The Growth Leader – Volume 16
We hope you’re Planning, Growing & Succeeding!
This edition is a little heavier than usual, and that’s deliberate. A widely shared opinion piece has been doing the rounds, and it deserves more than a passing mention – it’s a genuine wake-up call about the direction of the Australian economy, and perhaps our future living standards.
We’re not going to pretend otherwise. But we’re also not going to leave you there.
This month we’re covering four things:
- The essay itself – what it argues, and why it’s worth ten minutes of your time.
- A follow-up watch that goes deeper on the debt piece of the puzzle.
- Where the numbers behind the red tape actually come from.
- Why we genuinely think there’s more hope here than the headlines suggest.
So, without further ado, let’s hop right into it…
The Wake-Up Call
Veteran journalist Chris Uhlmann opens with an uncomfortable comparison that at the turn of the 20th century, Australia and Argentina were both among the richest nations on Earth. One broadly kept its promise. The other spent the next hundred years proving that bad politics can wreck a rich country.
His argument in what is a pointed opinion piece for The Weekend Australian, is that Australia is quietly working through a version of that same playbook. Not through any single decision, but through the slow accumulation of many smaller ones.
Energy policy that has made power scarcer and more expensive, a carbon and compliance architecture that taxes local production while overseas competitors face no equivalent cost, approval processes that can take years to clear a mine, a farm project or a mid-sized apartment block, industrial relations settings that make hiring feel like a legal gamble, and a growing pile of Commonwealth debt now being rolled over at rates many multiples of what it was originally borrowed at.
None of it, he argues, is fatal on its own. Every rule has a rationale. Every subsidy has a beneficiary. Every spending program has a sympathetic name. The risk, in his telling, is the accumulation; one modest burden loaded onto the next, until the weight of it becomes the story.
It’s a confronting read, and clearly an opinion piece rather than a neutral account, but the underlying data he leans on is real, and worth sitting with for ten minutes regardless of where you land politically.
Where the Red Tape Number Actually Comes From
One statistic from the essay is worth double-checking, because it’s a good habit to do such a thing, and because the source turns out to be even more interesting than the headline; and that is the claim that company directors now spend the majority of their board time on compliance, up from roughly a quarter a decade ago.
That figure traces back to the Productivity Commission itself. Not a lobby group, the government’s own independent adviser. Chair Danielle Wood cited it directly in a recent speech making the case for regulatory reform, noting that time spent on compliance leaves less room for strategy, technology and the investment decisions that actually grow a business.
Read the Productivity Commission’s “Regulating for Growth” speech
Now, Here’s the Hope!
Here’s the part that doesn’t always make it into the doom-scroll version of this story – the same Productivity Commission has already put forward one of the most detailed reform blueprints Australia has produced in years.
Across five separate inquiries, it has landed 47 specific, costed recommendations, including a targeted $10 billion cut in regulatory burden, covering everything from approvals timelines to business investment settings to how the workforce is trained.
This isn’t some vague sentiment about ‘productivity mattering’. It’s a genuine, itemised ‘to-do list’ sitting in front of government right now. Reform agendas like this don’t move quickly, and we’re not naive about that. But the diagnosis and the prescription both exist in detail and that’s a meaningfully better starting point than most economic anxieties ever get.
Questions Worth Discussing Around Your Board Table
✅If rates move again in September, what’s our plan? And if they don’t, does anything actually change?
✅Where in the business is a decision being avoided because the information isn’t perfect yet?
✅If leadership changed hands tomorrow, what would our successor need to know that isn’t written down anywhere?
✅What’s one big-ticket decision we made recently that got less scrutiny than it deserved?
🚦Business Strength Assessment🚦
The questions above – and plenty more – are exactly what we work through with our Board of Advice clients every quarter.
Rate calls, budget cycles, succession pressure, none of it waits for a convenient time.
The businesses that come out ahead are the ones that have already pressure-tested their plan. If you’d like a second set of eyes on yours, we’d love to help.
Book a Strategic Business Review here.
No obligation. No cost. Just a genuine one-on-one conversation.
We’ll finish where we started. Between the headline and how you run your business, there’s a space.
That space is still entirely yours.
Until next time, keep Planning, Growing & Succeeding!
Let’s build a future you can look forward to. Call us on (07) 3875 9888 or visit www.4front.net.au to get started today.