Notes from the 2025 Wheelton Family Oration

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This week, I delivered the first Wheelton Family Oration for the wonderful LMCF.

It’s been recorded and will be shared soon, but in the meantime, and for the TLDR (or TL Won’t Watch 🙂 ) here are a few of the key points:

Some of the underlying dynamics of Australia’s economic system:

  • Australia’s huge economic wealth stands on the basis of unpaid rent, land stolen from Indigenous Australians.
  • We used to have decent predistribution: in that work paid and enabled you to build a decent livelihood for your family, if you were a white, able male
  • But we’ve seen a shift to an assetised economy, where your ownership of assets determines so many of your life chances. We might not be an aristocracy, but we certainly are an asset-ocracy
  • Unearned wealth is enabled by decisions such as favourable taxes on assets such as capital and property and the compulsion to seek unearned wealth is driven by the erosion of collective institutions and the provision they otherwise would have offered.
  • The economic and social determinants of health are too often danced around, despite the ample evidence that the economy is not meeting the needs of many people.
  • Social justice and environmental breakdown are two sides of the same coin, linked by the way economy distributes and produces
  • In part this is because of a false and distorted sense of value in the way market prices work, with many externalizing environmental impact and so deliberately turning a blind eye to the damage to our ecosystems.
  • The phrase “the business community” glosses over huge diversity: some businesses are extractive and some are constructive; some help meet the needs of people and planet, and others undermine them
  • Human needs (H/T to Manfred Max Neef) include subsistence, protection, relationships, connection, participation, identity, and freedom. But often pseudo satisfiers are grasped for: robot friends for affection; the purchase of status symbols for identity, belonging and esteem; fancy well-stocked kitchens for sense of security; or amazon and huge shopping centres for freedom.

Policy both puts all our eggs in one basket, while dancing around the elephant in the room (for more on this, see here).

In the face of this, a lot change is needed, across policy and practice.

But also in mindsets and imaginations about what is possible and how far upstream the conversation and action needs to go.
For those who get it, this can be overwhelming, leading to thinking fast. Thinking fast can limit responses to what we already know and are comfortable with. After all, it is calmer water downstream. But there’s a risk that this only offers system compliant fixes.

It is hard to go against this conformity, to do something that is potentially system changing, to go upstream as far as the economy. In part, this is because the systems in which many decision makers work are designed in ways that create a sense of unsafety and our imaginations are limited by the shibboleths of today, some of them repeated like incantations that become almost spells that put us in a BAU trance.

The need is to build an economy deliberately designed to work better for people and planet; underpinned by a different logic than today’s economy; a wellbeing economy is driven by the goal of collective wellbeing (quality of life for people and planet).

The good news is that there are loads of examples out there, but these great instances remain isolated examples. Neither the policies and the practices that have been enacted and created are adding up to system change, because mindsets and collective imaginations are still constrained to patching BAU, to offering system compliant fixes, to tweaking and dancing around the elephant in the room.

The task is to take the time to look upstream, not to slip into the space of feeling overwhelmed and then just turning to what we’ve done before, to the easier system compliant fixes.

That will need a broader movement to create solid ground for political action and so decision makers stare down the push back and recalcitrance of those content with BAU. This means meeting people where they are, but not stopping there – building ambition together, raising gazes to the economy and showing how daily challenges (struggling to get to the end of the month) are a function of the current economic system and how it can be transformed for the better.

How change is pursued matters, and compassion offers great potential as a method for change. According to Monica Worling of Stanford University, there are 4 stages of compassion which show it isn’t just some fluffy sympathy tilt of the head, but analytical and action orientated.

The movement for change needs to be a mosaic: prefiguring and building the new at the fringes, but also transforming the mainstream and dominant structures and institutions, and everything in between. Perhaps we can heed the Maori proverb, that “If everyone does their part, the job will be done”…?

(Picture credit: Melina Chan)