What's next from Australian Community Futures Planning?

After publishing The Public Interest Economy, what are ACFP's next steps?

May 02, 2026

Article voiceover

0:00

-13:12

Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in my latest book, The Public Interest Economy: the path to wellbeing, security and sustainable consumption in a democratised Australian economy.

Now that I’ve completed the release of the audio version of the book, I thought it might be helpful to talk about where to next. How are we thinking at ACFP about what we can do to get the proposals in the book going in our real lives? The book is just the beginning; so the question now is what can we do to kick-start the reforms? This article sets out our first steps.

Writing The Public Interest Economy has been a learning experience for me. I’ve come to understand the dynamics of the economy in a far more nuanced way and as a result I can more clearly see pathways we can pursue to get us past the blight of neoliberalism.

These pathways are not difficult to travel. They don’t involve time consuming protest or unnerving exposure to the personal risk that comes when people put themselves on the front line of resistance and find themselves confronted with fascistic thuggery or state sanctioned violence. They also don’t leave everyone stuck in the paralysis of fear, their voices having been chilled to silence by seeing what happens to those whose objections to overweening state and corporate power are not welcomed by corporately captured governments.

Instead, the pathways set out in the book, which are basically practical steps we can take to democratise our economy, offer us all a safe transition to the future we want – a future of wellbeing, security, healthy lifestyles, a sustainable planet, and peace. They by-pass social unrest, conflict and racial tension, and help us move straight onto our preferred future.

The Public Interest Economy offers us the processes we need to define and follow safe pathways to the sort of future that Australians have repeatedly said they want over the past 30 years. Those processes of National Integrated Planning & Reporting (National IP&R), coupled with fully inclusive but orderly community engagement, represent a missing piece in the architecture and institutions of our democracy. They overcome the deficiencies in those elements of our democracy that are inefficient and ineffectual in securing our future. They release us from being confined to protest and mere voting.

If we learn to use these community engagement and National IP&R processes, we can reverse the economic arrangements that, since the mid-1990s, have delivered:

decreasing volumes of wellbeing;
higher exposure to international and home-grown financial shocks and planetary heating;
a growth in poverty and inequality (particularly political and wealth inequality); and
all the social breakdown that comes with the repeated unfairness in decision making inherent in neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics has led to an abandonment of fairness in decision making. It is also propping up the neoliberalism that thrives on unfair access to financial security and destructive misallocation of scarce human and natural resources. While Australia’s current governments believe in the prudence of neoclassical economics, they are lying to us and to themselves about its economic utility, especially if they expect to build a sustainable economy that is capable of restoring the wellbeing and security we have lost under neoliberalism.

In pondering this while writing the book, I’ve emerged from the whole exercise with ideas about the processes and institutional reforms that are most likely to make up for:

our losses of wellbeing and security;
our loss of time to stem planetary heating; and even
our loss of sovereignty over our own country in the face of the projects of imperialism and colonialism that are being prosecuted by states that are themselves now captured by the corporations and financial institutions that drive neoliberalism.

Fortunately these process and institutional reforms are not difficult to implement. There will be political and corporate resistance, but it will be to the advantage of Australians if they pay no mind to that. None of us need permission from the state to pursue these reforms and we are well placed to start with the simpler ones.

In The Public Interest Economy I’ve identified the simple ones as:

The National Accord on Wealth, Welfare and Wellbeing – an agreement between the people of Australia and their governments on the principles of fairness in economic decision making;
National Integrated Planning & Reporting – a process that gives all Australians a forum in which they can:
1. exercise their voices as equals in democracy, and
2. collaborate to build a coherent long term plan to safely secure everyone’s wellbeing and that of the planet; and
A National Public Interest Collaboration – a democratic process by which Australians and their governments can collaborate to build an economy in the public interest, starting by establishing a social new deal in which Australians and governments agree to introduce a fair universal basic income matched with fair tax reform, and in the process, secure permanent and affordable access for all to the services that are essential for their health and wellbeing, including most notably fee-free tertiary education.

There are other reforms proposed in the book, but these top three reforms are the ones that governments will find themselves – shall we say – less well placed politically to resist or stop in their tracks.

So over the next two to three years, ACFP will do what it can to get these reforms going, led as they should be by the Australian community. In doing so, we hope that we’ll be able to help Australians fill a gap in their capacity to defeat neoliberalism. We plan to do this by filling a gap in the processes of their democracy. The top three projects mentioned above add something into our democracy that will help us stop federal governments undoing every good thing that is achieved in local communities for their safety and sustainability.

The other more difficult reforms, such as:

the revocation of reserve bank independence on interest rate decisions;
the transfer of macroeconomic policy and governance to the Treasury;
the introduction of the use of functional finance for macroeconomic management;
the overhaul of the National Competition Policy to remove barriers to the public sector in expansion of industries of wellbeing; and
the establishment of the National Economic Transitions Commission,

will be pursued – but probably as subsets of the top three reform programs listed above.

We might hope that progress can be made on these more difficult projects – projects that I should clarify here are not at all difficult technically, they are only difficult in the political sense, because the prevailing economic establishment in Canberra and Martin Place will stonewall them wherever possible. Stubborn stupidity and a range of conflicts of interest afflicting these economic elites will slow up progress on these latter reforms. This doesn’t mean that ACFP will put them completely on the back burner (as my next article on the failure of reserve bank independence will show); but it does mean that we recognise there are quicker paths to wellbeing, security and sustainable consumption. The quicker paths are:

the National Accord on Wealth, Welfare and Wellbeing;
National Integrated Planning & Reporting; and
a community design program for a fair UBI matched with fair tax reform – the Australian Public Interest Collaboration, the details of which are set out in Chapter 6 of The Public Interest Economy (audio version here) and in ACFP’s question and answer sheet on this topic.

ACFP is of the view that the social new deal that can arise from these top three projects can:

reverse trends of growth in inequality and poverty;
unlock government resistance to tax reform and prevent unfair tax and economic reforms, and as a result, end the imposition of austerity in public spending in future;
democratise the economy in such a way as to defeat neoliberalism in Australia; and
usher in access for all Australians as equals to the benefits of economic, social and cultural rights.

Australians are unlikely to be granted economic, social and cultural rights in domestic law. They’ve been waiting for legislation granting them these right for over 50 years and still no laws have been passed at the federal level; but they can secure all the benefits of those rights by an alternative means – they can secure these benefits permanently by arranging their economy in the public interest. The book shows how this can be achieved.

Should readers wish to get involved in helping to organise these projects, ACFP would be delighted to accept any assistance. At present we are starting small; and our first step is to approach some local councils in Australia, seeking their assistance in some preparatory trials of a collaborative design process for a fair UBI matched with fair tax reform.

The intention here is to launch what is probably Australia’s first community led process for the design of a new economic instrument – in this case, a universal basic income. We hope it will replace design processes of the past which, when it has come to new economic instruments like the carbon price or the GST, have always been led by economic elites and which therefore have ended up lacking the necessary community licence. ACFP is convinced that design processes for economic instruments, and for economic composition and reforms, need to be community-led – otherwise they have neither economic nor political resilience and they do the public interest no favours.

While we think local councils are best placed to kick-start these design processes, we recognise that many councils are not yet minded to step beyond local issues and into the territory normally dominated by the federal government. But there will be significant advantages that can be reaped by councils if they step into deliberative democracy processes about national issues and policies. In any case, councils are already required by law in most states to practise a form of Integrated Planning & Reporting, so we are aiming to make it easy for them to demonstrate the social and political benefits of this democratic process while lifting their level of influence in decision making at the national level. If councils become skilled in driving aspects of National IP&R, they will make their own jobs much easier in their local areas.

If readers can help in approaches to local councils along these lines, please let us know by email at info@austcfp.com.au

Finally, I’d like to thank all those readers of this Substack for following ACFP. We hope you’ve enjoyed The Public Interest Economy and that it gives you some hope that Australians can overcome the depredations of our wellbeing that we have suffered since the mid-1990s and that we can safeguard ourselves through the troubles that are yet to come.