StrategyAudit works with small and medium businesses. That offers a perspective into how things work, and don’t work, across a variety of domains. We are in a season full of forecasts, pundits everywhere are forecasting what tomorrow will bring. Most will be destined for the round bin, as any business knows, unless you address the foundational challenges and problems hindering performance today, building on top of a shaky foundation is a road to failure.
My advice is always to address three headline challenges.
Simplification.
Focus.
Mutual interest.
Each on their own are challenging. However, they are also interdependent, and compound with every small improvement. If we apply the same formula to the ‘Australian condition’ we can come up with a list of priority items that to date have been endlessly deferred by politics, vested interests, and lack of will.
Simplify
We have made governing, investing, and even trading across state lines needlessly complex. Every layer of approval and every bespoke state rule turns a national economy into a bureaucratic obstacle course.
One economy, not eight mini‑regulators
Harmonise licensing, product standards, and safety rules. Default to national templates unless a state can prove a unique public interest, which should then be applied nationally. Every extra bureaucratic form and protection of some politically engaged but fringe vested interest is a tariff disguised as stationery.
Regulation should protect the public, not the loudest lobby. Each new compliance layer should sunset unless proven that there is widespread benefit.
Transparent, fixed cycles for reform
Adopt four‑year fixed federal election cycles. Certainty attracts capital and allows initiatives to gather momentum before being re‑litigated by the next political marketing campaign. Genuine reform takes time to gather momentum. The current adversarial 3 year term is akin to a terminal case of cancer to most genuine reform.
Legal and regulatory compliance.
The legal and compliance regimes currently in place institutionalise and solidify power. Those with the resources will (almost) always win against those that do not, as the latter do not have the resources to leverage the necessary lawyers, accountants and relevant experts to argue a case. This mismatch represents a gross mismatch of equal opportunity, a foundation of the nation which is now just a cliche.
Focus
We cannot continue to fund everything but achieve little beyond self-congratulatory press releases, and a few happier individuals and enterprises. Choices must be made about where public capital, political effort, and regulatory clarity will deliver compounding national benefit. Choice requires that we actively choose what not to do. This side of the equation is ignored totally in public and political discourse.
Opportunity cost should be a mandatory line item in every budget and policy submission.
Direct capital to national capabilities
Pick a handful of sectors where we can win. Critical minerals, med‑tech, ag‑tech, renewables, and back them with predictable, performance‑based co‑investment. Stop scattering grants like confetti to the most cashed up and politically engaged opportunists. The absence of a clear national strategy inevitably results in disjointed capital allocations, delivering subpar outcomes. We do not have enough depth of capital to allow this to continue.
Build the grid before we build slogans
Power transmission, firming, and storage are the enablers of the renewable transition, which is happening, like it or not. Without them, debate, announcements, and political jockeying are just supercharged brakes on output. Treat the grid as a platform to future productivity and living standards, not as a project.
Tax what’s unearned, reward what’s built
Shift the tax system to favour productive effort over rent‑seeking. Reform land and capital gains taxes, reduce bracket creep, close offshore residency for tax purposes, return artificial domestic tax minimisation structures like trusts back to their original purpose, and simplify compliance. Productivity grows when builders beat speculators.
Tax reform is the most challenging domain, which is an indicator of its most important priority. With a massive majority in the reps, and an opposition fractured and almost irrelevant, there will never be a better chance to generate meaningful and long-term change than right now. Political history demonstrates that once a reform is instituted, subsequent governments might fiddle at the edges, but do not reverse the direction.
Maintain what we own
Ring‑fence funds for maintenance of infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. It’s cheaper to fix a leak than rebuild the roof.
Maintenance is far less politically ‘sexy’ than announcing new things, particularly things that can be opened, and generate lots of press releases and hard-hat photo opportunities. Maintenance over new investment is a choice, which sadly favours the latter to our detriment. Fix what you have before replacing it. At the very least, you get a better price when you sell it.
Mutual Interest
A society works when effort and reward align, and when long‑term collective benefit trumps short‑term political advantage. Education, national security, climate resilience, and competition all belong here. They’re not partisan, they are foundational.
Education that serves every child
Make needs‑based funding sector‑blind and tied to evidence‑based teaching. Publish learning growth metrics nationally. Equality of educational opportunity, irrespective of geography, socio economic position, and learning style and preference should be a national priority, not a slogan.
Shared national objectives
Matters of strategic importance: energy transition, sovereign capability, defence, and education should be somehow quarantined from the election cycle. A comprehensive national set of strategic priorities as previously noted is essential, requiring non-partisan engagement.
The real deficit is not fiscal, it’s moral. We lack the will to argue transparently, in public, with facts about the past and a clear sense of plausible futures beyond the next poll. Until that changes, reform will always be a press release.
Almost everything in the current adversarial culture of party and individual politics aligns itself against this absolute necessity if we are to leave the place better than we found it. There is really only one cure for the disease: collective leadership, and a leader who inspires followers. It seems we have run out of those!
The reasons these things won’t happen are familiar: politics seeks popularity, not durability; vested interests fund resistance; bureaucracies protect complexity; and the public has been trained to demand benefits without trade‑offs. None of that is inevitable.
The antidote is political courage married to public literacy. Tell the truth about the trade‑offs, publish the facts, and stop pretending that every tough decision can be deferred until after the next election.
This has been the last post for 2025. My thanks to the (very) few people who have stuck to reading the thoughts I have as presented in this blog. Amongst the tsunami of AI generated slop that is increasingly infecting publicly available platforms, it is becoming increasingly challenging to be seen.
Header by Nano Banana. it is an amazing tool!
