The wisdom of serious reform:  The forthcoming August 2025 Government Roundtable seeks a better future for all Australians. And, indeed, our society has well-known and well documented lists of policies that can reliably deliver on that desired outcome.

To illustrate, the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) has estimated if all the individual policies proposed by major analysts and agencies in 2015 had been implemented then, for both structural reform AND investing in our future, consumption per head would have been some $7700 better off today, ten years later.

We did not seize this opportunity and instead failed to rise above conventional party and interest group zero-sum politics. Yet good government could have taken the people on such a journey. Public attitude analysis for ACOLA in 2015 demonstrated that a clear majority of the population was supportive. Only 23% were resistant.

The breakthrough needed was leadership and communication. This had been a key for the preceding Hawke-Keating-Howard reform era.

Roundtables back then were one of the vehicles for such communication, so it is good that they, at least, have now returned to assist with consensus building.

Many of the policies needed are again well-known and well-documented. But acceleration can........

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