The reform imperative

Over the last 20 years, public policy has been increasingly reduced to soundbites, quick fixes, and other gimmicks. The pressure of political communication — to have short, clear, potent messages that promise upside without any downside — has completely overwhelmed policy development.

Even as policy messaging has gotten sharper, policy effectiveness has diminished. Parties win government without a viable plan to improve people’s lives or solve their problems. As a result, voters are increasingly losing faith in the major parties and defecting to minor parties and independents. And so our problems so unsolved.

If we want growth and better lives here in the ACT, sharp communications won’t be enough. Winning government without a plan won’t be enough. And there are no simple, quick or painless options to get us there. Solving our challenges requires structural reform: sweeping changes across the ACT government, spanning expenditure, legislation, regulation, process, and culture to bring about deep and systemic change – all built around a clear vision of a better Canberra.

This will require leadership. It must be the whole purpose of a government united in its support for change, several tranches of reform — probably requiring two or three terms of the Assembly — as well as control of the Budget and support from the Public Service. It will also require the adoption of a different governing philosophy across the public sector. None of this can be done from outside government.

There is, in theory, the possibility that legislation could be passed by the Liberals and Greens, without government support, or that crossbench members could demand changes as part of confidence agreements or parliamentary horse-trading. But, without the other powers of government, such changes could only ever be piecemeal and temporary.

Given that structural reform requires executive government, and the current executive is not interested in the reforms we need, abundance will not be realised this term. Which means the task is to build support for abundance over the next two years, so the next government is ready and willing to embrace reform after the 2028 Territory election.

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Reform foundations

Structural reform is ambitious and difficult but far from impossible. Australia sustained a structural reform effort that ran for almost 25 years — from 1983 to 2007 — across three governments, countless reshuffles, and a deep recession. It’s instructive to look back at what enabled the success of the reform era.

First, each government had a credible reform agenda: they understood the current economic framework — which had been a bipartisan commitment for decades — was failing and had to change, and they developed policies across the whole of government to deliver the changes that were needed. This shared understanding of the problem and the necessary solution enabled a remarkable coherency across different portfolios and challenges, and even across different political parties.

Second, the reforms were highly salient because they were responding to real problems being faced in the community. Persistently high inflation, double-digit unemployment, low wage growth, and public sector budget pressures were all undermining people’s financial wellbeing and their quality of life. It was not just the politicians and experts who saw the economic framework was failing; people could see it in their lives and knew deep change was needed.

Third, governments had a mandate for reform. The 1983 election was a landslide win for Labor because voters could see that failure and so they embraced an alternative. Later in the reform era, voters had seen firsthand that the long-term benefits of reform were worth the short-term costs: problems were being solved, the economy was growing, and their standard of living was rising. Successful reform created an appetite for further reforms, which is what ultimately allowed the era to continue for as long as it did.

These are the foundations which enabled structural reform to be undertaken so successfully at the federal level: the agenda addressed the most salient issue people felt, and generated a mandate for reform. If we want structural reform in the ACT, it won’t be enough to secure a change of government: we will also need to ensure that the same foundations are present for a new government to build on.

Next steps

To realise abundance in the ACT, these reform foundations will need to be built — and largely built from scratch.

First, reform needs a credible and coherent agenda. This agenda needs to be built on a shared understanding of the ACT’s challenges and agreement on the direction of reform. It must set out what reforms are needed, across the whole of government, to bring about the deeper changes that we need.

This agenda cannot be the work of a single person, party, or organisation. It needs the input of those with experience and expertise. Fortunately, Canberra is blessed with policy analysts, academics, think tanks, and others capable of designing real reform.

Next, reform needs to be more salient for Canberrans. The ACT’s current policy settings are failing to deliver economic growth or better lives, and they are holding people back, but we are not yet in a crisis. The challenge is to convince Canberrans — many of whom are not terribly interested in the ACT Government — of the need for change before we reach the point of failure and crisis.

Finally, reform requires a mandate for change.

A mandate is more than just community support for an idea: it is permission from the community to do something that may be costly and difficult. Permission for something that affects the whole community cannot be given by one part of the community. It has to be supported by a broad coalition of Canberrans: not just aspiring homeowners but existing homeowners; not just businesspeople but consumers too; not just net taxpayers but net recipients as well.

Without broad support, abundance will not claim a mandate; it will only ever be a policy preference of a small cohort, whose reform agenda will be frustrated and ignored.

Conclusion

If we want to restore growth and opportunity to the ACT, and enable Canberrans to flourish, we need to take on the work of structural reform. That, in turn, requires building the foundations for reform: a credible and coherent agenda that responds to salient challenges in the lives of Canberrans, and a mandate for change.

That’s how we can build a better Canberra.

We have now made our case for change. Next week’s essay will bring the series to a close with a summary of what we’ve argued and where we go next.

Embracing abundance

If the fundamental challenge for the ACT is scarcity, the solution is to embrace the alternative. That alternative is abundance.

This is the idea that artificial constraints, across huge swathes of government and the economy, are making our lives worse. These constraints take the form of a multitude of mandatory processes, obligations, regulations, and rules. Each constraint may be justifiable on its own but, collectively, the accumulated burden creates complexity and uncertainty, decreasing the likelihood of initiatives and projects coming to fruition. The end result of this is a society that is unable to create, build, or innovate.

This is a recipe for stagnation and decline.

To embrace abundance, on the other hand, is to embrace growth and new supply. It is the necessary foundation for a society that does things and builds things, both in the private and public sectors, and ultimately improves the lives of its people.

This is not a novel idea. The reforms of the Hawke, Keating, and Howard governments were all based on improving prosperity by expanding supply. And the same thinking underpins the YIMBY groups that have been so successful in reshaping attitudes and housing policies around the world. Supply reform works and we need to apply those lessons here in Canberra.

Abundance is an idea that cuts across the political divide, because scarcity impacts the political priorities of the right, left, and centre. The constraints which hold up a new commercial project also hold up new solar farms. The obstacles to new private housing are also obstacles to new public housing. And the processes which make new highways so expensive also make new light rail and high speed railways so expensive.

By removing the constraints that prevent people creating opportunities, growing businesses, and investing in new ideas, abundance produces the productivity and economic growth we need for Canberrans to enjoy higher wages, lower prices, and greater prosperity.

It’s what we need for Canberrans to enjoy better lives.

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A governing philosophy

Abundance is a governing philosophy built around human flourishing, growth, and prosperity. Embracing that philosophy means shifting the orientation of the ACT Government and embedding abundance in the work of every official, from the Chief Minister on down. We can make that shift by establishing core principles to guide their decisions.

First amongst those principles should be a presumption in favour of supply. The current approach effectively prohibits anything unless it has made it through a thicket of processes, rules, and objections.

Instead, we should have a presumption in favour of expanding supply — new buildings, projects, and ventures — unless there is a compelling reason not to proceed. We need to shift from precaution to permission.

Second, we need to consider the cumulative burden that government imposes on individuals and organisations. The current approach only considers the costs and benefits of a tax, rule, or process in isolation, which leads to excessive constraints — delays, cost escalations and systemic uncertainty — and ultimately produces scarcity.

Instead, we should consider how an intervention affects the overall burden placed on Canberrans and the impact on new competition, investment, and housing.

Third, we need to prioritise speed, certainty and delivery. The current approach ignores the costs of delay and deferral, which are usually invisible: businesses that never start, housing projects and investments that are abandoned before applications are finally decided, and worthy initiatives where approvals come too late.

Instead, we should shape decisions and processes around a recognition that time kills ideas, projects, and opportunities.

Putting these principles at the core of government decisions will shift its orientation from scarcity to abundance, realising better policy outcomes and more opportunity for Canberrans. It will also change the culture of Canberra: we will start to become a place where projects proceed, where it is worth taking a chance on a new idea or a project, and where things happen.

Key reforms

Changing the government’s orientation is essential but insufficient. We also need to implement sweeping reforms to change the decisions and policies that are holding us back.

Scarcity was not the product of a single decision, law, or regulation. It is the outcome from thousands of different constraints, implemented over a number of years. So the work of pivoting away from it and towards an alternative will not be fast or easy. The scale of this means we need to prioritise those which will generate the biggest benefits.

The top priority must be housing affordability.

If we want Canberra to be a place where people can create and innovate, where businesses can access workers, and where local people aren’t leaving, we need to ensure people can afford to live here. The cost of living starts with housing, and we need to embrace the supply necessary to make Canberra affordable.

Another priority must be increased business competition and investment. If we want Canberra to be a city where it is viable to start, grow, and run a business, we need to ease the burdens we put on them. We need simple, clear regulatory frameworks; faster, more responsive, and more predictable approvals processes; and a tax system that isn’t a deterrent to starting or growing a business here in the ACT.

A third priority must be expanding the capacity of the ACT Public Service. Given the ACT Budget’s challenges, the only way to improve public services is by empowering officials: reducing administrative burdens, respecting the autonomy and expertise of frontline staff, and ensuring merit-based decisions. We also need to repair the Territory’s fiscal position, so the debt is manageable without constant tax hikes, starting with ensuring that new investments can feasibly provide real value for money.

These are the foundation of the reform program we need to bring to build a better Canberra.

Conclusion

Canberra has all the ingredients it needs to be a great city, a place where Canberrans can truly flourish. Abundance can help close the gap between our potential and reality.

Next week’s essay takes the final step and shows us how we can bring about the reforms we need to build a better Canberra.

Scarcity

The ACT relies on Commonwealth-driven population and spending growth to fuel our economy. It is a model that is not just failing to deliver for Canberrans but one that is incapable of delivering.

Because of this failure, scarcity has become a fact of life in Canberra. As the population has grown and our living standards have not, we simply don’t have enough of the products and services that enable Canberrans to lead comfortable, meaningful lives.

Housing is an obvious example. For many people, housing is the foundation for a meaningful life: it is what they want before starting a family, provides financial security in retirement, and an asset to underpin a new business.

But housing in Canberra is increasingly scarce. Our population keeps growing while new housing supply fails to keep up.^[1] Consequently, house prices and rents are up, people are sharing with family or friends (when they’d prefer not to), homelessness has spiked, and Canberrans are moving in droves to satellites like Googong, Queanbeyan, Braidwood, Murrumbateman, Yass, and even to Goulburn.

Scarcity goes beyond housing. Opportunities are scarce as well: opportunities to enjoy food, culture, and recreation; to work outside government; and opportunities to start or build something of your own. And there is scarcity in our public services: we don’t have enough GPs or specialists to care for our population, we don’t have enough police officers to keep us safe, and we don’t have the crews to maintain the amenity of public spaces.

The problem of scarcity cuts across all of Canberra: young people and old, single people and families, blue-collar and professionals. Some impacts are large and some are minor but they all accumulate. The result is that Canberrans have a higher cost of living, fewer opportunities, and less ability to enjoy fulfilling, meaningful lives.

Consequently, people are voting with their feet. More Canberrans are moving interstate than interstate residents moving here. It’s a trend that will accelerate if we can’t overcome the problem of scarcity and offer Canberrans a better quality of life.

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The persistence of scarcity

In fairness to the ACT Government, they never set out to make housing unaffordable, businesses unviable, or our public services unsustainable.

Government is a complex system, and sometimes those systems deliver unexpected outcomes. No government can escape complexity but a good government ensures there are tight feedback loops between decisions and consequences. Things like administrative data and community feedback tell government when policies aren’t delivering and need to be changed.

The challenge in the ACT is that those feedback loops don’t work so well. The scale of the public sector means many people are insulated from economic shocks; local data collection is infrequent and patchy, so impacts aren’t always known; and the ease of ‘quitting’ the ACT by moving across the border means many people don’t voice concerns. The result is that our government is less informed about what’s working and what’s not.

Over time, a lack of feedback can become a lack of interest in feedback. Complacency sets in across government, and the consequences of decisions become less important than the perception: whether government policy is actually making housing affordable matters less than the announcements, the intentions, the vibe that it is doing so.

The Westminster system provides safeguards against complacency: an Opposition eager to prove government failure, competing media operations hungry for stories, and voters willing to switch to other parties. These institutions provide accountability and drive governments to address problems they might otherwise ignore.

But the Westminster system breaks down when the Opposition is not a credible alternative government, when the media don’t provide adequate scrutiny, and when voters are disengaged or uninformed. Which means issues like housing affordability can fester for years without action.

This is the challenge we face in the ACT: government is not delivering the desired outcomes, the lack of effective feedback has made government complacent, and our institutions are failing to hold them accountable. Without a price to be paid for failure, bad decisions and bad policies persist — and our quality of life is worse than it ought to be.

The ACT Government may not have intended any of this but it is the result of their decisions and their complacency. Which means they are responsible for the state we are in, whether they intended it or not.

Stagnation

Even if the ACT government wanted to embrace a new economic model, there’s no clear way to make it happen. So much of the government structure, Budget, and public service have been built around the current model that tweaks can only generate marginal benefits. Real change requires comprehensive reform, which is difficult, expensive work.

The ACT’s fiscal position is core to the problem. The ACT has accumulated so much debt in the last decade that interest now accounts for one-tenth of all government spending. Any additional debt is unaffordable but there’s little opportunity to raise more revenue or cut spending elsewhere, so there’s no way to meet the cost of reform.

Any new spending initiative — even something that would be beneficial for the Budget and the community in the long term — is essentially off the table. We simply don’t have the money.

Stamp duty is an instructive example. Labor pledged to abolish stamp duty as part of its tax reform package in 2012, in exchange for a new rates system.^[2] The abolition hasn’t happened and is increasingly unlikely to ever happen. We simply cannot afford to give up the $200 million in revenue stamp duty generates — just as we cannot afford any other tax reforms that might hurt revenue.

Another example is Public Service capability. A new economic model necessarily means fewer people in some areas and more in other areas. It could mean fewer levels in the ACTPS hierarchy^[3] or changing the number of agencies or divisions within them. Even if this meant no job cuts and could be implemented for free (and it certainly cannot), the evolution of ACT Government enterprise agreements means that changes are slow and difficult, and there’s no guarantee of success.

This is why it is so difficult for us to escape scarcity. Our current economic model is unsustainable but moving to an alternative is unaffordable.

It’s like having a job that is making you increasingly miserable but your other option requires you to take a significant pay cut. On any given day, it makes sense to put off the difficult decision for another time. That’s exactly what the ACT has been doing for the last decade.

But we are on a trajectory where things will only get worse until we accept it’s time to do the difficult but necessary thing, and make a change.

Conclusion

Our broken economic model is producing scarcity, and institutional failures have prevented us from changing course. And so Canberrans are not flourishing or enjoying the quality of life they deserve.

We are in a real pickle. There’s no easy way out of this – but there is a way, which we will explore in our next essay.

^[1] According to the ABS, the ACT population has grown by 74,000 people but only 43,000 dwellings in the last decade. Since COVID, population growth has continued while the number of new dwellings being built is in freefall.

^[2] The reform vision was to gradually replace the ACT’s inefficient and inconsistent taxes with efficient, consistent alternatives, like pivoting from stamp duty to rates. This can yield substantial economic benefits — but it does require the whole package to be implemented.

^[3] Curiously, the ACTPS hierarchy has two extra layers than the APS hierarchy (an extra SES and EL/SOG), despite the ACTPS being one-tenth the size.

The current growth model

One way to understand the economy is to think of it as a process. It’s a process by which society transforms its resources (like workers and land) into products and services that people want (like homes and food). It’s a process of inputs and outputs. And when the value or the volume of outputs increase — when we have more of the things that people use and value — then the economy has grown.

We realise economic growth in two ways. One is that we can accumulate more inputs — such as growing the workforce through migration — and the other is that we use the same inputs more productively, to get more from less.^[1]

The economic model we have in the ACT is mostly based on the first approach: growing our economy through population growth, driven almost entirely by the Commonwealth. More federal spending means more federal jobs, often based here in Canberra. As our unemployment rate is so low, these roles are usually filled by people migrating to the ACT.

The ACT Government is also dependent on that population growth. Without the ability to tax Commonwealth jobs or spending, the ACT generates the majority of its revenue from land, including rates and stamp duty^[2]. This means the ACT Budget is better off in periods of buoyant population growth but exposed in periods of slower growth. Given the current strains on the Budget in a period of relative growth, any slowdown would almost certainly lead to service cuts across government.

The local private sector is dominated by the property industry, which is also dependent on population growth: it largely exists to build homes for those who are migrating here to fill Commonwealth vacancies. The rest of the private sector is a collection of hospitality, retail and services businesses, which improve quality of life but are too small to be a significant driver of local economic growth.

So our economy and our government depends on population growth.

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Implications

Economic growth matters and the ACT economy has seen robust growth over the last decade, averaging about 3.5% a year. This is a strong number for any advanced economy over any decade but is particularly impressive given it includes the pandemic years.

The same period has seen strong, persistent growth in household spending – a good proxy for living standards – averaging around 2.1% a year. But most of this comes from population growth, which has been 1.8% over the same period.^[3] Canberrans themselves aren’t getting much benefit: our economy may be growing but living standards aren’t rising.

The ACT is also becoming increasingly dependent on the Commonwealth. The public sector now accounts for more than 60% of local economy activity, up from less than half in the early 1990s, and three-quarters of our growth in the last decade came from bigger government. Only one-quarter of our growth came from households and businesses doing better.

This dependence comes at a time when most APS agencies have had some kind of workforce caps imposed over the last 12 months, some are now openly offering voluntary redundancies, and that pressure is growing a result of the latest Commonwealth Budget. The potential for the Commonwealth to reduce workforce spending, coupled with the growth of remote work, means population growth – which has already slowed markedly – continues to decelerate or even to stall completely.

This would have a terrible impact on our whole economy, hitting house prices, local businesses, and the ACT’s already-parlous fiscal position. The damage would go beyond the rate of growth and hurt our standard of living – and all of this is beyond our control.

That’s the price of dependence and the risk we take with our current economic model of depending entirely on the Commonwealth.

The structural challenge

The data already shows our economic model isn’t leaving Canberrans better off. But the problem runs deeper than that: our model isn’t capable of working. There’s no pathway, theoretical or empirical, by which dependence on the Commonwealth produces sustained improvements in the living standards of Canberrans.

Our experience is hardly unique: it’s the same experience of any economy that has sought growth through accumulation, throughout all of human history. There’s a reason economic growth didn’t take off until the Industrial Revolution enabled societies to pivot away from accumulation and towards productivity growth.

Modern economic growth derives from productivity, and a process where new knowledge and ideas are formed through scientific and commercial research, which are transformed into useable innovations and technologies, and applied commercially. New discoveries spill over into other teams, firms, and industries, creating benefits across the economy. As labour becomes more valuable and technology drives costs lower, the benefits of economic progress diffuse throughout society and raise individual prosperity.

The challenge for the ACT is not just having embraced a model that is unable to deliver the growth we need, it’s that we have also suppressed the very things we need to pivot towards this type of growth.

Startups, small businesses, and major corporations all know the ACT is a poor value proposition. We have made it prohibitively difficult to start, run, and grow a business: we impose enormous regulatory and tax burdens; talent is expensive and largely locked away in the public sector; and real estate is expensive. The innovation and startup activity that we need to grow just isn’t viable here.

There’s no easy way out of this. We cannot tinker with our current model and hope to make it work. We need to acknowledge that we have a structural problem which will require a structural solution.

That’s not to say that we need to turn our backs on the Commonwealth or stop migration into Canberra. Rather, it’s about diversifying our economy by also embracing other opportunities, and using those opportunities to become more prosperous and independent than we would otherwise be – and better equipped to address the non-economic challenges that our community faces.

Only then can we ensure Canberrans experience the growth they need to flourish and to lead better, more fulfilling lives.

Conclusion

If our goal is to improve the lives of Canberrans, we need to ensure we have an economic model that delivers growth and prosperity. Our current model of depending on the Commonwealth is not delivering what we need and shows that we need to pivot to an alternative model.

It’s time we made that move.

^[1] Some people imagine productivity growth to mean forcing people to work harder but this rarely works; it’s more about embracing innovations and technology.

^[2] The ACT generated $3.1 billion in own-source revenue in 2025-26. Of this, 38% came from rates, 12% from stamp duty, and 1% from the Lease Variation Charge. This excludes levies which are imposed as a rates surcharge (e.g. the Emergency Services Levy and the Safer Families Levy). This does not include land sales.

^[3] These numbers have different methodologies so you cannot subtract one from the other and conclude ACT households were 0.3% better off each year for the last decade.

In a lot of ways, we are incredibly lucky to live in Canberra because it’s got all the makings of being a great city, a place where everyone can flourish. But having potential and living up to it aren’t the same thing.

And that’s the challenge we have here in Canberra.

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Canberra’s strengths

If you were to design a society where people would be able to flourish, you’d probably endow it with a lot of the characteristics Canberra enjoys.

One would be ensuring that people have good incomes. Canberra is fortunate to enjoy very high average incomes, both by international and Australian standards. According to the ABS, average cash earnings are $1,820 per week in the ACT compared with $1,611 nationally. And around half of local households are in the highest-income quintile nationally, which shows the financial advantage Canberrans enjoy.

Another would be ensuring that people are well educated. ABS data shows that Canberra does well here too: almost half (46%) of Canberrans have a bachelor’s degree (or higher) compared with 34% nationally. The difference is even more stark with postgraduate qualifications: 20% in Canberra compared with 12% nationally. So we are a community with a lot of knowledge and expertise.

A third would be a strong sense of community, including high levels of public trust and integrity. The ABS General Social Survey shows the ACT enjoys higher than average performance on a whole range of indicators, including trust in others, community involvement, and family and community support.

And all that’s before you think about the cultural, environmental, and other lifestyle factors that so many Canberrans value about living in the ACT.

Given all of this, it is no surprise that Canberra outperforms so many other places on various international ‘liveability’ measures, like Oxford Economics’ Global Cities Index. We are privileged to have a city like Canberra to call home, where we have all the necessary ingredients to enable people to lead meaningful, flourishing lives.

Our challenges

Despite all of our advantages and privileges, if we are really honest with ourselves, we might admit that we aren’t actually flourishing here in Canberra. There’s a substantial gap between what we could be and what we are.

That’s a big claim, but there’s plenty of evidence which suggests Canberrans aren’t living the good life, despite all of our advantages.

The most obvious piece of evidence is the cost of living, particularly housing affordability. Like most Australian cities, housing in Canberra is somewhere between severely and impossibly unaffordable.^[1] This is the inevitable result of many years where population growth has outpaced new housing supply, putting pressure on prices and forcing first home buyers out of the market. Canberra should be a place where the cost of living is manageable and housing is affordable – but the reality is that it is not.

Secondly, Canberrans aren’t enjoying the quality of life you might expect. The GSS data shows that Canberrans feel more stressed and rushed for time than other Australians^[2]. We have more mental health challenges – such as depression and anxiety – than the rest of the country. And more Canberrans are now moving and building their lives in other states than interstate residents moving here. People don’t usually choose to move away from the places where they are flourishing.

Finally, despite the depth of local capability and expertise, combined with government spending of more than $20,000 per person per year^[3] – second only to the NT – Canberrans are hardly blessed with world-class services. Our education, healthcare, law enforcement, and transportation systems generally perform worse than other jurisdictions. It’s the opposite outcome to what you would expect of Canberra, and of what Canberrans deserve.

Each of these issues is a problem in its own right. But they are also symptoms of the deeper problem that Canberra is not a place where our people are flourishing.

And these issues are getting worse. The gap between what we should be and what we are is getting larger: the quality of those underperforming public services is deteriorating; inflation, interest rates, and housing affordability are worsening; mental health challenges are being exacerbated; and the ACT’s fiscal position means taxes are rising while public services are diminishing.

Too many Canberrans struggle to lead good, flourishing lives – and the number is growing.

Unrealised potential

The gap between we what should be and what we are – our failure to ensure Canberrans are leading good lives – is our own responsibility. It is a result of the choices we have made, rather than any external factors which have forced this outcome on us.

It could be argued that Canberra is not unique: after all, the whole country has struggled to enjoy any economic growth for the last 20 years, and the impact of the pandemic, inflation, and high interest rates have been felt everywhere, not just in Canberra.

This is all true – but anyone who has spent time in our other capitals has seen how different things can be. Brisbane is more vibrant and dynamic than ever. Sydney spent the last decade delivering world-class infrastructure. Melbourne seems determined to outbuild the most YIMBY cities in the world. None of these places are perfect but they are working to improve outcomes for their communities, enabling them to flourish in ways we are not. Our unmet potential is our own responsibility.

This has two important implications.

First, it means our government is not fulfilling its core duty. It may be achieving other, valuable goals but not its core purpose: not the essential thing that is why we have a government in the first place.

Second, if our failure to flourish is a result of our own choices – including the government we have chosen – then the outcome is not fixed. We can make different decisions and enjoy different outcomes.

We can choose to flourish.

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Conclusion

Our purpose with Building a Better Canberra is to make the case that the ACT can be better than it is: it can be a place where Canberrans flourish and can enjoy better, more meaningful lives than they currently do. It’s a choice we can make – and it’s a choice we should make.

Next week’s essay will start to explore what needs to change for us to enjoy the lives we deserve.

^[1] Demographia publishes a global Housing Affordability Index that includes Australian cities. Canberra is too small to be included but our attempt to replicate their methodology suggests a score of 7.3, meaning Canberra’s housing market is ‘severely unaffordable’ and one of the 20 least affordable in the world. (We’ll have more on this in a later post.)

^[2] This may be why a top objective of past and present ACT economic development strategies is about ‘giving people back time’.

^[3] The ACT Government will spend more than $10 billion this year on a population of around 485,000 people.

It’s harder to make a critique: to set out some standards that government has not met, to explain why they have not done so, and to make a case for why and how it could be done differently. Real change does not come as a result of criticism; it comes as a result of critique and of offering a better plan to achieve our goals.

If we want change in the ACT, we have to move beyond complaint and criticism. We have to form a view on how and why government is falling short, and develop an alternative view of what Canberra could and should be.

Today’s essay is the first in a series that will make that critique and work through what it would take to actually build a better Canberra.

The purpose of government

In building a house, you need strong foundations. Building a society, government, or political party is no different: each needs a foundation of clear principles and values that everything else can be built on.

It’s not enough for those values to be known and shared: they must continue to shape what is being done and why. If they are ignored and forgotten, the foundations will crumble. Sooner or later, the edifice will collapse.

Those values must also define our answer to the fundamental question in politics: what is the purpose of government?

In the ACT, eight people make up the Executive – the Chief Minister and Cabinet – who collectively wield enormous power over Canberrans. We spend almost $10 billion a year and employ more than 31,000 people – around one of every 16 Canberrans – to implement their decisions. Given all the power and resources we put into government, we need a clear and shared understanding of what we are hoping to achieve.

For classical liberals, the purpose of government is to enable human flourishing.

Flourishing is the idea of the good life: one that is meaningful, fulfilling, and worthwhile. This is an old idea, dating back as far as Aristotle, and means government isn’t here to serve itself or a clique of insiders. Government is here to enable everyone in our community to flourish and to realise the good life.

But of course, there’s no single definition of what makes for a good life. It’s up to each one of us to figure it out for ourselves: for some people, it might be to raise a loving, close-knit family. For others, it might be fame and fortune. Some people are driven to creating or achieving something – such as in art, commerce, knowledge, or sport – and some people are drawn to serving their country, community, or faith.

Whatever flourishing means to you, the government’s role is to create the conditions where you can realise your idea of a good life.

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The role of government

Because there’s no single definition of a good life, it’s not the place of government to tell you what to do or how to live. The government’s role is to enable us to live our best lives by giving us the freedom to find out what our best life is and to pursue whatever it is that makes us happy.

That creates a limit on government: they need to respect our autonomy and agency, and preserve our individual freedom, as much as possible. This becomes a core principle of what government should do.

Another principle comes from the fact that it’s not just governments that have to respect our freedoms: people have to respect them as well. And, as we can’t all enforce our own freedoms, it creates an obligation on governments to ensure people are free from coercion and harm.

But individual freedom, both from government and from other people, is not the only thing that determines whether we can achieve the things we want in life. We are also limited by time, opportunity, and resources. Whether as individuals or societies, we have to consider what we have the capacity to do, prioritising those things which mean the most to us.

That’s where government can actually make a difference and support human flourishing in a positive way: without telling you how to live, government can help to expand the set of opportunities and relax the constraints that might otherwise prevent you living the life you want. This is a third principle of what government should do.

And it is fundamentally why prosperity and material wellbeing matter. Not because people should have more material goods but because it enables people to flourish in ways they otherwise could not.

Growth

If the purpose of government is human flourishing, and material wellbeing enables greater flourishing, it follows that governments ought to support economic growth. In fact, this should be one of the few things at the very core of what government does.

There are two ways government can make an individual better off: they can redistribute some of society’s resources towards that individual or they can support economic growth. Both have their pros and cons — but only one leads to sustainable, broad-based improvements in lives and livelihoods.

We saw that in Australia between 1980 and 2007, when living standards doubled and enabled millions of Australians to lead better, more fulfilling lives. This was brought about by a rapid economic expansion that persisted, and compounded, for almost three decades. Governments certainly engaged in redistribution at the same time, but it was growth that produced better lives and growth that enabled increased redistribution to occur.

Some people view economic growth with scepticism but it ultimately just means higher wages, lower prices, and more opportunity. These are the very definition of better living standards: in the short term, it means a little more breathing room in the household budget. In the longer term, it means we can spend more on the things we enjoy (like luxuries and travel), more resources for addressing social and environment issues, or we can work less and put more time into the things we find meaningful.

This means governments have a moral obligation to support economic growth; it is part of the reason we have government in the first place. But it’s an obligation most Australian governments – federal, state and territory – have neglected for the last two decades.

In that time, living standards in Australia have barely grown. Older people know the economy can work better — after all, they experienced that growth firsthand — but younger people often feel like they are getting a raw deal. No matter how educated they are or how hard they work, their living standards generally aren’t improving: housing is unaffordable, wages barely keep pace with inflation, and the income tax burden is heavy.

Young people are not the only ones who feel this way. Too many Australians – including Canberrans – don’t feel like they are flourishing or enjoying the good life. And they are increasingly frustrated with governments who fail to help them realise their aspirations.

Those governments are failing to deliver what people want and expect from them, and disaffected voters are increasingly shifting away from the parties of government, including One Nation, teals, and independents. That support will continue to grow until the major parties rediscover the reason we have government and the principles for them.

Conclusion

The essential question here – what is the purpose of government? – may seem abstract but it should be the foundation to every decision government makes. And it should define how we answer the question of whether a government is doing a good job.

That’s the question we consider in the next essay: are we creating a society in Canberra where people are flourishing?

Canberra is a beautiful city, and a great place to live and work — but it’s getting harder to enjoy the good life here.

Financial pressures, like the cost of living and housing affordability, are getting worse; there are fewer opportunities to create or build something of your own; and budget pressures are forcing cuts to government services and jobs. Which means more people are giving up on the ACT: graduates look for work elsewhere, young families buy their first homes elsewhere, and entrepreneurs start their businesses elsewhere.

This simply isn’t sustainable. But nobody in the ACT has a plan to get us back on track and enable Canberrans to flourish.

We don’t have all the answers either, but we have some ideas and we want to start the conversation. So, over the next six weeks, we’ll share our thoughts on what we need from government, what’s driving our challenges, and what we could do differently, in order to build a better Canberra.

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About us

Building a Better Canberra is brought to you by Leanne Castley MLA and Dr Jonathon Deans.

Leanne is the independent Member for Yerrabi and a former ACT Leader of the Opposition. JD is a Canberra-based economist and policy wonk.

This Substack is a joint project between Leanne and JD — but also with you. We hope that you’ll engage by letting us know where you agree and disagree, sharing your own ideas, and collaborating with us where there’s an opportunity to make a difference.

This isn’t the usual way things are done in the ACT. But if we want to build a better Canberra, we need to do something different.

You can get in touch with us using the button below, by leaving a comment on any of our posts, or by emailing building@bettercanberra.com.