Below is another excellent guest post from MB reader Erin Rolandsen, CEO of Angelassist:
Cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer once said: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” If that is true, what, then, do we make of Australia’s systems?
Everywhere we look, the systems designed to solve problems instead perpetuate them.
We have a housing system that operates like a casino, with government policy pumping the chips while young Australians line up at the door, priced out of a future. We have a “nation-building” immigration system that decreases per capita GDP while overwhelming our infrastructure. We have universities that act like visa mills instead of being crucibles of innovation.
Our government is meant to be a guardian of the people, but it has become a guardian of its own interests. Instead of contesting ideas, they divert our attention by focusing on identity: us versus them, fake left versus fake right, the morally righteous versus the xenophobic despicables. Instead of supporting an active democracy, they have created laws to reinforce their duopoly. Instead of increasing transparency and accountability, they have introduced bills to stifle it.
The cycle has become self-reinforcing. Each actor maximises their own slice while the nation as a whole stagnates.
Even our backstop mechanisms appear to have failed. The ACCC was meant to protect competition, but we have an oligopolistic market with one of the least sophisticated economies in the world. The Australian Energy Market Commission, perversely, has helped give us some of the most expensive energy in the world. Our media, instead of truly holding the government to account, dishes out their talking points.
Our institutions have forgotten their purpose. They serve themselves instead of the people. Financialisation has infected every sector. Form has overtaken function. Revenue outranks results. The mission has become a slogan.
We are living through a real-world enactment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Every institution declares noble goals while serving narrower, entrenched interests. Citizens are told the system exists for us, yet our lived experience testifies otherwise – higher costs, choked infrastructure, declining trust.
In essence, we have a performative democracy, run by performative institutions, overseen by performative regulators.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long time partner, put it plainly: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” Australia’s dysfunction becomes predictable once you examine the incentive structures through this lens. It is in the interests of public servants to hold their jobs, not to fix our country. That is why our government departments churn out policies instead of long-lasting solutions.
William Baumol, an American economist, explained this through the “Sales-Maximisation Theory”. If firms aren’t answerable to their shareholders, they will maximise revenue instead of profit. Instead of acting like it is responsible to the people, our government acts as if it is answerable to lobbyists, big business, and unions.
This is why the issues that actually affect the direction of the country are never put on the election menu. These issues have been decided in advance by those who fund the electoral campaigns.
There’s a meme that says, “In China, you cannot change the government but you can change the policy. In the West, you can change the government but you cannot change the policy.”
We see that every election. AUKUS—not up for discussion. Privatisation of care—not up for discussion. Financialisation of universities—not up for discussion. Carefully deflating the housing market—not up for discussion.
Every election, we’re given a choice between plain or chicken salt, but we’re instructed to be good and eat our fries.
It is not a coincidence that we have a divided, disengaged electorate. Distraction is the antidote to despair. Our bread and circuses are tax cuts and Netflix. They rely on our disillusionment and powerlessness to keep the whole system in check.
There is a way back: realign interests with their real purpose. The institutions will not reform themselves—they are too comfortable in their dysfunction. Accountability must return to the people.
That means citizens setting the agenda, not lobbyists. It means institutions measured against their outcomes, not their press releases. It means a media ecology where truth is rewarded above clickbait. It means we need to harness technological innovation to embed accountability into the very structure of governance.
We need to scrap the KPIs and funding models that reward throughput (beds, enrolments, profit margins) instead of outcomes. This requires embedding real feedback from the people, distributing control, measuring what matters, and using technology to make systems transparent and adaptive.
We can rescue our sclerotic institutions by realigning incentives with purpose. We must return accountability back to the people. We need an agenda set by the people and regulated by the people.
Beer’s dictum reminds us: if we want different outcomes, we must build different systems. Until then, what we have is not a broken democracy but a democracy working exactly as designed—just not for us.
