Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/James Ross)

Crikey readers yesterday took a stab at why Australia is finding it difficult to create meaningful productivity growth — responding to Jason Murphy’s take on the real costs of Australia’s endless growth pursuit. The consensus: it won’t come cheap or easy. Elsewhere, readers chatted about the war on superannuation and tried to guess Boris Johnson’s next move.

On productivity

John Macfarlane writes: I think that the reason that we haven’t seen the productivity growth expected from the internet boom, as you put it, is down to the nature of our economy: we are largely a primary producer — our main exports are agricultural and mineral. While we have seen productivity increases in these industries due to technologies like robotics and big data analytics, these industries are probably not as capable of productivity “revolutions” as something like high-tech manufacturing or similar. It wasn’t enough to just expect a productivity boom from technology alone, we needed to have an economy and industrial landscape that was receptive to it.

On the super war

Elizabeth Anderson writes: The Liberal Party has never agreed with the concept of super. Super gives ordinary Australians control over their retirement funds, something the Liberal Party does not want. The Liberal Party wants to control the lives of retirees by keeping them totally dependent on government for their standard of living, then offering increased pension benefits near elections to get their votes. Statistics clearly show that fewer retirees are dependent solely on the aged pension, thus reducing the influence able to be exerted on them by government.

John Hall writes: I would love to see the Industry Superannuation Funds creating their own political party — they could be a great third force to create a bit of tension in the Canberra ant hill!

On Boris’ next move

Charles Richardson writes: Once the EU has approved the extension, which now seems inevitable, I don’t think Johnson would have any trouble getting the numbers for an election if he wants it. It’s hard to see how Labour could justify blocking it, and not even clear that they’d want to.

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