David James Olney

1 September, 2026

This report follows How the hell did we get here? Why the West is a mess.

Executive Summary

The West is not condemned to remain a mess. Its problems are serious because they interact: economic insecurity weakens agency; weak agency narrows democratic participation; thin social connection increases anxiety; anxious politics rewards certainty and blame; institutions under pressure treat symptoms while causes accumulate. Russell Ackoff called this kind of entanglement a mess. A mess cannot be solved one department, target or election at a time. It must be owned as a system.

My previous report argued that recovery requires shared capability: enough security to act, power to matter, connection to belong, emotional maturity to tolerate difficulty, attention to understand complexity, and institutions able to convert understanding into action. This report develops that outline into a direction of travel. It is neither a single blueprint for “the West” nor a nostalgic return to the post-war order. Countries share pressures, but each must build a plan suited to its institutions, geography and history.

Britain offers an early demonstration. In his first weeks as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has begun translating themes from Head North into government: devolving revenue and responsibility, establishing No 10 North, reconnecting technical education with employers, using procurement to support jobs and skills, strengthening public influence over essentials, expanding community mental-health provision, and promising a preventative state and more council housing. These are beginnings, not outcomes. Funding, administrative capacity, constitutional durability and honest evaluation will decide whether “rewiring the state” becomes more than an attractive phrase.

Australia should borrow the method, not copy the machinery. A credible Australian plan would establish a secure floor beneath ordinary life; restore power to people who live by work; build housing and social infrastructure; give regions stable, accountable capacity; shape markets around public missions; connect vocational and university pathways; and require those who create risks to share their consequences. It would make prevention fundable, local experiments safe to fail, and successful models easy to expand.

The plan must also cultivate capable citizens. Grit without security becomes an instruction to endure injustice. Stoicism without solidarity becomes resignation. Nudges without structural reform become decoration. Used properly, however, perseverance, emotional maturity, moral ambition, thoughtful constraints and tolerance for uncertainty help citizens and institutions keep learning together.

Success will require patience. Reform must survive changes of government without becoming immune to correction. National standards should protect rights and redistribute resources, while regions adapt delivery to local conditions. Citizens, workers and communities must help frame problems, inspect results and challenge failure. Hope becomes durable when responsibility is shared and learning continues.

Progress should be judged by outcomes people can feel: affordable essentials, secure work, accessible services, stronger trust and participation, better health, restored places, more competitive markets and improved capacity to withstand shocks. We do not need perfect knowledge or a heroic announcement. We need a sound destination, clear principles, visible measures, distributed responsibility and the appetite to continue. The road to somewhere begins when possibility is converted into repeated, accountable action, and when citizens can see that acting together makes tomorrow better than today for them.

The car is getting faster

As a teenager in the 1980s, I remember the cool, unsettling cheerfulness of Talking Heads singing, “We’re on the road to nowhere.” Nearly fifty years later, the line feels less like surreal pop and more like a policy forecast. The West has been travelling without an agreed destination, and the car is getting faster. Even more frighteningly, the driver has a super-sized energy drink in one hand, is texting with the other, and is steering with their knees.

This is an exaggeration, but only just. We have more data, more computing power, more management systems, more consultants, more targets and more public commentary than any civilisation in history. Yet we routinely fail to make housing affordable, prevent foreseeable illness, build infrastructure on time, regulate concentrated power, prepare young people for adult life, or maintain public confidence that tomorrow will be better. Activity has multiplied faster than direction.

By the early 1990s, the Scorpions were singing about a “Wind of Change”. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War was ending. Liberal democracy seemed to have history behind it. The optimism was relaxed, infectious and real. It was also more vibe than plan. Western leaders treated victory in a geopolitical contest as proof that their economic and political model needed no serious maintenance. Globalisation, finance, technology and markets would carry us forward. The destination could remain vague because the vehicle appeared to be working.

It did work for many people in many ways. This is not an argument that the last fifty years produced nothing but decline. Life expectancy, educational access, disability technology, legal equality, scientific capability and consumer choice all improved. Australia remains prosperous, peaceful and institutionally capable by world standards. Britain retains a formidable public realm and civic inheritance. The West still has enormous resources with which to repair itself.

The problem is that progress in one part of the system became detached from security and belonging elsewhere. Wealth grew while housing moved beyond the reach of younger citizens. Digital connection expanded while attention and social connection frayed. Governments became better at measuring services while citizens experienced more difficulty navigating them. Individual choice widened while the capacity to shape the conditions surrounding those choices narrowed.

My previous report asked how the hell we got here. This report asks the more hopeful question: how do we get on the road to somewhere? Hope matters, but hope without a destination is merely another mood. What we need is some of the Scorpions’ confidence combined with a seriously cohesive and adaptable plan.

The previous diagnosis, turned towards action

The previous report described the West as a mess rather than a collection of separate problems. Ackoff used “mess” to mean a system of interacting problems. Housing affects health, work, family formation, geography and trust. Transport affects employment, education, community and carbon emissions. Secure work affects a person’s capacity to plan, challenge authority, care for others and participate in politics. Changing one element can improve several outcomes, but an apparently efficient intervention can also shift costs elsewhere.

This is why conventional government often disappoints. Departments optimise their own budgets. Ministers announce programs that fit electoral cycles. Businesses respond to incentives designed around measurable transactions. Citizens are asked to manage the resulting friction privately. A cost removed from one agency appears as a waiting list in another, unpaid labour in a household, exhaustion in a worker or preventable illness years later.

In the previous report I summarised eight directions for getting out of the mess. They deserve to be restated in more detail because they form the test for every proposal that follows.

First, rebuild the political and economic power of people who live by work. This means more than increasing wages after prices have already risen. It means sectoral bargaining where it fits, portable benefits, fair rules for contractors and platform workers, worker voice in technological change, stronger competition policy, and institutions through which carers, service workers, tradespeople, professionals and small businesses can organise. Daron Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism is useful here. Liberal democracy becomes credible when ordinary people have power within economic life, not only a vote every few years.

Second, make essential life less precarious. Affordable housing, healthcare, education, childcare, transport, energy, disability support and retirement security are not indulgences bestowed on passive recipients. They are foundations of agency. A secure person can leave an abusive employer, retrain, care for a relative, start a business, volunteer, participate in politics and tolerate the uncertainty involved in changing direction. Security is not the opposite of dynamism. Properly designed, it makes dynamism possible.

Third, reconnect reward with contribution and risk with decision. Taleb’s skin-in-the-game principle is both an ethical test and a design principle. Executives, investors, advisers and public officials should not capture short-term gains while exporting long-term costs to employees, customers, taxpayers or the environment. Decisions should leave an auditable trail. Incentives should extend beyond the announcement. When failure occurs, those responsible should share enough of the downside to learn from it.

Fourth, protect competition without worshipping markets. Markets are tools, not gods. Some goods are best produced in competitive markets; others through public provision, regulated utilities, cooperatives, mutuals or mixed models. The relevant question is not whether an institution is public or private in the abstract. It is whether it serves its purpose, distributes voice, preserves capability, limits extraction and learns from failure. Public ownership without competence can fail. Privatisation without competition can simply replace a public monopoly with a private tollbooth.

Fifth, rebuild community as social infrastructure. Libraries, parks, sporting clubs, neighbourhood houses, adult education, unions, arts organisations, faith communities, local media and hospitable streets create repeated contact. They allow people to become known, useful and accountable to one another. Governments cannot manufacture friendship, but planning, funding and institutional design can make connection easier or harder. When every place to meet requires a purchase, loneliness acquires an entry fee.

Sixth, treat attention as a human and civic resource. A democracy cannot deliberate if its citizens are exhausted, interrupted and emotionally manipulated. Schools need protected time for reading, conversation, play and device-free interaction. Workplaces should reward outcomes rather than constant visible responsiveness. Technology policy should reduce manipulative design, protect children, make data use intelligible and give users meaningful control. Attention is not only a private productivity issue. It is part of the infrastructure of judgment.

Seventh, teach emotional maturity without turning life into therapy. Mature citizens can experience strong feelings without treating those feelings as infallible evidence. They can admit error, tolerate ambiguity, distinguish discomfort from danger, hear criticism, repair relationships and remain in a conversation with people they dislike. Families, schools, workplaces and public institutions all shape these capacities. Emotional education should enlarge agency and responsibility, not turn every difficulty into an identity or diagnosis.

Finally, design institutions to manage messes. Bring affected citizens, frontline workers, technical experts and decision-makers into the same problem-framing process. Track burdens displaced outside a program’s budget. Reduce the marginal losses created by needless forms, handovers, delays and incompatible systems. Preserve redundancy where failure would be catastrophic. Experiment on a scale where failure teaches rather than destroys, then expand what works.

These directions do not amount to a shopping list. They are mutually reinforcing. Security creates room for agency. Agency enables participation. Participation supplies knowledge and legitimacy. Skin in the game improves accountability. Local experimentation produces learning. Social connection and emotional maturity allow disagreement without social breakdown. Together they begin to convert private coping into shared capability.

Start at the end: what would “somewhere” look like?

Dan Bingham’s Start at the End argues for reverse-engineering success from a desired outcome. This sounds obvious, but public policy often begins at the other end: with an existing department, a funding envelope, an available announcement or a technology searching for a problem. The result may be competently delivered movement without meaningful progress.

If we begin at the end, the destination is not a number on a national accounts spreadsheet. It is a society in which most people can reasonably plan a good life. A young adult can imagine secure housing, useful work and relationships that have time to deepen. A parent can combine paid work and care without continuous crisis. A person who becomes ill or disabled can obtain support without becoming an expert in administrative combat. A worker can challenge an unsafe decision without risking economic ruin. A small business can compete without being crushed by a monopoly gatekeeper. A community can influence the development imposed upon it and share in the value it helps create.

This destination includes economic growth, but it asks what growth is for, how it is produced and who acquires the capacity it creates. It includes freedom, but distinguishes theoretical choice from practical agency. It includes resilience, but refuses to make resilience a polite word for absorbing repeated institutional failure.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind supplies an important premise: most people are more cooperative, decent and capable of mutual aid than cynical institutions assume. Nicholas Christakis’s Blueprint makes a related evolutionary argument. Human beings carry capacities for friendship, cooperation, teaching and social learning as well as aggression and selfishness. Neither author proves that good societies arise automatically. They tell us that cooperation is not a fantasy requiring a different species.

Bregman’s later idea of moral ambition adds motion to that premise. A society should make it prestigious to use talent on consequential, neglected and solvable problems. That requires more than telling graduates to choose worthy careers. It requires public institutions, firms and civic organisations in which useful work is properly paid, well led and capable of achieving something. Moral ambition collapses into burnout when admirable people are inserted into systems designed to frustrate them.

The destination, then, is a capable society rather than a permanently rescued population. Citizens have secure foundations, meaningful ways to contribute and evidence that collective action works. Institutions make promises sparingly, keep them visibly and admit what they do not know. Politics returns to the construction of shared foundations rather than the distribution of private coping advice.

Before Australia, look at Britain’s live experiment

Every country needs its own route. Ian Bremmer’s G-Zero argument was that no single power was willing and able to organise the global system. That diagnosis has only become more persuasive as geopolitical rivalry, climate shocks, disrupted trade and weakened international institutions have grown. Cooperation remains essential, but no Australian government can wait for a benevolent global leader to solve housing, skills, trust or regional inequality.

Britain illustrates both the need for a national plan and the danger of copying one. It is unusually centralised. Westminster and Whitehall have controlled decisions and money that comparable democracies often distribute more widely. Head North, by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, argues that Britain cannot reduce regional inequality without redistributing power and money. Its moral foundation is not administrative tidiness. It is the experience of places whose knowledge was dismissed and citizens who confronted institutions able to control information, delay accountability and outlast them.

The Hillsborough campaign is central to that outlook. The disaster and the long struggle for truth revealed what happens when institutions possess more legal, informational and financial power than the people harmed by them. A duty of candour and publicly supported representation are therefore not peripheral legal reforms. They are attempts to give citizens skin in the game’s necessary counterpart: a fair capacity to challenge those who exercise power.

Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026. It is far too early to declare success. At the time of writing, most of his government’s program consists of announcements, initial decisions and promised frameworks. The October budget, subsequent legislation, administrative capability and cooperation from other levels of government will determine what survives contact with reality. A direction of travel is not an arrival.

It is nevertheless a coherent direction. The creation of No 10 North in Manchester is partly symbolic, but symbols matter when they are attached to altered routines and authority. Burnham has said he will work there weekly. The reinstated National Economic Council includes regional mayors. The government has described the office as a situation room for growth, with responsibilities linked to essential utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration. The test will be whether it changes decisions, not merely their postcode.

The more substantial step is the promised transfer of power and revenue to English mayors. Plans announced on 30 July would allow mayors to retain a greater share of business rates and, eventually, income-tax revenue, while gaining control over jobs, transport, housing and public services. Areas without mayors would be assisted to establish strategic authorities. This begins to answer Head North‘s complaint about the “begging bowl”: local leaders cannot plan seriously if every project depends on a competitive grant designed in London and withdrawn at the next change of fashion.

Yet fiscal devolution creates its own risks. Rich places can raise more than poor places. Local leaders can centralise power just as national leaders do. Unequal administrative capacity can produce unequal services. Revenue autonomy therefore needs transparent equalisation, national minimum standards, audit, citizen scrutiny and constitutional durability. Moving power closer is not the same as making it accountable.

The emerging skills policy is similarly aligned with the book’s argument. New technical routes would give students access from age fourteen to practical skills, work experience and employer relationships. Mayors are promised greater influence over post-16 education budgets. Public procurement for large contracts will give greater weight to high-quality jobs, local skills, apprenticeships and work placements. This connects education, industrial policy and public purchasing rather than leaving each in a separate silo.

The potential is significant, but so is the danger of creating an inferior track for children whose parents lack influence. Technical education must have parity of esteem, permeable pathways into higher education, rigorous general education and real employer demand. A hard hat should be valued as much as a graduation cap, but neither should become a ceiling placed on a fourteen-year-old.

Burnham has also begun to join immediate relief to structural change. Removing VAT from domestic electricity bills for the current financial year, capping eligible bus fares at £2 during 2027, cutting business rates for pubs, social clubs and live-music venues, and acting against subscription traps are “everyday fixes”. They offer breathing space and signal that government notices ordinary friction. The risk is that temporary relief substitutes for reform. Cheaper bills today do not by themselves create an affordable, decarbonised energy system tomorrow.

The longer-term agenda points towards stronger public control of essential services, a national care service, more council housing, Housing First for homelessness, expanded community mental-health facilities and the use of procurement to rebuild domestic capability. Burnham’s first speech described a preventative state that invests in people’s success rather than paying for failure. That is Dan Heath’s upstream logic translated into politics: move towards the source of harm before expensive crisis response becomes the permanent operating model.

Again, the caveat matters. Public control does not magically create competence. Britain’s fiscal rules constrain investment; defence promises compete for resources; the capacity of local government has been eroded; and nationalising a troubled utility or industrial asset can inherit years of neglect. If the state wants to lead, it must rebuild the engineering, commercial, procurement and operational knowledge that outsourcing allowed to wither.

Burnham’s early program is therefore best understood as a prototype. It aligns place, power, essentials, prevention, skills, public investment and institutional candour. That is already more coherent than a pile of isolated announcements. But coherence on paper must become capability in practice, and capability must produce outcomes citizens can feel.

Australia cannot Head North, but it can distribute power

Australia is not Britain with better weather and more road between the towns. We already have a federal constitution, powerful states and territories, compulsory voting, an independent electoral administration, universal Medicare and a long history of public economic development. Responsibility is distributed, but revenue and accountability are often not. The Commonwealth raises much of the money; states deliver many essential services; local councils shape daily places with limited fiscal capacity. Citizens encounter the result as buck-passing.

An Australian version of the Head North method should not create another heroic tier of mayors or another capital-city office. It should align authority, funding and accountability at the level where a problem can be understood and acted upon. National government should set rights, standards, equalisation and large missions. States and territories should integrate housing, transport, health, education and land use. Regions and councils should have stable capacity to adapt those systems to place. Indigenous communities should exercise genuine authority through structures they design, consistent with self-determination rather than consultation after decisions have been made.

The destination must also reflect Australia’s geography. A policy that works in inner Melbourne may be useless in the Pilbara, western New South Wales or a remote First Nations community. Regional capability cannot mean shifting duties to small councils without engineers, planners, data systems or revenue. Devolution without capacity is abandonment wearing a democratic hat.

What follows is an optimistic stretch, but it is grounded in institutions Australia already possesses. The plan is not to invent a new country. It is to connect existing strengths, repair missing links and change the incentives that repeatedly return us to crisis.

An Australian road to somewhere

1. Put a secure floor beneath ordinary life

The first mission should be to make it possible for people to plan. This requires a national definition of essential security covering housing, healthcare, energy, transport, childcare, disability support, digital access and income during predictable transitions. The floor would not guarantee comfort or remove all risk. It would ensure that one illness, rent rise, redundancy or caring obligation does not routinely destroy a household’s future.

Housing must sit at the centre because it connects almost everything else. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council reported in 2026 that Australia remained off course on affordability and supply. Building more homes is necessary, but supply is not a magic incantation. Governments must coordinate serviced land, planning, construction skills, infrastructure and finance while expanding social and affordable housing at scale. Public land should be leased or developed under conditions that preserve long-term affordability rather than sold once to repair a budget.

A workable settlement would combine faster approvals in well-serviced areas, firm design and environmental standards, greater density around transport, construction-sector training, modern methods of construction, stronger renter security, and a sustained public and community-housing pipeline. Tax settings that reward passive land gains should be reviewed gradually and transparently, with transition arrangements that avoid creating a new shock. Housing policy should be judged by secure homes delivered, not dollars announced or applications processed.

Healthcare needs the same upstream turn. Australia spends heavily treating preventable complications while primary care, mental-health support, dental care and social services remain fragmented. Pooled regional funding could allow primary-health networks, hospitals, councils and community organisations to invest in interventions whose savings occur outside their own budgets. A home modification that prevents a fall, a community nurse who stabilises chronic illness, or secure housing for a person leaving hospital may save money in another system years later. Current accounting often makes prevention look expensive because avoided suffering has no invoice.

This secure floor is Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism in practical form. It does not abolish markets or personal responsibility. It gives ordinary citizens sufficient independence to exercise both. Freedom becomes more than the formal right to choose between options one cannot afford.

2. Restore power to people who live by work

Australian trade-union membership was 13.1 per cent of employees in 2024, down from 40 per cent in 1992. The precise institutional response is contestable, but the imbalance is clear. Individual workers cannot bargain on equal terms with concentrated employers, labour-hire chains, franchisors, platforms and automated management systems.

The objective should be organised voice, not nostalgia for one model of unionism. Sectoral standards can prevent low-road employers from competing through poor wages and conditions. Portable leave, training and insurance can follow workers across jobs and platforms. Worker representatives should participate when artificial intelligence or automation changes job design. Procurement should reward firms that train, retain and develop people, not those that submit the lowest visible price while exporting turnover and insecurity to the public.

Grit belongs here, but in its proper place. Angela Duckworth describes grit as passion and perseverance towards long-term goals. Those qualities matter enormously. States, firms and citizens will need stamina to sustain reforms beyond an election or a burst of enthusiasm. But grit cannot substitute for a fair track. Telling a casual worker to persevere through unpredictable hours or a young family to become more resilient to unaffordable housing is structural failure disguised as character education.

The task is to build institutions that deserve people’s perseverance. Employers should offer progression, mastery and voice. Vocational education should connect to real careers rather than a churn of certificates. Public servants should be allowed to retain expertise and speak honestly. Passion grows when effort can plausibly change an outcome.

3. Join skills, industry and place

Australia already has the beginnings of a mission-oriented state. The Future Made in Australia framework identifies sectors where net-zero transformation, comparative advantage or economic security justify coordinated public support. Mariana Mazzucato’s argument in The Entrepreneurial State is not that bureaucrats can pick every winner. It is that states have always shaped markets, funded uncertain research and absorbed risks private capital would not take alone. The question is whether public investment has a clear mission, builds capability and returns value to the public.

An Australian plan should select a limited number of long-horizon missions: abundant clean energy; affordable, low-carbon housing; resilient food and water systems; sovereign health and emergency capability; accessible digital and assistive technology; and regional value-adding in critical minerals and advanced manufacturing. Missions should be broad enough to invite competing solutions but narrow enough to measure.

Public support must carry conditions. Recipients should provide apprenticeships, local supply-chain opportunities, transparent tax practices, emissions performance and mechanisms for sharing exceptional upside. Grants should not become gifts to companies that later move capability offshore. Equity, royalties, repayable finance or price conditions can preserve a public return. This is skin in the game applied to industrial policy.

The skills system must be built into each mission. Jobs and Skills Australia continues to identify shortages driven by long training pipelines, weak entry, suitability gaps and poor retention. Importing skilled workers remains valuable, but it cannot be the permanent answer to conditions that drive trained people away. TAFE, universities, employers and unions should form regional skills compacts with shared data, paid placements and permeable qualifications. A person should be able to move from apprenticeship to diploma to degree and back into advanced practice without starting again.

Burnham’s technical pathways offer inspiration and warning. Australia should expose every secondary student to practical, academic, civic and creative learning, then allow specialisation without creating a hierarchy of children. Work placements must be safe, paid where substantial, and connected to learning. Employers receiving major public contracts should help create the workforce they say is missing.

4. Give regions capacity, not begging bowls

Australia needs ten-year regional settlements negotiated among the Commonwealth, states, territories, local government and, where relevant, First Nations authorities. These agreements should cover a small number of outcomes across housing, transport, skills, health, climate resilience and economic development. Funding should be stable enough to retain staff and sequence investments. National equalisation should ensure that poorer regions are not punished for having a smaller tax base.

Authority should follow subsidiarity: make decisions at the lowest level capable of managing their consequences, while keeping national standards where rights and redistribution require them. Regions should control integrated transport, local skills commissioning, elements of preventive health, place-based procurement and portions of development value. States remain essential because metropolitan transport, hospitals, energy grids and housing markets cross municipal boundaries.

Local power also requires local scrutiny. Regional assemblies or citizen panels could review ten-year plans, major projects and annual performance. Independent audit should follow money across institutional boundaries. Data should be accessible, disaggregated and connected to lived outcomes. A project that meets its budget while increasing travel time, administrative burden or ecological risk has not necessarily succeeded.

This is where Australia can improve on the British experiment. We do not need to concentrate hope in charismatic mayors. Leadership can be distributed among elected representatives, public servants, Indigenous organisations, unions, businesses, universities and civic groups. Keith Ferrazzi’s Leading Without Authority is useful here, because systemic change rarely waits for a neat chain of command. Coalitions can begin aligning practice before legislation catches up.

5. Make democracy something people do

Compulsory voting gives Australia a strong democratic floor, and confidence often rises after a well-run election. Yet voting is not the same as participation, and a post-election bounce in satisfaction can coexist with deep distrust of politicians, media and institutions. Democracy weakens when citizens are treated as an audience between elections and a source of complaints during them.

National and state governments should make deliberative participation routine for complex, long-term questions. Properly selected citizens’ assemblies can hear evidence, question experts, deliberate across difference and recommend options. They do not replace parliaments. They improve the information and legitimacy available to them. Governments should be required to publish a reasoned response.

A public duty of candour should apply when Australian institutions investigate serious harm. Officials and contractors must preserve records, correct misleading statements and assist inquiries. People harmed by the state should have access to representation comparable to the public bodies appearing against them. Hillsborough’s lesson travels well: accountability cannot depend on citizens outlasting institutions with vastly greater resources.

Political finance, lobbying, revolving-door appointments and major procurement decisions should be more visible. Taleb’s symmetry principle suggests a simple question: who gains if this decision succeeds, and who pays if it fails? The answer should be public before the decision becomes irreversible.

Civic education also needs repair. Students should learn how federal, state and local responsibilities interact, how to evaluate claims, how to participate in a meeting, how to disagree constructively and how institutions can be changed. Emotional maturity is democratic infrastructure. A plural society cannot function if disagreement is automatically interpreted as injury, betrayal or proof of evil.

6. Treat connection, attention and emotional maturity as infrastructure

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare links loneliness and social isolation with poorer mental and physical health and lower wellbeing. A national response should not begin with an app telling lonely people to connect. It should begin with the places, time and institutions through which connection occurs.

Every major housing and transport plan should include a social-infrastructure assessment. Are there libraries, parks, shaded paths, sporting facilities, neighbourhood houses, accessible venues and affordable rooms in which groups can meet? Can a disabled person reach them? Can a teenager be present without having to purchase something? Can a volunteer organisation obtain insurance and a key without navigating an administrative obstacle course?

Funding should favour stable local institutions rather than endless short pilots. Small grants matter, but the deepest community work depends on relationships that take years to form. Governments can reduce marginal losses by creating common applications, multi-year agreements and proportionate reporting. Accountability should protect public money without consuming the time that volunteers and frontline staff need to serve people.

Attention policy is inseparable from this work. Schools should establish clear, age-appropriate device rules while teaching digital judgment rather than pretending technology can be banished. Public agencies should design communications that citizens can understand in one reading. Employers should limit unnecessary monitoring and after-hours interruption. Platforms serving children should face stronger duties around addictive design, privacy and recommendation systems.

Society also needs ordinary language for emotional maturity: recognising feelings without obeying every impulse, accepting limits, apologising, repairing, waiting, keeping perspective and staying connected through discomfort. Harry Moffitt’s The Fourth Pillar offers a modern Stoic frame built around judgment, discipline, courage and service. Used thoughtfully, Stoicism can help people distinguish what they can influence from what they cannot and act well under pressure.

The qualification is essential. “Broicism” turns Stoicism into performative toughness, domination and the denial of vulnerability. At its worst, it tells people harmed by structural conditions to control their reaction while leaving the conditions intact. A civic Stoicism should be paired with solidarity: govern yourself where you can, support others where they cannot, and organise together against avoidable harm. Acceptance of reality is the beginning of action, not surrender to injustice.

7. Build an upstream, antifragile state

Dan Heath observes that societies become trapped in response because emergencies are visible, urgent and owned, while prevention is dispersed and its successes are absences. Nobody holds a press conference for the crisis that did not happen. An upstream state must therefore change budgets and accountability, not merely its rhetoric.

Every major spending portfolio should identify preventable demand and publish a prevention account: where pressure originates, which interventions have evidence, who must cooperate, when benefits are expected, and which budget will capture them. Treasury rules should allow investment when costs occur now but benefits appear across agencies or electoral terms. Independent evaluation should protect prevention from becoming a label attached to ordinary spending.

Antifragility adds a different requirement. Taleb distinguishes systems that resist shocks from those that learn and improve through manageable stress. A society should not seek disasters in order to grow. It should allow small variations, preserve redundancy, distribute experimentation and prevent local failure from cascading through the whole.

Amy Edmondson’s “intelligent failure” supplies the operational discipline. A useful experiment occurs in genuinely uncertain territory, is informed by available knowledge, limited in scope and designed to produce learning. It is not negligence renamed innovation. We should be enthusiastic about a reversible trial of a new regional service model and extremely cautious about a national digital replacement that removes every fallback on launch day.

David Epstein’s Inside the Box shows how constraints can improve focus and creativity. Australia’s constraints are substantial: a small population spread across a continent, limited construction capacity, ageing infrastructure, climate exposure, fiscal pressure and a fragmented federation. These limits can force useful design questions. Which missions matter most? What can be standardised nationally? What must remain adaptable locally? Which scarce capabilities should be built once and shared? Constraint becomes productive when it narrows attention without narrowing imagination.

This yields a practical architecture: national standards and shared platforms; regional variation and experimentation; transparent measures; redundancy for critical systems; and rapid exchange of learning. Safe-to-fail does not mean free-to-harm. It means containing downside while keeping discovery possible.

The ethics of implementation: better, not perfect

Owning a mess this large requires ambition about the destination and humility about implementation. The danger is not only that governments attempt too little. A grand plan can also promise simultaneous transformation, overwhelm the public servants and local institutions expected to deliver it, and become politically brittle when its first component disappoints. The answer is disciplined iteration: hold the direction steady, begin with a manageable set of high-leverage actions, expose assumptions, learn quickly and expand only when capacity and evidence justify it.

Rebecca Ray’s Good, Great, Perfect helps distinguish high standards from the paralysing demand to get everything right before acting. Richard Koch’s 80/20 principle is not a mathematical shortcut for public policy; it is an invitation to identify the few interventions capable of improving several parts of the mess at once. Owain Service and Rory Gallagher’s Think Small turns those priorities into concrete goals, manageable steps, commitments, feedback and rewards. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge shows how defaults and choice architecture can make beneficial action easier without removing choice. Together, these ideas connect the report’s systemic ambition to the daily practice of reform: choose interventions that reinforce one another, reduce needless friction, test them at a scale where failure teaches, and keep improving rather than waiting for a flawless beginning.

These ideas belong inside a systemic plan, but they must not shrink it into personal housekeeping. A better default can increase retirement saving; it cannot make an inadequate wage sufficient. A reminder can improve appointment attendance; it cannot create an available doctor. A simplified application can reduce friction; it cannot compensate for a housing shortage. Nudges should help people use good systems, not help bad systems blame their users more efficiently.

The 80/20 question is nevertheless powerful. Which early actions would improve several parts of the mess? Building social and affordable housing near transport supports security, labour mobility, health and emissions reduction. Strengthening primary care reduces hospital pressure and household precarity. Aligning procurement with skills creates jobs while building capability. Multi-year regional funding improves planning, workforce retention and accountability. A duty of candour improves institutional learning as well as justice.

“Good enough” should mean sufficient to test safely and improve, not mediocre forever. The first version of a program should state its assumptions, limits and measures. Teams should be rewarded for finding and correcting failure early. Citizens should be told what will happen next if evidence is disappointing. Perfectionism delays learning; complacency prevents it.

Alexander’s Question: what would make me change my mind?

A plan claiming to be adaptable must say what would cause it to change.

I would revise the emphasis on security as a foundation for agency if comparable places that made housing, health, education and income transitions more secure experienced no improvement in mobility, participation, entrepreneurship, family stability or wellbeing. It is possible for badly designed security to produce dependency, insider privilege or fiscal fragility. The answer would be to redesign the institution, not assume every expansion is beneficial.

I would revise the case for devolution if regions given stable authority and funding did not outperform centralised administration in responsiveness, integration, trust or innovation, or if local capture and postcode inequality routinely outweighed those gains. Devolution should therefore be staged, measured and accompanied by equalisation, minimum standards and independent scrutiny.

I would revise the mission-state argument if conditional public investment consistently crowded out superior private investment, entrenched incumbents, produced no additional capability or returned less public value than neutral alternatives. Mazzucato’s work is a case for a capable, learning state, not a blank cheque for ministerial enthusiasm.

I would abandon particular prevention programs when credible evaluation showed that they did not reduce harm or merely displaced it. Upstream rhetoric can become as evasive as crisis rhetoric if no one specifies the causal pathway, timeframe and counterfactual.

I would revise the argument about participation if citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative mechanisms were repeatedly captured, unrepresentative or ignored, or if they reduced rather than improved trust. Participation without influence becomes theatre. Influence without representative safeguards can empower the loudest participants.

I would also revise my optimism about Burnham if the promised transfer of power remained discretionary, if fiscal equalisation proved inadequate, if public-control announcements failed to build operational capacity, or if the ten-year plan avoided hard trade-offs. Early coherence deserves attention, not immunity from evidence.

Most importantly, I would reject the synthesis if its elements worked only as attractive metaphors. Antifragility can romanticise hardship. Grit can excuse exploitation. Stoicism can become resignation. Moral ambition can become self-righteousness. Nudges can distract from power. Devolution can relocate inequality. Public investment can socialise losses. Every principle requires counterweights, measurement and people able to challenge it.

This is not a weakness in the plan. It is the plan. Simone Stolzoff’s How to Not Know argues that tolerance for uncertainty can support creativity, empathy and sounder decisions. Being comfortable with uncertainty does not mean being vague about values. We can be certain that dignity, shared power, ecological viability, candour and the capacity to plan matter, while remaining open about which instruments will work best.

From possibility to probability

Owning the mess requires a sequence. Attempting everything simultaneously would overwhelm the very institutions we need to rebuild. Doing nothing until a complete blueprint exists would preserve the status quo. The answer is a limited first wave tied to a longer destination.

In the first two years, Australia could establish a national shared-capability compact with the states and territories; legislate transparent mission and community-benefit rules for public investment; select several regional demonstration areas; create prevention accounts in major portfolios; expand social and affordable housing pipelines on public land; strengthen portable entitlements; and introduce a public duty of candour. Each action already has institutional precedents. The innovation would be to connect them and publish common measures.

Within five years, regional settlements could integrate housing, transport, skills and preventive health; technical and academic education pathways could become genuinely permeable; major public procurement could be routinely linked to training, local capability and public return; and citizens’ assemblies could become a normal input into contested long-term decisions. Successful demonstrations should expand, failed ones should close or change, and the reasons should be public.

Across ten to fifteen years, the objective would be visible change in the conditions of life: a larger stock of permanently affordable housing; cheaper clean energy; stronger primary care; higher workforce participation and mobility; deeper vocational capability; shorter administrative journeys; healthier local institutions; greater resilience to climate and supply shocks; and improved confidence that governments can keep promises.

Measures should include distribution, not only averages. National prosperity can rise while a generation loses access to housing. Employment can rise while insecurity and underemployment remain concentrated. Service activity can rise while outcomes deteriorate. A public dashboard should track affordability of essentials, security of work, waiting times, preventable hospital use, training completion, market concentration, social connection, democratic participation, emissions, regional gaps and citizens’ experience of administrative burden.

The dashboard must not become another target factory. Quantitative measures need narrative evidence from citizens and frontline workers. Independent evaluators should look for gaming, displaced costs and unequal effects. Parliament should debate outcomes across portfolios rather than hearing each department defend its own output.

Citizens cannot wait passively for ideal leaders. Ferrazzi is right that leadership does not always require authority. People can join unions and professional bodies, support local journalism, volunteer, convene neighbourhood projects, participate in consultations, create cooperatives, ask institutions for evidence and reward businesses that share risk fairly. Bregman’s moral ambition asks capable people to direct time and talent towards problems that matter.

But private action cannot substitute for public reform. The point is to create pressure, demonstrate alternatives and build the civic muscle that large change requires. Citizens should not have to repair the bridge themselves. They should be able to organise, insist that it be repaired, contribute local knowledge and hold the responsible institution to account.

A hopeful discipline

Hope is sometimes treated as an emotion that arrives when circumstances improve. It is more useful to understand it as a discipline: the practice of identifying possibilities, choosing a direction and acting without a guarantee. Bregman and Christakis give us grounds for confidence in human cooperation. Heath shows that prevention is possible. Edmondson shows that failure can teach. Epstein shows that constraints can focus creativity. Taleb shows why distributed experiments, redundancy and shared risk matter. Stolzoff shows that uncertainty need not produce paralysis.

None of them gives us a master lever, because none exists. Their ideas become powerful when they correct one another. Moral ambition needs humility. Grit needs security and an exit from futile effort. Stoicism needs solidarity. The mission state needs skin in the game. Devolution needs equalisation. Nudge needs structure. Intelligent failure needs boundaries. Antifragility needs protection from catastrophic downside. Hope needs measurement.

The West also needs to recover the connection between expectation and citizenship. Ted Robert Gurr’s concept of relative deprivation concerns the gap between what people believe they should reasonably receive and what they believe they can attain. It does not mean disappointment automatically produces violence, and later research has qualified any simple causal chain. It does help explain why a society can become angrier even while remaining wealthy in absolute terms.

For decades, citizens were encouraged to expect expanding choice but became less confident about secure housing, stable work, public services and influence. Improvements and risks were personalised. If you succeeded, the story credited your choices. If you struggled, the story examined your habits. Politics captured by those who live by wealth stopped reliably constructing foundations that socialise improvement and socialise risk.

A road to somewhere would restore a defensible expectation: not that every year will be easy, every child richer than their parents or every shock avoided, but that shared institutions will help people convert effort into a good life and will not leave them alone with socially created risks. When setbacks occur, the system will tell the truth, learn and improve.

This expectation is demanding because it creates obligations in both directions. The state must become more capable and candid. Firms must contribute to the systems from which they profit. Citizens must participate, tolerate disagreement and accept that shared goals sometimes constrain private preference. Rights remain essential, but a functioning society also depends on duties, contribution and repair.

Conclusion: turn the wheel

The road metaphor can only take us so far, but it leaves us with a useful distinction. A destination is not a fixed route. Governments cannot predict the technologies, crises, migrations, climatic pressures or political conflicts of the next fifteen years. A rigid blueprint would be obsolete before the paint dried.

What can remain stable are the principles: people need security to exercise agency; those affected by decisions need voice; reward should remain connected to contribution; decision-makers should share risk; markets should serve public purposes; prevention should be fundable; local knowledge should meet national solidarity; institutions should admit uncertainty and learn; and progress should be visible in ordinary life.

Andy Burnham’s early government shows what it looks like when several of these ideas are brought into the same political story. Power moves closer to place. Skills connect with industry. Procurement connects with jobs. Essentials return to public purpose. Immediate relief sits beside a ten-year promise. Prevention becomes a stated function of the state. The experiment may fail, stall or disappoint. Its value at this stage is that it makes an alternative imaginable.

Australia can do more than imagine. It already has federal institutions, capable public agencies, compulsory voting, universal programs, world-class universities, strong civic organisations, renewable resources and communities accustomed to responding together when disaster arrives. Its problem is not an absence of assets. It is the failure to connect them around a destination and sustain action beyond a political cycle.

We do not need perfect. We need better, followed by the appetite to become better again. We do not need to know everything. We need sound principles, honest measures, safe experiments, clear responsibilities and enough humility to change course. We do not need citizens to wait for a heroic driver. We need them to help choose the destination, inspect the vehicle, share the work and insist that power carries consequences.

For almost fifty years, too much of the West has confused speed with progress and choice with control. The way out is not to slam on the brakes and reverse towards an imaginary golden age. It is to take hold of the wheel, put down the phone, decide where a good society ought to go and begin building the shared capability required to get there.

The road to somewhere starts when we own the mess as ours.

 

References and Further Reading

Books central to this report

Ackoff, R. L. (1978). The Art of Problem Solving, Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables. John Wiley & Sons.

Acemoglu, Daron (2026). What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. Profile Books.

Bingham, Dan (2021). Start at the End: How Reverse-Engineering Can Lead to Success. Welbeck Publishing Group.

Bregman, Rutger (2020). Humankind: A Hopeful History. Bloomsbury.

Bregman, Rutger (2025). Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. Bloomsbury.

Bremmer, Ian (2012). Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. Penguin.

Burnham, Andy and Steve Rotheram (2024). Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain. Trapeze.

Christakis, Nicholas A. (2019). Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Little, Brown Spark.

Duckworth, Angela (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.

Edmondson, Amy C. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Atria Books.

Epstein, David (2026). Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Riverhead Books.

Ferrazzi, Keith and Noel Weyrich (2020). Leading Without Authority: Why You Don’t Need to Be in Charge to Inspire Others and Make Change Happen. Portfolio.

Gurr, Ted Robert (1970/2015). Why Men Rebel. Princeton University Press/Routledge.

Heath, Dan (2020). Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Avid Reader Press.

Koch, Richard (1997/2003). The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less. Nicholas Brealey/Nightingale-Conant.

Mazzucato, Mariana (2013/2015). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Books/PublicAffairs.

Moffitt, Harry (2025). The Fourth Pillar: Modern Stoicism and the Philosophy of High Performance. Macmillan Australia.

Ray, Rebecca (2022). Good, Great, Perfect: Ditch Perfectionism for Good Enough and Succeed More. Audible Originals.

Service, Owain and Rory Gallagher (2017). Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals. Michael O’Mara.

Stolzoff, Simone (2026). How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. Balance.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2018). Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House.

Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein (2008/2021). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.

Selected evidence, interviews and policy sources

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024). Trade Union Membership, August 2024.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2025). Social Cohesion and Social Connection.

Australian National University (2025). Shifting Trust and Satisfaction: Monitoring a Key Dimension of Democratic Resilience.

Cabinet Office (2026). “Rewiring the State: Cabinet Statement”, summarised in the House of Lords Library briefing, 20 August, 2026.

Heath, Dan (2020). Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, author’s book page.

Jobs and Skills Australia (2025). Occupation Shortage Drivers Report.

Mazzucato, Mariana (2018). “Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies: Challenges and Opportunities”, Industrial and Corporate Change, 27(5), 803–815.

National Housing Supply and Affordability Council (2026). State of the Housing System 2026.

Olney, David (2022). Marginal Losses: An Explanation of Suboptimal Institutional and System Performance.

Prime Minister’s Office (2026). Andy Burnham’s First Speech as Prime Minister, 20 July, 2026.

Prime Minister’s Office (2026). PM Hands Mayors Share of Income Tax to Make Lives Better in Every Postcode, 30 July, 2026.

Productivity Commission (2026). Foundations for a Flourishing Australia, 25 June, 2026.

Reuters (2026). What Is Andy Burnham’s Policy Approach for Britain?, updated 20 July, 2026.

Treasury (2024). Future Made in Australia: National Interest Framework Supporting Paper.