It sits at the service station entrance, usually lit in red, updated most days. The petrol price board is the most read piece of data in Australia. When that number goes up and stays up, governments flounder. Alongside it, another number is also moving. More than four million Australian households… Read More
In 1971, a small team inside Royal Dutch Shell began rehearsing for a crisis that had not yet happened. Led by Pierre Wack, they weren’t trying to forecast an imminent oil embargo, and never claimed they could. What they did was harder. They walked Shell’s executives through how the… Read More
In March, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose firm manages US$14 trillion, wrote to investors that the world is reorganising around self-reliance. Rebuilding the global economy will cost more than governments and banks can fund alone. Fink has form. In 2020 he… Read More
In March 2026, the Australian Prime Minister flew to Brunei to beg for fertiliser. He was there because a dozen insurers in London and Oslo closed a strait that carries a fifth of the world’s oil. I can’t recall a single meaningful conversation about it. Nine months… Read More
The climate movement spent two decades framing decarbonisation as a moral imperative. Donald Trump and a cost-of-living crisis broke the popular mandate. Iran has now achieved what we environmental advocates could not. A solar farm cannot be blockaded. A battery cannot be torpedoed in the Strait of Hormuz. Each new… Read More
In 1996, a Dutch engineer, Geert-Jan Bruinsma, noticed something about hotels. Travellers couldn’t compare them in parallel. A visitor opened tab after tab, scribbled prices on a notepad, and settled for whatever looked reasonable. Bruinsma built Booking.com to fix this. In 2005, Priceline bought it for $133 million. Read More
Why Strategy Comes Before Compliance With AASB S2 mandatory disclosures now in force, it’s easy to treat sustainability as a reporting exercise. But reporting without strategy is just the documentation of indecision. A robust sustainability strategy does three critical things that reporting alone cannot: … Read More
Trump’s Return — a Symptom, Not a Cause Trump’s return wasn’t an isolated event. It reflected a broader shift across liberal democracies towards personal freedoms over collective notions of equality that had been dominant since the global financial crisis. But recent elections in Canada and Australia suggest the trend is already reversing. The question for company… Read More
Stretching Boards, Not Boring Them IFRS S2 and its local equivalents make climate scenario analysis mandatory for hundreds of thousands of firms worldwide. Most will experience it in its most anaemic form: templates and boilerplate models, lightly customised across industries. That will satisfy the regulator, but it leaves the strategy… Read More
The Incentive Trap Step inside any boardroom, and you’ll witness a peculiar form of institutional schizophrenia. CEOs are expected to be long-term visionaries while being judged on short-term performance. A leader who invests in decarbonisation, R&D, or workforce development might generate extraordinary value over a decade. Read More
