As fears mount the oil crisis could cause the Albanese government to shy away from ambitious changes to tax and spending in the May budget, Treasurer Jim Chalmers reiterated his assurance cost-of-living measures would not crowd out reform.
"I've got a heap of respect for Martin. I've worked closely with him for a long time, formally and informally, and I think he makes a really important point," Dr Chalmers told Sky News on Wednesday.
"In this budget, we're not choosing resilience or reform; we're choosing resilience and reform.
"Even with the quite extreme global economic uncertainty that we're seeing, that's no reason to hit the pause button on some really important changes that we need to make."
Anthony Albanese and his cabinet colleagues harboured plenty of ambition, Dr Chalmers said, denying the prime minister might clip his wings.
In an address to the National Press Club earlier on Wednesday, Dr Parkinson warned Australia was "staring into the risk of stagflation" - a scenario in which an economy is caught between the twin pressures of rapidly rising prices and mounting unemployment.
That made it all the more urgent to fix Australia's existing poor productivity performance, which was compounding the challenges of an ageing population and a declining ratio of working-age people.
"To deal with these challenges, we need a broader tax base with better targeted, more efficient taxes, or we need to cut expenditure to deliver a more sustainable fiscal position," he said.
"We need to incentivise innovation and investment to raise the speed limits to our growth rate, and we need either a larger working-age population or a far more productive working-age population.
"These windows of opportunity close quickly. When they are open, we need to strike and strike hard."
Dr Parkinson, alongside Settlement Services International chief executive Violet Roumeliotis, called for the government to address the under-utilisation of skilled migrant workers in Australia.
About 620,000 people in Australia were not working in their trained professions, while the nation faced skills shortages in those fields, because their qualifications were not recognised, Ms Roumeliotis said.
"There is ... a waiting room of wasted talent," she said.
"Doctors, nurses, aged care workers, tradespeople, engineers. But they're not waiting because they lack skills. They are waiting because of slow, expensive and unfair processes, just simply to recognise their credentials."
Dr Parkinson said short-term cost-of-living measures could go hand in hand with steps towards genuine reform in the budget.
He said it was unrealistic to expect the government would do nothing to ease consumer pressures, such as its decision to halve the fuel excise, despite economists warning it would exacerbate demand and inflation.
