The Inflection Points Podcast

Recorded live in Melbourne in March 2025, this event — co-hosted with Effective Altruism Australia — brings together three speakers making the case for reforming our charitable giving laws. Ryan Ginard (Fundraise for Australia) argues that without fixing the infrastructure, the $5.4 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer will pass the charitable sector by. Clare Ozich (Justice Connect) explains exactly what the system is, why it fails, and what the Productivity Commission's solution...

Policymakers often suffer from a cognitive blind spot: we intuitively think like consumers rather than producers. When it comes to housing, this leads governments to reach for demand-side levers—like First Home Owner Grants—that often inflate prices, rather than addressing the fundamental constraints on production. In this episode of the Inflection Points Podcast, Matthew Maltman, Senior Research Economist at the e61 Institute, joins Jonathan O’Brien to discuss his landmark essay, “Best Pract...

Every successful Australian tech company follows roughly the same playbook: build the product here, test it in our market, then export it overseas. Atlassian, Canva, Safety Culture—they kept a lot of their engineering and R&D in Australia, while their sales teams conquered international markets. The secret to Australian tech success is to treat it like an export industry. Brandon Sheppard is the COO at Instant and has been in Australian tech since 2012—back when major VC funds...

After a decade of sluggish growth—the slowest productivity gains in 60 years—Australia faces a fundamental question: how does our nation capture the dynamic potential of the 21st century? How do we build an economy that rewards innovation, enables competition, and creates opportunity for all? This is a conversation with Andrew Leigh about both personal and national productivity. In the first half of this episode, we dive into Andrew’s personal systems and productivity trade-offs, from four-ho...

Australians aren't apathetic. If anything, we care a lot more than our reputation suggests. But when the conversation about our country's direction is either a one thousand-word op-ed that barely scratches the surface, or a 400-page report that almost nobody reads — the real work of changing Australia becomes inaccessible. Even for the people who want to see it the most. Welcome to the Inflection Points Podcast: the home of in-depth policy discussion for a bigger, better Aus...