Australia’s malaise is not mysterious. We have become very good at distributing scarcity and very bad at building capacity. Housing is scarce, infrastructure is slow, energy is contested, tax rewards passive asset gains, migration is not clearly tied to national capability, and too much public spending is absorbed by systems that respond late rather than prevent failure early.
The national task should be simple: make Australia easier to build in, easier to work in, easier to invest in productively, and harder to exploit.
The first switch is housing abundance. Australia cannot sustain strong migration, family formation, low inequality, productive cities or social cohesion while homes remain artificially scarce. We need to legalise more apartments and townhouses near jobs, transport and services; override local vetoes where they block state or national targets; expand construction skills; standardise approvals; and fund infrastructure in