The Map in Your Head Is Out of Date
The UN voted 164 to 1 for a world map showing countries at their true size. The harder question for leaders is which picture they are still deciding from.
We Stopped Queuing: Apple’s September and the End of the Surprise
Apple launched a foldable iPhone this month, split its release calendar into three, and started selling phones on instalments in Australia. None of that is the story. The story is a category that has quietly stopped surprising anybody, and what happens to a business when the only levers left are shape, price and timing.
Australia’s Housing Shortage Is Not a Land Shortage
Australia is one of the emptiest developed countries on earth and we keep saying we’re running out of room. We’re not. We’re running out of trunk: the sewage, water, power and transport that turn a paddock into somewhere liveable. Eighty one per cent of home loans now go through a broker, 54 per cent of Australians aged 55 to 64 still carry a mortgage against 18 per cent in 1996, and the retirement system was built on the assumption that neither would ever be true.
Security by Antiquity: Why the Oldest Thing in Your Building Might Be the Safest
Older technology is sometimes safer from attack, not because it is stronger but because nobody is looking at it. Ireland is keeping its radio beacons alive, Australia quietly kept 200 navaids at 124 airports, and San Francisco is paying 212 million dollars to leave floppy disks behind. Underneath the jokes sits a question most boards have never been asked: you bought capability, but did you ever buy resilience?
Nobody Argued About the Shark Drones
New South Wales now flies shark drones over around seventy beaches, every day of the year. The money arrived within days of swimmers being killed, and nobody argued, because the reason was too good to argue with. That’s how permanent observation actually shows up. The hard part of drones was never the flying, and the ripple effects land somewhere most leaders aren’t looking.
We Funded the Bed, Not the Nurse. Now We’re Being Asked to Fund the Robot.
For about two decades Australia funded aged care by counting beds. Not nurses, not meals. Beds. We got exactly what we counted. Robots are now entering the same sector, and the funding question is live. A robot is easier to count than a bed, and the thing we actually want to buy is the hour of human attention it was supposed to free up.
