Australia’s short-term politics are failing our future

Political short-termism is undermining our future, as growing challenges demand courageous, integrated long-term planning, writes Dr Bronwyn Kelly.

THE CENTRE for Policy Development’s latest Purpose of Government Pulse survey shows that a significant majority of Australians (68%) believe ‘politics is more concerned with short-term gains than addressing long-term challenges’.

This response shouldn’t be surprising. Australians have been saying the same for at least a decade.

But as time’s winged chariot has rushed on in the 2020s, governments have passed up almost every remaining opportunity to effectively address the long-term challenges Australians know we face, with the imminent onset of climate change and a simultaneous rise in global political and economic instability.

The failure of Australia’s federal governments to secure our future in the face of these threats is evident in the detailed reports on the state of Australia produced by Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP) at the end of each of the last two federal parliamentary terms, in 2025 here and in 2022 here.

These comprehensive, evidence-based reports make it clear that Australian governments are not coping. We are slipping backwards in terms of safety, security and wellbeing. And the CPD Pulse survey makes it clear that the vast majority of Australians agree that, if this slippage is to be reversed, we need more than the short-termism and timidity in policy reform that have become typical of the two major political parties that have held power in recent decades.

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They know that business as usual – a bit of Band-Aid legislation here and a bit of cost of living relief there – is not going to cut the mustard when it comes to the sort of challenges we – and every other nation in the world – are now facing.

These challenges are now sitting right on our doorstep. They are being pushed through our front doors and onto our families as inaction on climate change by a succession of governments has almost totally crushed the flexibility we once had to mitigate it before intolerable planetary temperature rises are irreversibly locked in.

In this situation Australians need more than ad hoc reactions to crises; and a very significant majority of them know it.

As CPD has reported:

‘Almost three quarters (73%) of Australians believe governments should focus on preventing problems early by investing now to reduce future costs, rather than relying on reactive measures.’

A lack of vision, accompanied by a now ingrained, cowardly habit of responding in knee-jerk fashion to crises that were both foreseeable and avoidable, won’t work anymore. Australians need courageous governments, not cringing ones.

Fortunately, though, as the Pulse survey also shows, Australians know what to do about this even if their governments don’t.

Among other things, ordinary people know that there is a now desperate need to reinstall universalism in access to services essential for their wellbeing:

‘An overwhelming majority (80% to 91%) believe health, education and childcare must be free or universally affordable.’

They know that governments must abandon neoliberal policies of privatisation, small government and austerity in public spending.

They can see how life quality and prosperity in the UK have declined under austerity. But they have also realised that Australia has not been quarantined from these trends. It is all too clear now that neoliberalism has caused Australians to suffer significant setbacks in their prospects for a “fair go” — that particularly Australian value to which the CPD Pulse survey says we ‘hold an unwavering commitment’.

The loss of fairness in access to essential public services – especially in health, housing, aged and disability care, and tertiary education – is the direct result of privatisation and market deregulation under the neoliberalism that has been favoured by our governments. And the real wage declines we have suffered since COVID-19 are the direct result of the corporate stranglehold on both our private and central banking systems.

The financial sector is now neoliberalism’s supporting partner in the financialisation of our economy — a creeping blight that has pushed our economy away from a composition that provides full employment and decent pay in sustainable production. Secure incomes for workers are becoming unavailable under the partnership of neoliberals and the Australian financial sector — a situation that can only worsen with the onset of artificial intelligence (AI).

These losses of economic resilience under neoliberalism are so apparent that we should not be surprised at the Pulse survey’s results showing that ‘84% of Australians believe the government must maintain the internal capability to deliver social services directly’.

If there is a concern about the rise of populism and growth in support for far-right extremism in Australia, it is obvious that the majority of Australians now put the loss of fairness at the top of their list of causes. Inequality offends them, more so since it need not have come to this.

There is no excuse for the failure of a succession of federal governments to take the opportunities they could and should have taken over the last decade to help Australians withstand the effects of coming social, ecological, economic and democratic upheavals and preserve a reasonable quality of life through the turmoil.

We have now reached a point where the odds are against us, largely because governments have talked about “resilience” but have not organised themselves to build it. To get organised, they need to develop skills in national long-term, integrated planning and reporting — National IP&R. Nothing else will lift their sights beyond the short-term, timid, knee-jerk, Band-Aid approaches that, if persisted with, will spell inevitable failure.

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As such, governments need to start by finding out what National IP&R is. It is a lifeline; an organised, democratically fair, community-driven (not politically-driven) approach to long-term safety that governments should have taken, but have not yet realised is available.

National IP&R represents the best chance governments will have now of organising themselves and their policy selection processes to rescue Australians from the brink of the destruction of their security and wellbeing. They can’t rescue us with short-termism and timidity.

And this is why the latest Issue of Australia’s only long-term, integrated plan for safe passage to a sustainable future, issue ten of Australia Together, comes with a dire warning to governments that we have almost run out of time to secure a decent future. And yet we still have a chance if the current government takes the unprecedented step of learning how to plan fairly for a safe future for everyone.

Australia Together shows how that can be done. It maps a safe path to the kind of future Australians have repeatedly said they want. It has been built using the fully open and transparent democratic process of National IP&R. This provides easy access for everyone to the factual information they need to select the strategies and policies that, when integrated, will deliver the resilience that governments have thus far only talked about.

The integration system within the National IP&R process is the thing that can give us the speed we now need to make up for the time we have lost. It can give people and governments the courage to rule out policies that will hurt them in both the short and long term and to take the steps we all need for systemic change.

Issue ten of Australia Together contains a set of eight integrated clusters of urgent systemic reforms that will be essential to our safety, security and wellbeing. None of these reforms will be financially impossible. They are all vital for our survival.

Find out how these urgent reforms have been integrated in Australia Together to speed Australians fairly towards a prosperous and sustainable future.

Dr Bronwyn Kelly is the Founder of Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP). She specialises in long-term integrated planning for Australia’s society, environment, economy and democracy, and in systems of governance for nation-states.