To win the 2022 election, Labor needed more than a "grab bag of policies", he told a Melbourne audience on Wednesday.

"What struck me was the number of people who contended that we should discard ideas based on nothing more than politics," he said of the fall-out from last year's defeat.

He would not elaborate on which ideas he was referring to, nor comment on the key problem policies of abolishing negative gearing and scrapping refunds for franking credits on shares. Instead, he said Labor should be "methodical" and get the right answers for the economy when it came up with a new suite of policies for 2022.

Dr Leigh, a leading economic thinker for the party, painted a stark picture of the state of the Australian economy as in a deep malaise that was not part of the normal economic cycle and could not be fixed by temporary stimulus.

"The risk to Australia is if we see these as temporary issues, and choose to blame bushfires or coronavirus," he said. "There's nothing temporary or transitional about these trends. The sad fact is that Australia's economy is less productive, less nimble, and less dynamic than many other advanced countries."

A decade ago, the top five companies in the United States included Exxon Mobil, Walmart and investor Berkshire Hathaway. Now, the top five were all technology companies.

In Australia, the top five have barely budgeted in a decade. A decade ago, the top five were the big four banks and BHP. Today, three of the banks and BHP were still on the list, with biotechnology firm CSL joining them.

Dr Leigh also pointed to Harvard University's comparison of economic complexity in different countries, which uses exports to compare countries from the starting point that nations that export silicon chips tend to produce more things than nations that export diamonds. On this measure, Japan, Switzerland and Korea are the world's most complex economies. Australia ranks behind Morocco, Uganda and Senegal in 93rd place.

He compared Australia to Detroit in the 1950s, thriving on car-making but destined for a crash because there were no start-ups. In Australia, the rate of new businesses starting up was 11 per cent a year. In the early 2000s, it was 14 per cent a year.

"For all the talk of Australia as a start-up nation, our new business creation rate isn't accelerating," he said. "... Our economy simply isn't hatching new firms like it used to."

People were changing jobs less often than they used to, with job-switching down from 11 per cent to 8 per cent, because there were fewer good opportunities available. Australians were also moving house less and moving interstate less.

And he said productivity had slipped into the negative, shrinking 0.2 per cent in the last financial year, after growing at about 2 per cent since the 1970s. Rising productivity was a central driver of rising living standards and without it, wages would stagnate and living standards stall.

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"Workers in the last financial year produced less per hour than the previous year," he said. "This isn't normal."

In the past two decades the productivity of 95 per cent of the country's businesses had barely risen. The most productive five per cent of companies had slipped by a third globally.

The best of "Made in Australia" hasn't kept pace with the best of "Made in Germany", "Made in the Netherlands" or even "Made in America", he said.

Dr Leigh said managers needed to become more Asia-literate, exposing them to new ideas and systems, and boosting exports. Australia needed to attract the best people into teaching, caps should be lifted on university places, massive open online courses needed to be accredited in higher education and more vocational education opportunities should be offered.

Australia should also encourage firms to collaborate with universities on research to stay on the leading edge of technology. And it should encourage innovation among women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities, for fresh inventions.