As I prepare to step away from my role as Chief Executive of McKinnon, while remaining involved through the Board, I have found myself reflecting on a question that has sat at the centre of much of our work over the past two years.

What does good political leadership look like in a democracy that feels increasingly unsettled? It is a harder question than it once was.

For much of modern democratic history, politics operated on a simple social compact. People expected that if they worked hard, contributed to society and played by the rules, governments and institutions would broadly create the conditions for a better life.

I think it is increasingly clear that many people no longer feel that promise is being kept. Across much of the democratic world, we are seeing a profound loss of confidence in institutions that once commanded enormous trust. We see it in Britain after Brexit. We see it across Europe with the rise of populist movements. We see it in the United States, where political division has become structural.

And increasingly, we are seeing it here in Australia. I sometimes worry that too many people within our political and institutional establishments are misreading what is happening.

When voters express anger about housing affordability, economic insecurity, cost of living pressures, migration, cultural change or simply a sense that the system no longer understands their lives, the instinct too often is to caricature that frustration rather than confront what sits beneath it.

One of the surest ways to drive people further away from the political centre is to sneer at their dissatisfaction and dismiss legitimate frustration as ignorance or unfounded grievance.

People do not turn against institutions in a vacuum. More often, they do so when they conclude the system is no longer delivering for them. At its core, trust in democracy has always rested on performance. For most people, that means something very simple: whether government is making life more affordable, communities more secure, housing more attainable, public services more effective and the future more promising for their children than it was for them.

At the same time, I do not believe Australians have abandoned faith in democratic institutions altogether. Our own McKinnon Index recently found trust in federal politicians sits at just 35.9 per cent. Yet trust in institutions like the Australian Electoral Commission remains above 70 per cent. I think that distinction matters enormously.

Australians still trust institutions they believe are competent, independent and capable of delivering outcomes. The challenge is that politics itself is increasingly struggling to meet that same standard. This reality places extraordinary pressure on modern political leaders.

Economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, aging populations, natural disasters and social fragmentation have all combined to make political leadership materially harder than at perhaps any other time in recent history.

And yet politics remains one of the few professions where we invest remarkably little in leadership development itself. We spend enormous time preparing military leaders, business leaders and civic leaders, but we devote far less thought to preparing the people who make some of the most consequential decisions in our society.

My time at McKinnon has only strengthened my conviction that this must change. Democracies are ultimately only as strong as the quality of the people entrusted to lead them. That belief sits behind everything this organisation does. It sits behind the McKinnon Prize, which recognises outstanding political leadership. It sits behind programs like Advanced Political Leadership, where we work directly with those already serving in public office, and Next Horizon, which seeks out talented Australians who may never have considered politics as a pathway. Both are built on the belief that democracies function better when leadership is developed intentionally.

But if we are serious about lifting the quality of political leadership, we also need to think much harder about whether the structures surrounding public life are helping or hindering that goal. There should be a serious conversation about how we attract talented people back into our parliaments, whether that means reconsidering long-term incentives such as parliamentary pensions, creating stronger barriers that discourage ministers moving into lobbying roles, and examining publicly funded election models that give Australians greater confidence that political decision making is free from the perception of donor influence. Strong democracies require strong institutions, but they also require systems deliberately designed to attract and sustain exceptional people in public life.

As I step away from this role, I also want to acknowledge Dr Sophie Oh and Grant Rule, whose vision in founding McKinnon was underpinned by their unwavering commitment to Australia, to our democratic traditions and to the belief that strong institutions and strong leadership ultimately make us a better people. I also leave knowing the organisation is in exceptionally capable hands under Acting CEO Leigh O’Neill, whose career has been built around helping major institutions rethink how they operate and constantly improve the outcomes they deliver for their customers. At McKinnon, that customer is the Australian public.

Politics has developed an odd habit in recent years. We have started confusing power with leadership. They are not the same thing. 

That was part of the story behind last week’s McKinnon Prize in Canberra, where Senator James Paterson was named Federal Political Leader of the Year. At first blush it may have felt like a strange decision, given the electoral realities facing the Federal Coalition, but serious democracies depend on serious opposition.

Senator Paterson has established himself as one of the most substantive voices in federal politics. Time and again, on some of the most difficult policy questions facing the country, he has shown the discipline and depth of thinking that forces governments to engage more seriously with the decisions they make. Parliament is stronger when more people do the job this way. 

Former British Prime Minister Lord David Cameron joined us from London just 48 hours after Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, offering a striking reflection on the extraordinary volatility now defining British politics. 

With six prime ministers in just a decade and the political upheaval unleashed by Brexit still reverberating, Cameron reflected on the growing question confronting Britain and much of the democratic world: whether liberal democracy, in its current form, is proving capable of meeting the demands and frustrations of modern electorates. 

His warning was clear. The strength of democratic institutions depends on a simple but vital principle: that power ultimately rests with the people, and that elected leaders remain servants of the public, never their masters. At a moment of profound instability in the United Kingdom, it was a timely reminder that trust in institutions can never be taken for granted. 

Few Australian leaders embodied that responsibility more clearly this year than NSW Premier Chris Minns MP. He was recognised after a year in which his leadership was tested by the worst terrorist attack in Australian history. His response to the Bondi Beach tragedy, and his willingness to confront the rise of antisemitism with moral clarity and unwavering consistency, was outstanding by any definition.  

The Hon Dr Andrew Charlton MP was awarded Emerging Leader of the Year for embodying a quality politics too often struggles to attract. He entered parliament having already built a hugely successful career outside it, walking away from opportunities most people would never voluntarily leave behind because he believed public service was important. That same sense of purpose has shaped the work he is now doing around artificial intelligence, one of the few politicians genuinely engaging with the economic transformation this technology is about to unleash. 

Different politics. Different pressures. Same principle. Public life works better when serious people approach serious problems with discipline, judgement and a willingness to think beyond the immediate political cycle. 

That idea sits at the heart of everything we do at McKinnon. Because stronger institutions can only be built by better leaders. 

Australia has developed an extraordinary ability to talk endlessly about tax reform while achieving almost none of it. For more than twenty-five years, governments of every persuasion have acknowledged the structural pressures facing our public finances and have attempted reform roughly every three years. It almost always ended in retreat the moment political resistance arrived. 

That was the starting point for the National Tax Dialogue convened by McKinnon on 24 April, built around our latest report, 25 Years of False Starts. The conclusion is increasingly hard to ignore.

Time and again, difficult but necessary ideas collapse under the weight of short-term politics, vested interests and a public debate that rewards conflict long before substance has been properly examined. 

That is precisely why we brought together a room few organisations in the country could assemble. Under the leadership of Mike Baird and Anna Bligh, joined by former New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English, leaders from business, civil society and the policy community came together around a proposition that should hardly be controversial: Australia cannot keep postponing difficult reform because politics has become uncomfortable. 

The response was extraordinary. Participants who rarely agree on much at all signed a National Tax Reform Roadmap committing themselves to a more honest public conversation, one grounded in evidence, explicit trade-offs and the understanding that difficult reform cannot survive if every debate immediately descends into a contest over manufactured winners and losers. 

And then, almost immediately, we watched the exact opposite happen. The Federal Budget landed and within days the country returned to the same destructive habits that have paralysed reform for a generation. Public debate once again became less about substance and more about finding reasons the conversation should end before it properly began. 

This is precisely the cycle McKinnon exists to challenge. But Australia cannot keep pretending the structural pressures on the tax system will solve themselves while every serious reform conversation is strangled before it has a chance to breathe. Twenty-five years of false starts is already a national failure. We should not allow the next twenty-five to look the same. 

Australia has become very good at talking about school improvement and remarkably bad at delivering it. Student outcomes have flatlined, with one in three children now falling below NAPLAN proficiency benchmarks, yet the way we structure and govern schools today looks remarkably similar to the system that has been underperforming for years.

One of McKinnon’s most important reform partnerships is now underway in Tasmania, where in January the state became the first in Australia to begin trialling Multi-School Organisations, a structural rethink of how public education is delivered and led. Rather than leaving schools to operate as isolated islands, schools are brought together into strong families under shared executive leadership, allowing principals to focus less on administration and compliance, and more on teaching, learning and student outcomes.

The model is grounded in reforms that have already transformed schools internationally, particularly in England, where Multi-Academy Trusts have delivered dramatic improvements in underperforming schools by replacing fragmentation with scale, consistency and shared accountability. Tasmania is now testing how that same thinking can be adapted successfully to Australian conditions, backed by independent evaluation and with national implications if it succeeds.

The early signs are promising. Just six months into the trial, the Tasmanian Government has already announced the model will expand into the north of the state next year, a significant vote of confidence in both the reform itself and the schools leading it. Tasmania deserves enormous credit for recognising that if we want better results for students, we may need to rethink the systems responsible for producing them.