Ambitious Australia
We could all be much, much richer
TL;DR — Australia has drifted from wealth creation. We should ask ourselves how to 10× GDP per capita. How? Become an energy superpower, including nuclear; green the outback with cheap desalinated water; poach global talent; own industrial-AI niches; slash bureaucratic sludge, reform taxes; fund audacious moonshots. Prosperity beats perpetual grievance. Let’s build a richer Australia.
In 1788 the First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbour to deposit its crooks and their jailers on barren shores. They almost starved to death, saved by timely supply shipments from Cape Town.
A century later Australia had the highest GDP per capita in the world.
From a desolate prison colony, Australians built one of the most prosperous and enduring societies in history.
We should be looking at the state of our nation today as though it were Day 1 — 1788 all over again. In 2125 we should be many, many times better off than we are now.
But you wouldn’t think so listening to our recent federal election. Surely the grimmest, low stakes campaign in my lifetime. Australians have gotten used to slim pickings for vision from its politicians.
What can we do to actually create wealth for Australians?
This question is totally absent from political discourse. The GST was Australia’s last true significant reform, a quarter of a century ago. Politics since has been dominated by grievance politics (The Voice), bottomless rorting and redistribution (NDIS), and boomer payoffs (franking credits, super concessions). (Although pleasingly, former PM Julia Gillard once asked former Treasurer Secretary Ken Henry how to turn Darwin into Singapore — they aren’t complete zombies.)
Immigration has become extremely politically salient, but no one wants to touch it. Whilst the ambitions around a big Australia are admirable and have merit, it’s not obviously necessary. Indians are not wealthier than Luxembourgers and aren’t set to be any time this century (India’s GDP per capita (~US$9k) is a rounding error next to Luxembourg’s (~US$135k).
What if we were laser-focused on one question: how to make Australians ten times richer. GDP per capita, not total GDP. Just how do we become super duper wealthier. Wealth solves many problems. Over a lifetime (say 70 years) 10x GDP per capita implies 3.3% real annual growth rate. Ambitious but possible.
You are welcome to read this as left-liberal coded if you like, in the vein of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance.
Here are 5 ideas:
1. Energy superpower
Energy is upstream of basically everything. Cheaper energy lowers costs across the board and allows more things to happen.
Australia sits on one of the world’s largest mineral and energy reserves.
Yet domestic energy prices have been increasing. Average effective residential price rose from 20.4 c/kWh in 2007-08 to 27c in 2020-21 and sits in the low-to-mid 30 c/kWh range in 2023-24. Wrong direction!
We should allow all energy types: coal, gas, uranium, hydrogen, nuclear, solar, wind — no religious bans. Permit fast-track development. Kill litigation choke-points. No price caps.
Adani’s Carmichael coal mine took >8 years to get approval despite passing environmental reviews. Endless lawsuits, bureaucratic reviews, political reversals.
Onshore gas exploration is effectively banned or heavily restricted in NSW and Victoria — despite huge reserves.
Australia holds ~31% of the world’s uranium but has 0 reactors — a pure ideological choke. No need to believe in new tech. We could buy conventional plants off the shelf from South Korea. South Korea’s APR-1400 is fully operational and exported — they built the UAE's Barakah plant. From 2009 — 2024, the Koreans built 4 nuclear power plants in Barakah in about 7–8 years each. Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) has a full export package: design + build + operate + train Australians.
Each reactor has a gross electrical capacity of approximately 1,345 megawatts (MW), contributing to a total plant capacity of 5,600 MW. Collectively, the four units are designed to supply up to 25% of the UAE's electricity needs, generating around 40 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean electricity annually.
Nuclear could reduce costs meaningfully. In Australia coal is cheap but aging, renewables are cheap on production but intermittent, gas is expensive. Nuclear is reliable, with 24/7 baseload. The marginal baseload supply would disproportionately impact pricing. The 40TWh from a Barakah equivalent would add ~12% to Australian energy. Rule of thumb this should reduce prices by 15 - 30%.
The Barakah plants cost the UAE US$32 billion. This figure encompasses construction, financing, initial fuel supply, and related infrastructure. About the cost of 1 year of NDIS.
How about transmission?
Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) — the east coast grid (NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, TAS) — already manages about 65,000 MW of capacity. It's designed to handle peak loads of ~30,000 MW (high summer demand). So adding ~5,600 MW isn't totally crazy — it's ~12% more than today’s peak — manageable if intelligently placed.
Current transmission is optimised around coal regions (like Hunter Valley, Latrobe Valley). Those lines are old but well-connected.
Wind/solar expansions (like in western NSW, western VIC) require building massive new transmission (like the "VNI West" project) because these sites are remote.
Nuclear plants, if located near existing coal hubs, can re-use existing infrastructure with only moderate upgrades.
This would require massive government support — nuclear plants are natural monopolies (like transmission). A nation-building project, not a libertarian fantasy.
2. Terraform the desert
We should terraform the outback to 10x agricultural output.
We have the land and infinite sea water. With cheap energy we could desalinate to create new inland rivers (as proposed by US-based son of Australia Casey Handmer). Once we’ve done that, why not build new cities too?
The next Great Australian will build a new city.
Australia is the size of Europe, but much of it is uninhabitable and unproductive desert:
Accordingly, most of it is minimally used:
Almost all Australians live on the coastlines. The US has great inland rivers, which allowed it to build great cities and wealth from internal trade.
What if we could create something similar for Australia?
Mongolia successfully transformed 6,000km² of Inner Mongolia's Kubuqi Desert into green landscape, quadrupling annual rainfall from <100mm to >400mm. That’s the size of about two-and-a-half Australian Capital Territories. Or the 18 million hectares restored so far in the Sahel as part of the Great Green Wall, a vision to create a 8,000km green belt across 11 countries. Other examples can be found in Israel’s Negev desert and the Toshka Project in Egypt.
Australia exports around $76bn in agricultural product per year. We should aim to 10x that number.
3. Aggressively target global talent
No, this does not mean flooding our universities with migrants to ‘skill them up’ in a fake university-profiteering visa mill farce.
It means attracting the world’s best and brightest. E.g.
Zero income tax for X years if you start a business that employs >10 people or generate >$5m in exports.
Fast-track citizenship for scientists, engineers, founders, capital allocators, builders.
Poach aggressively from places where elites are suffocating (e.g., Germany’s Mittelstand engineers, Hong Kong’s disgruntled financiers, San Franciscan favelas).
Technology is probably the only way to increase productivity and for technological research we need more talent density. Australia is the best place in the world to live, why not attract more of the world’s best. It doesn’t mean we can recreate Silicon Valley — no one really knows how to do that — but we can make something better than we have.
4. AI?
AI is probably going to be the single greatest driver of global wealth over the next few decades. Can Australian industry get in on the boom?
Australia is an AI client not a creator.
Australia has no major foundational models (no OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind). Australia has no hyperscale tech companies (no AWS, Google, Meta scale). Australia imports almost all its AI tech (models, chips, cloud, SaaS) from USA, China, Europe.
It’s too expensive and it doesn’t have the AI talent density to build it anyway.
Australia could become a world leader in applied AI in heavy industries. Mining, agriculture, energy — these are Australia's strengths.
Build world-best AI systems for robotic mining, agriculture optimisation, energy grid AI ops to own the "industrial AI" verticals globally.
These sectors are hugely valuable and underserved by Silicon Valley, which has typically focused on digital-first solutions.
Precedents and talent already exist. Just a few Australian companies I’ve admired over the years or invested in include EarthAI (AI mining exploration), Farmbot (which is laying water-monitoring infrastructure to collect the data for such applications in the future), and A1Base (building Twilio for AI agents). There are many others, including across finance and housing.
We could also be a source of AI compute. If we unlock cheap energy, we have infinite land, infinite water (for cooling), and are a secure American satellite — we could host ~infinite data centres for compute. The US should be able to do this itself, but there is no reason we can’t seek to leapfrog its energy capacity and help it diversify.
5. The Boring Bits
There’s no getting around cutting all the nonsense policies and bureaucratic and tax molasses that has accrued over time to gunk up our system.
I’ve placed them at 5, but they may be the most important. Each are a political quagmire.
NDIS: We should at least halve the NDIS, which would still make it >twice as expensive as originally promised. As it is, it’s a massive government-funded scam soaking up jobs from the productive economy.
Tax reforms: Implement all the tax reforms we know we should — reduce the income tax, broaden the GST, introduce a land tax, remove super tax concessions, immediate expensing.
Political salaries: You will hate this but we should triple political remuneration. Make politics prestigious again. Let’s at least try and attract talent to politics. Probably double public servant salaries and halve the size of the public sector.
Employment law reform: Ok now that we’re really dreaming the impossible, all employment law should fit on a single piece of paper. A minimum wage, [5] weeks annual leave. You can make it as generous as you like, this isn’t about cutting conditions. It’s about simplifying a totally incomprehensible employment law landscape that no one understands and that’s built on >120 separate industry awards pre-supposing 100 years of outdated employee vs employer relations. Just stipulate the minimum conditions we are willing to accept all priced into a minimum wage, minimum safety requirements, and minimum days off (we are Australian after all). And let the market do the rest. 10% GDP boost right there.
6. Moonshot
Ok, #6 of 5.
Should we have a national moonshot project? Something to rally behind, something to push our industry and nation forward. Ideas:
Terraforming (#2 above) definitely counts.
The first fully autonomous mine.
Fully Deregulated Special Economic Zones — create one or two totally deregulated, low-tax, hyper-growth cities — e.g., in NT, WA, or Far North Queensland (think Shenzhen or Dubai — but Australian, free, democratic, and rich.) Build a Singapore in the Northern Territory (Gillard can chair the project and we can call it Gillard’s Dream if it helps!).
First fleet of fully autonomous navy / nuclear submarines (spicy!)
Nuclear Fuel Leasing: Not that moonshot, but it’s a no brainer — could increase South Australian state revenue by 34%.
Final word
We can be a much more prosperous nation. We need only the will.
Will all the above get to 10x GDP per capita? Depends on what timeline. Probably not soon. We’ve only tripled GDP per capita in the last 60 - 70 years with favourable demographic changes (women entering the workforce). But if we are ambitious and refocus national attention towards prosperity rather than squabbling over distribution, we will be better off.
Surely that’s something worth getting behind.
Thanks to Cameron Murray, Dan Morgan, and Aidan Morrison for input on drafts.
Another boring thing:
I know it's been fashionable lately to bash on our unis as useless degree mills, but Australian universities have great bones and punch above their weight in research impact given the relatively abysmal amount of funding allocated to basic scientific research for a country so wealthy. Innovations through technology that are wealth generating come from first giving adequate money to fund scientific discoveries. CRISPR for example came from a basic National Science Foundation Grant to understand how bacteria deal with viral DNA as an immune system. Ozempic came from being curious about the Hela Lizard venom and characterising those molecules--I could go on and on about the useful things that have been discovered by studying basic scientific questions. Australia spends ~half as much as an average OED country as a percentage GDP on R&D expenditures. CSIRO has gotten so bureaucratised it is not poised to innovate either. We can't do all this transformative technology if we don't have place for a basic foundation of research to discover new things. We also aren't training people to be poised in technically to take on these big challenges.
We actually have been benefiting from incredibly talented PhD students who want to avoid America or who cannot go for visa reasons recently, especially from China which has invested massively in scientific research and has many very well trained PhD candidates coming over who want training in English (still the lingua franca of science). But we have increasingly a poor environment due to these budgetary issues. There has been some discussion of participating in the brain drain of American scientists, but this is not even remotely feasible given levels of funding available. While I agree that there are perverse incentives from over reliance on international student tuition for revenue, this "degree mill grift" is essentially what has allowed the better universities in Australia to retain enough funding to at least have a semblance of globally relevant research activity. Faustian bargains taken to keep things from sinking even further.
An embarrassing thing that came to pass recently was that Albo had to call an emergency meeting to discuss that Australia receives nearly 600 million AUD per year in subcontracts from US funding agencies--crumbs in the US budget for global collaboration from agencies like the NIH or DARPA. Potentially losing this funding from Trump administration shenanigans, however, presented a serious problem. The ARC budget is 1 billion. The NHMRC budget is 940 million. So pennies from the US ends up being a substantial amount of money! That's honestly rather embarrassing.
If Australia is serious about becoming an economy that gets out doldrums of lack of innovation, first it must actually invest and foster our basic research ecosystem here. This means not letting our institutions languish, including our universities and institutions like CSIRO. There is a lot that can be done on the regulatory side to make research better and less of a bureaucratic mess (I have some rants about our GMO laws that have not been updated for over 20 years, for example that make certain sorts of biological research a nightmare or risk assessment paperwork that goes way overboard). But funding our academic and government researchers to go about their business of researching things is just not a priority in this country. Downstream, we have less funding for VC backed startup founders, but it's a chicken and egg issue. How do innovate if you can't discover?
4) The reason the US buys Al metal AKA 'solid electricity' from Australia is because it would have to build new electricity generation in order to process bauxite. The lead time for this (in the USA) is 10-12 years. Insane.
UPSHOT: Great post; ambitious & inspiring.