Roy Green’s recent article on productivity reform offers one of the most cogent and hopeful visions for Australia’s economic future.

Where others reach for recycled prescriptions — deregulation, market incentives or digital gloss — Green maps out a deeper, more ambitious reform pathway: one grounded in innovation, institutional capacity and long-term structural renewal.

He is right to frame Labor’s second term as a critical turning point. For too long, Australia has relied on mineral rents, population growth and speculative housing to prop up national income. These are the markers not of an advanced innovation economy, but of a semiperipheral model: one in which wealth is extracted, rather than created; where policy clings to old comparative advantages instead of forging new frontiers.

This is where Green’s vision must be extended. Productivity reform must not be an end in itself. It must serve a national transformation: the relocation of Australia’s economy from the semiperiphery of the global system to its innovation-driven core. This is not just about raising GDP or boosting wages – it is about finally escaping the structural limitations of a quarry economy and staking our place as a first-tier, high-value, knowledge-producing nation.

For decades, Australia has lived off the lucky combination of iron ore, coal, immigration and housing booms. But this luck has come at a cost: a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, lagging business investment in R&D, declining economic complexity and a distorted labour market increasingly divided between low-paid service work and elite finance or resource sector incomes.

Green correctly points to the importance of frontier firms, advanced manufacturing and a coherent research and innovation system. But to truly shift the dial, these efforts must be seen as part of a larger industrial strategy, one that mobilises public investment, repurposes procurement, builds sovereign capability and deliberately upgrades Australia’s position in global value chains.

The Productivity Commission’s new pillars — dynamic economy, digital capability, clean energy, care sector efficiency — are welcome. But unless they are integrated into a national ambition to break out of our low value-adding trap, they risk fragmentation. We need a plan for co-ordinated uplift: in green technology, AI, critical minerals processing, advanced health industries, and the care economy – not just as services, but as sites of innovation and social transformation.

None of this will be easy. It means confronting the rent-seeking power of the fossil fuel lobby, the inertia of property speculation and a fiscal culture that treats public investment as a risk, not a responsibility. It also requires rethinking what counts as productivity: expanding our definition to include care, sustainability, community capability and Indigenous knowledge systems.

And it demands a bolder political narrative. Australians are ready for more than piecemeal policy. They deserve a national mission: to become not just wealthier, but wiser; not just richer, but more resilient; not just competitive, but co-operative and inclusive.

The commodity boom of the 2000s was a missed opportunity to modernise the economy. Let us not waste this one. Green is right to call for a productivity revolution. But it must be a revolution that relocates Australia — structurally, institutionally, and imaginatively — to the core of the global economic future.