In addition to our ability to bring back into productive work people and capital equipment that had become unemployed during the recession, our very much improved growth performance in recent years has been the result of a whole range of policy changes - of reduced protection and regulation in the private sector, of corporatisation and privatisation of many formerly inefficient public sector enterprises, of a vastly less distorting tax structure, of port reform, of labour market reform, and all the rest.
If we want to build on that achievement in the years ahead, we must constantly be seeking areas where productivity can be further improved. At this stage, the aggregate numbers for the economy as a whole have led the Reserve Bank to base its economic projections on trend labour productivity growth of no more than 1.25 percent per annum.