and updating existing systems, as well as uncertainty over ongoing variable costs (such as unit prices for tokens). Costs are higher for businesses attempting the more transformative types of AI deployment.
Workforce capability (33%) – where existing staff lack the skills to make proper or full use of AI technologies. AI adoption normally requires adjuvant investments in training, raising total costs above the core spend required for the technology and systems.
Cyber security (32%) – all digital systems pose cyber security risks, but these become larger and less understood with AI deployment. There is particular concern over how well existing and trusted cyber practices will address new risks facing AI.
These uptake barriers make clear business AI is rapidly moving from a niche to mainstream technology play. Costs, skills and cyber risks are the core deployment questions for any digital project in industry. While the issues have a different character for AI – particularly cyber security – they increasingly look like the normal challenges of any digital technology projects.
Can AI in industry fix Australia’s productivity crisis?
It is currently impossible to say how much AI adoption will boost productivity. The technological frontier is highly unstable, and only a minority of firms have yet to deploy and test it in real world contexts.
Globally, economic studies on its potential impacts show wildly differing results due to the assumptions on capability and diffusion underpinning their models.
“AI will certainly lift productivity, but it remains uncertain by how much”
In the Australian context, the Productivity Commission has estimated that AI could boost multifactor productivity by 2.3% over the next ten years – equivalent to a 0.25% lift in the annual growth rate.
Over the longer-term, Treasury analysis for the 2026 Intergenerational Report suggests that about half of the productivity gains expected over the next forty years might come from AI and its second order effects.
These figures suggest AI will offer a material boost, but they are highly uncertain. And even in the more optimistic scenarios, much if not most of productivity will still come from the traditional process of business investment and workforce skills development.
Australia cannot control all the technological uncertainty surrounding AI, but we can maximise the benefits by driving uptake across industry.
Policy settings must be configured to support business adoption, particularly the more transformative applications that offer the greatest productivity gains. Risks should be managed in a way that is permissive and gives industry the confidence to experiment then deploy the new opportunities AI affords.
The way we tax business deters investment and contributes to our productivity problems.
Australia’s system of business taxation plays a key role in promoting investment and productivity. Tax is one of the main variables shaping investment decisions, both in terms of whether to invest in Australia and if so what forms that investment should take.
Unfortunately, Australia’s current tax settings are not conducive to investment promotion. Our tax rates are uncompetitively high vis our peers, our business taxes are excessively complex, and the tax mix relies on many inefficient taxes that stifle investment and growth.
It is no surprise therefore that business investment levels in Australia have been insufficient and have seen productivity stagnate. Reforming the business tax system to fix these deficiencies would greatly aid the agenda to get productivity back on track.
Internationally uncompetitive
By comparison to our peers, Australia’s corporate income taxes are very high. Our statutory rate (30% for medium and large businesses) is the equal fourth highest in the OECD. Our effective rate – a measure which adjusts for incentives and reflects the tax businesses actually pay – is the second highest at 28.5%, behind only Colombia.
Australia’s effective rate is much higher than the OECD average, as well as all major peers. We have the unenviable title of being the world’s highest corporate-taxing advanced economy.
“Our business tax system is uncompetitive, excessively complex and inefficient”
Indeed, Australia is defying a trend towards lower corporate income taxes. Between 2017 and 2025 twenty OECD economies reduced their effective rates, lowering the group average from 23.3% to 22.2%. The reduction was especially pronounced in the US, where the effective rate fell 12 percentage points to 22.7%.
While high corporate taxes are somewhat blunted for domestic investors who benefit from the dividend imputation system, foreign investors are fully exposed.
Capital is internationally mobile, and with corporate income taxes typically consuming around a fifth of profits they materially shape investment decisions.
This greatly reduces tax competitiveness, which is critical for attracting foreign investment in technology sectors like AI and more we aspire to develop. Outside of areas where we possess intrinsic natural advantages – such as resources and energy – our ability to attract capital is greatly impaired by high corporate taxes.
Excessively complex
Indeed, company tax is far from the only tax paid by companies. Businesses are required to pay a much broader set of taxes, charges, duties and levies applied by both state and federal governments.
Unfortunately, there is no official inventory of all taxes in the Australian tax system. However, liaison research indicates that a nationally operating business can pay over 100 different taxes annually when all federal and state systems are counted together.
Some of the most prominent include: payroll taxes applied to medium and large employers; stamp duty on business and land transactions; taxes on insurance; energy taxes on oil, gas and fuel products; trade taxes including both customs duties and export taxes; and a host of smaller duties on specific products.
Revenue from select taxes, 2023-24
Payroll taxes
$41 billion
Stamp duties
$31 billion
Energy taxes
$25 billion
Trade taxes
$14 billion
Other duties on business
$19 billion
Insurance taxes
$9 billion
Company tax
$144 billion
This suite of additional taxes imposes two additional burdens on business:
The first is their direct costs, which are far from trivial. Just four of these taxes – payroll, energy, trade and business-specific levies – raised $99 billion in 2023-24. This is almost as much as the $144 billion from company tax. The actual tax burden on business is around twice as high as company tax alone suggests.
The second are the indirect costs of compliance with up to 100 different tax regimes. Businesses have to engage with multiple tax rules, administered by different agencies across the various states and territories.
Payroll tax is a notorious example, where a national employer needs to comply with eight different payroll tax systems. Their revenue differences are slight, but the compliance costs of maintaining eight systems are significant are arguably unnecessary.
An inefficient tax mix
Complexity also reduces the efficiency of Australia’s tax mix. Taxes change behaviour, and where those changes deter desired behaviours – such as investment or job creation – they can have material impacts on the efficiency and productivity of our economy.
Economists assess tax efficiency in terms of ‘marginal excess burden’ – a measure of the economic loss per dollar of tax collected due to behavioural changes resulting from a tax. The chart below shows efficiency estimates for the main components of the tax system.
It reveals that many of the taxes applied to business are also the least efficient in our tax mix. Stamp duty, insurance taxes, payroll tax and company tax all impose high economic costs – equivalent to between 40% to 70% of the revenue they collect.
By contrast, other taxes – such as land taxes, GST, and personal income tax – impose far lower economic burden. This indicates the complex thicket of business taxes is a major source of the inefficiency of our tax system and the loss that imposes on the economy.
Federalism is a key factor. Many of the taxes applied to business, particularly the least efficient, are levied by state governments. Some are ‘taxes of constitutional necessity’ – highly inefficient taxes that have survived previous rounds of reform because the constitution grants the states few alternate revenue sources.
This points to both the challenge and benefits of genuine and system-wide tax reform. Reforms which optimised the tax mix – by rationalising the over 100 business taxes, and shifting towards more efficient taxes – would deliver a material uplift for the economy.
But it also requires federal cooperation. The Commonwealth and states need to jointly redesign the entire system, not simply tinkering with individual taxes. This was achieved during the GST reforms of the 1990s, but reform appetite has since fallen away.
And competitiveness must also be front of mind. Simplification can achieve a lot, but Australia will struggle to attract investment while it maintains one of the highest corporate tax rates in the OECD.
Significant reform effort lies ahead if we are to deliver the competitive, simple and efficient business tax system required to lift investment and productivity.
Jeffrey Wilson is Head of Research and Economics at Australian Industry Group.
He leads our economics team and provides strategic direction in developing the research program to support our advocacy, service delivery and policy activities.
Dr Wilson specialises in international economic policy, with a focus on how trade and investment shape the Australian business environment.
About the Australian Industry Group
For more than 150 years, the Australian Industry Group has been helping Australian businesses to succeed.
We represent more than 60,000 businesses across manufacturing, construction, technology, defence, care, logistics and more.
Our purpose is clear - to empower Australian industries.
We do this through expert advice, advocacy, training and policy influence, enabling businesses to boost productivity, navigate change and seize new opportunities.
As we confronts the demands of global competition, digital disruption, workforce reform and sustainability imperatives, our role is more vital than ever.
At the Australian Industry Group we’re ready for business so you’re ready to thrive.
Contact for this report: Dr Jeffrey Wilson Head of Research & Economics
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