The Inflection Points Podcast

Recorded live at Hope Street Radio in Melbourne, Danielle Wood—Chair of the Productivity Commission and former CEO of the Grattan Institute—joins Jonathan O’Brien to discuss what stagnant productivity is costing an ordinary household, as well as what the Sydney lockout laws teach us about governing at speed, and why “hamburger-with-the-lot” procurement can end in a $1.7 million public toilet.They also look ahead: to how government should think about data centre regulations, and to why Australia, as a small open economy, might not need an overarching AI Act.Read Danielle’s essay in Inflection Points: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/the-red-tape-impulseAnd subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts – Spotify – Pocketcasts – RSS – Substack Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Auckland is the world’s most well-studied example of upzoning and planning reform. It’s the landmark story of how loosening restrictions enables more homes to be built—and yet the history of how it happened is not well understood. Join New Zealand’s own Stuart Donovan for an in-depth chat about the Auckland upzoning, the housing crisis, and what it takes to get good policy over the line. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

It’s not the same as social housing, and it doesn’t help those most in need. Australia is spending big on ‘affordable’ housing—but we shouldn’t.The reality is that ‘affordable’ housing is deeply, intrinsically flawed. It is a wasteful use of public funds that redirects government support away from the people who need it most. It provides those who do benefit with help they don’t particularly value, and the criteria and rules set up to administer it result in bizarre outcomes. Most importantly, the policy is wholly ineffective at delivering the outcome Australians actually want: not ‘affordable’ housing, but inexpensive housing. Dominic Behrens co-authored “Against ‘Affordable’ Housing” with Ethan Gilbert, and is our guest on today’s show.Hosted by Jonathan O’Brien, Editor-in-Chief of Inflection Points.Read the article: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/against-affordable-housing Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

In October 2023, Jim Chalmers told the Sydney Morning Herald about his chocolate-eating habits. He said: "I don't do moderation, in anything. I'm always going 100 miles an hour. If I eat a piece of chocolate, I eat a block of chocolate."On Tuesday night, he stood up in the House and ate chocolate.He scrapped the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount. He quarantined negative gearing on existing homes. He cut the growth of the NDIS from ten per cent to two. He pulled the private health insurance rebate off the over-65s and shovelled the money into aged care. He put two billion dollars on the table for states and councils brave enough to reform planning.It's the most interesting Budget since the Howard-Costello era.It’s not quite a whole block of chocolate. But it’s a start.Matt Bowes — Senior Associate at the Grattan Institute. Matt will take the reigns on infrastructure and housing.Jessy Wu — Founder and Managing Director at Encour, a comms agency for the AI era. Jessy leads us through productivity and innovation.Manning Clifford — Founding Editor-at-Large here at Inflection Points. Manning will steer us through state capacity and human flourishing. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Alain Bertaud has worked in over forty cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without land markets — in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict the market's ability to produce floor space — in Mumbai, in New York, and, indeed, in Australian cities.In 2018, he synthesised sixty years of field work into a book: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, published by MIT Press. It became, quickly, one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing the most robust framework available for combining urban economics with urban planning.In two hours of conversation, we cover the functioning of cities as labour markets, what communist cities taught him about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient — with specific numbers, rather than adjectives. We also got, at the very end, an admission from Bertaud: that leaving the importance of urban design out of Order Without Design was a mistake, and Australia, of all places, is the one that convinced him this was so.Purchase Order Without Design: https://yimby-melbourne.square.site/product/order-without-design-how-markets-shape-cities-alain-bertaud/PQ5DV6J7VMNTEI3SC7W5XEDE Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Recorded live in Melbourne in March 2025, this event — co-hosted with Effective Altruism Australia — brings together three speakers making the case for reforming our charitable giving laws.Ryan Ginard (Fundraise for Australia) argues that without fixing the infrastructure, the $5.4 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer will pass the charitable sector by.Clare Ozich (Justice Connect) explains exactly what the system is, why it fails, and what the Productivity Commission's solution would do.Grace Adams (Effective Altruism Australia) shows how DGR rules actively distort giving away from some of the most important causes of our time.Myriam Robin of the Australian Financial Review moderates the panel.Read Ryan Ginard's essay “The Generous Country” in Inflection Points: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/the-generous-countrySupport Justice Connect’s Unlock DGR campaign: https://justiceconnect.org.au/campaigns/unlock-dgr/  Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Keith Wolahan is a barrister, a former Australian Army commando with four deployments including three tours in Afghanistan, and the former Liberal Member for Menzies—the seat named after the party’s own founder.He won the seat in 2022 by unseating a thirty-year conservative incumbent at preselection. Three years later, he lost that same seat as the Liberal party’s metropolitan vote collapsed beneath his feet.In his essay for Inflection Points, Keith argues that the Liberal Party’s failure is structural, not cyclical, and driven by three forces: migration, education, and home ownership.The party has lost the multicultural suburbs. It has lost university-educated professionals, particularly women. And it has lost a generation locked out of the housing market—people who, as Keith writes, are “not hostile to Liberal values; they simply do not believe the party is serious about the one thing that would make those values real.”This is a podcast about the seriousness required to bring a political party back from the brink.Read Keith Wolahan’s essay, Liberal Foundations, in Inflection Points. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Policymakers often suffer from a cognitive blind spot, intuitively thinking like consumers rather than producers. When it comes to housing, this leads governments to reach for demand-side levers—like First Home Owner Grants—that often inflate prices, rather than addressing the fundamental constraints on building new homes.In this episode of the Inflection Points Podcast, Matthew Maltman, Senior Research Economist at the e61 Institute, joins Jonathan O’Brien to discuss his landmark essay, “Best Practice for Supply Side Reform”. Drawing on the empirical evidence from Auckland’s 2016 Unitary Plan, Maltman explains how broad-based upzoning successfully lowered rents and boosted construction productivity where other measures failed.Matthew and Jonathan unpack Maltman’s three principles for effective reform: focusing on removing “bans” (prohibitions on density) rather than just reducing “burdens” (red tape), prioritising market health over the specific concerns of incumbent firms, and controlling policy inputs while monitoring outputs. Matt argues that while cutting paperwork is popular, it is ultimately ineffective if policies that ban the things we need remain in effect.Read Matthew Maltman’s essay “Best Practice for Supply-Side Reform” here.Listen to the podcast on:* Apple Podcasts* SpotifyMatthew is a Research Economist at e61 Institute and runs One Final Effort, a supply-side economics blog. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Australia’s housing stock is growing more slowly than its population, and for the first time in decades, we are failing to build enough homes in the places people want to live. The result is a median home price in Sydney that is more than 10 times the median household income.In this episode, Brendan Coates, the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at the Grattan Institute, outlines the findings of their latest report, “More homes, better cities”, arguing that the root cause of the crisis isn’t immigration, tax settings, or banking—it’s that our planning systems say “no” by default.Brendan and Jonathan discuss how 80% of residential land near Sydney’s CBD is restricted to three stories or less, and how removing these bans could unlock hundreds of thousands of new homes. Brendan explains why “gentle density”—allowing three-story townhouses as-of-right—is the key to affordability, better streetscapes, and economic productivity.Read Brendan Coates’ “Planning is the Bottleneck to New Housing” here.Read Grattan Institute’s full report here.Brendan is the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at Grattan Institute. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe

Every successful Australian tech company follows roughly the same playbook: build the product here, test it in our market, then export it overseas. Atlassian, Canva, Safety Culture—they kept a lot of their engineering and R&D in Australia, while their sales teams conquered international markets.The secret to Australian tech success is to treat it like an export industry.Brandon Sheppard is the COO at Instant and has been in Australian tech since 2012—back when major VC funds didn’t exist here and Canva was just being founded. He’s lived the reality of building products in Brisbane while competing for talent against companies offering three times the salary in San Francisco.Brandon is the COO of Instant. He has over a decade’s experience working in Australia’s tech sector. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe