But in our professional lives, our defining challenge, is to be ahead of our time.
At the Property Council, most of our policy work is not about today, it’s about tomorrow.
It’s not about the immediate but it’s about the strategic. It’s about anticipating the needs of our cities and the regions so that we are prepared for the future.
If the demographers are right (and they mostly are), Australia is going to need to create the infrastructure, housing and city ecosystems for a city the size of Canberra every year for the next thirty years.
While that offers great opportunity for our industry, it also offers its challenges as well.
The challenge is to prepare for that growth so that it is natural and affordable. In the last two weeks, we have seen two pieces of the jigsaw released that help us plan for that future. The first is the latest Census data which reveals how we are growing and changing as a nation. The second piece of the jigsaw was Infrastructure Australia’s research into saving land corridors so that we can bank land in anticipation of the building of major road and rail projects.
Governments get a fair bit of criticism for short term thinking, but it’s not all warranted. This latest work by Infrastructure Australia is a reminder of the good, but often hidden, long term work being done to prepare Australia for a bigger future.