Government reports come and go with great rapidity. Some are acted on, most are quickly pigeonholed. Last week Scott Morrison tabled a report from the Productivity Commission called Shifting the Dial, but it was soon lost amid all the excitement about raids on a union and politicians being thrown out of their jobs.
Despite this inauspicious beginning, let me make a fearless prediction: when the history of the economy in the early decades of the 21st century is written, this report will get prominence.
Why? Not because this government or the next will rush out to implement its recommendations, but because it will be seen as a turning point in the thinking of the nation's economic advisers.
The populist revolt against the doctrines of "neoliberalism" – or economic rationalism, as we've called it in Australia – has been apparent for most of this year. It's been apparent since the middle of the year that the long-running bipartisan consensus in support of neoliberalism in the advanced economies has collapsed.
But where to now? The economy and its apparatus are far from perfect and there's always something that needs working on. The econocrats need something to be working on to justify their existence, so what are they to do now that so many citizens are jack of deregulation and privatisation?
Well, now we know. Ostensibly, the commission's report is just the first of many five-yearly reports on ways to improve the economy's "productivity" – its ability to increase its outputs of goods and services faster than the increase in its inputs of land, labour and capital – the magic that's made us so much richer than our great-grandparents.
The Productivity Commission, would you believe, is preoccupied with productivity. Same old, same old.
Don't be deceived. The commission – formerly a leader of the economic rationalist charge – has taken the initiative in proposing an agenda for economic improvement that's quite different to what we've had so far.
Its new agenda attempts to restore public support for economic "reform" (a word it tries to avoid) by responding to popular criticism of the push that, while well-intentioned and necessary when it originated in the Hawke-Keating years, has since seemed to degenerate into "bizonomics" – what's good for big business is good for the rest of us.
Gone is the unending obsession with tax reform (cutting the rates of tax on companies and high-earning individuals) and industrial relations (cutting penalty rates and shifting bargaining power in favour of employers).
In their place, the commission focuses on three big issues: healthcare, education and cities.
On health, it argues there needs to be more emphasis on preventing and managing the growing incidence of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. This may involve less reliance on paying doctors according to fee-for-service.
The health system – state-run public hospitals in one box, most doctors in another and pharmaceuticals in a third – needs to be better integrated so as to make it more centred on the needs of patients rather than the suppliers of health care.
This greater co-ordination should happen at the local level.
On education, too many students are being let down at every level.
The commission finds that school results are deteriorating, vocational education and training is "a mess" and universities are more concerned with publishing research papers than improving teaching standards.
As for cities, they produce a growing portion of our gross domestic product – about 80 per cent, with Sydney and Melbourne accounting for half of that.
By the time we reach 2050, almost 11 million extra people will be squeezed into our capital cities, according to Morrison.
The social costs of congestion in our capital cities will grow from almost $19 billion a year in 2015 to more than $31 billion a year by 2030, we're told.
See how different all this is to the economic reform talk we're used to?
It's shifted the focus from business to the "non-market economy" run mainly by government bodies. It's less concerned with mining, farming and manufacturing, and more with the services sector.
Its approach to reform is bottom-up – concentrate on the needs of patients and students, on getting to work – not trickle down.
Putting it another way, it's people-friendly, not business-friendly.
The three issues are two-sided: they directly affect the wellbeing of individuals, but also the nation's productivity, as a healthier, better-skilled workforce gets to work more easily.
This means the "reform agenda" ought to be a lot more relevant and appealing to ordinary voters. It also means it can be pursued by either side of politics.
One of the great objections to the old agenda was fear that it benefited the better-off at the expense of the rest of us.
Rest easy – the commission has got the message.
"A key issue will be to ensure that future economic, social and environmental policies sustain inclusive [note that word]growth – by no means guaranteed given current policy settings, and prospective technological and labour market pressures ...
"One of the advantages of better healthcare, education systems and cities is that they provide strong prospects for improving lifetime outcomes for people from all backgrounds.
"Indeed, improvements in these areas have the potential to decrease health inequalities, and reduce job insecurity and wage risks for those whose skills are at most risk from technological change," the commission concludes.
