About the Consultation

The NSW Government invited submissions to inform development of the 2026–27 NSW Budget, with a focus on responsible fiscal management, reprioritisation, productivity uplift and improved wellbeing outcomes.

Consistent with recent Budget statements, the consultation emphasises practical, low-regret reforms that improve system efficiency, service delivery and value for money, rather than proposals reliant on significant new recurrent expenditure.

Across many portfolios, productivity constraints increasingly relate to how product, business and supply-chain data is specified, regulated and reused across government and industry systems.

Why this matters for NSW businesses and communities

NSW’s productivity challenge is increasingly a service-delivery and system-efficiency challenge.

Across priority areas - including health, infrastructure, housing, primary industries, waste and essential services - rising costs are driven not only by labour and inputs, but by fragmented data requirements, duplicated systems and inconsistent regulatory settings.

These inefficiencies have direct impacts on NSW Government priorities:

• Health system efficiency

  Inconsistent use of standard identifiers and data formats across procurement, logistics and clinical settings increases administrative effort, reduces visibility of product information and diverts scarce workforce capacity away from frontline care.

• Cost-of-living pressures

  When suppliers must comply with multiple labelling, identification or reporting regimes, those costs are embedded in the price of essential goods, including food, healthcare products, building materials and household items.

• Infrastructure, construction and housing delivery

  Poorly aligned product and materials data across construction supply chains contributes to delays, rework and higher project costs, directly undermining objectives to accelerate housing supply and infrastructure delivery.

• SMEs, regional businesses and primary industries

  Smaller and regional businesses face disproportionate compliance costs when navigating overlapping state, national and export requirements, affecting competitiveness and regional economic resilience.

• Circular economy and sustainability programs

  Fragmented approaches to data and verification across recycling and stewardship schemes increase administrative burden while limiting automation, trust and measurable outcomes.

Callout: Frontline Health Productivity

Former NSW Minister Victor Dominello recently observed and commented on a pathology nurse spending ten minutes manually entering patient details from a paper referral. While many GPs now use barcoded referrals, many specialists do not. Multiplied across clinics, this represents thousands of hours of avoidable administrative effort - time that could be redirected to patient care through simple, low-cost data standards.

Government across Australia can deliver $500M in annual healthcare savings according to an independent analysis by the Centre for International Economics (CIE). The CIE report shows that globally interoperable supply-chain data standards already deliver $19–27 billion in annual economic value to Australia, with a further $36–50 billion in potential productivity uplift available through broader, coordinated adoption.

For NSW, this represents a low-regret opportunity to deliver savings and efficiency across multiple portfolios without new regulatory regimes or major new spending, by embedding interoperability and data reuse into existing policy, procurement and service-delivery frameworks.

Mapping GS1 Australia’s Key Messages to NSW Government Priorities

Productivity, Reprioritisation & Fiscal Discipline

• Use interoperable data standards as a multiplier reform across portfolios

• Reduce administrative and compliance costs through coordination, not expansion

• Prioritise reforms that deliver measurable efficiency gains without new spending

Digital Government & Service Delivery

• Treat product, location and certification data as shared digital assets

• Enable “collect once, use many times” across regulation, procurement and delivery

• Avoid bespoke NSW-only systems where widely adopted global standards exist

Regulatory Efficiency & Cost-of-Living

• Reduce duplication in labelling, reporting and system changes for business

• Enable flexible, standards-based compliance approaches

• Lower downstream costs for consumers by reducing embedded compliance costs

Infrastructure, Housing & Essential Supply Chains

• Improve data quality and traceability in construction and infrastructure supply chains

• Support safer, more efficient regulated product supply chains

• Strengthen resilience of essential goods and services

Circular Economy & Sustainability

• Enable verifiable sustainability and recycled-content claims

• Reduce duplication across stewardship and reporting schemes

• Support measurable outcomes without increasing administrative burden

Key Documents & Links

• NSW Treasury – 2026–27 Pre-Budget Submissions

• GS1 Australia – 2026–27 NSW Pre-Budget Submission (PDF) Submitted December 2025

• GS1 Australia – NSW Pre-Budget Submission Questions and Responses (PDF) Submitted December 2025

• Centre for International Economics – Economic Value of Supply-Chain Data Standards