Part of my job is making sure readers are kept fully informed about the messages our top econocrats are trying to get across to the public. They're usually much franker and clearer than the spin we get from our political leaders.

But just because I report their views faithfully doesn't mean I always agree with them. As it related to the outlook for the economy, the message in the speech Treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson delivered last week fitted well with the messages we've been getting from Glenn Stevens and Dr Philip Lowe, of the Reserve Bank.

Illustration: Michael Mucci.

It's a warning that, between the slowdown in our rate of productivity improvement, the expected continuing fallback in mineral export prices and the reversal of the ''demographic dividend'' delivered by the baby boomers, ''we face a significant challenge in maintaining the rate of growth in living standards that Australians have come to expect''.

Specifically, Parkinson projected that, even if we assume labour productivity grows at its long-term average, the other two factors would cause real income per person to grow by just 0.7 per cent a year over the decade to 2023-24, rather than the 2.3 per cent ''to which Australians have become accustomed''.