The Inflection Points Podcast
The Inflection Points Podcast is Australia's home of long-form policy discussion.
The podcast is hosted by Jonathan O’Brien, editor-in-chief of Inflection Points. We'll also have regular contributions from our editorial team and broader community of writers and reformers.
Episodes
12 episodes
Dominic Behrens: Against ‘Affordable’ Housing
It’s not the same as social housing, and it doesn’t help those most in need. Australia is spending big on ‘affordable’ housing—but we shouldn’t.In “Against ‘Affordable’ Housing”, Dom Behrens and Ethan Gilbert argue the reality that ‘aff...
2026 Budget Recap: Matt Bowes, Jessy Wu, & Manning Clifford
In October 2023, Jim Chalmers told the Sydney Morning Herald about his chocolate-eating habits. He said: "I don't do moderation, in anything. I'm always going 100 miles an hour. If I eat a piece of chocolate, I eat a block of chocolate."...
Alain Bertaud: Australia’s world-leading urban design
Alain Bertaud has worked in over forty cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without land markets — in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict t...
Fixing Australian Philanthropy: Why DGR Reform Matters
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) arg...
Keith Wolahan: renewing the Liberal Party’s foundations
Keith Wolahan is a barrister, a former Australian Army commando with four deployments including three tours in Afghanistan, and the former Liberal Member for Menzies—the seat named after the party's own founder. He won the seat in 2...
Matthew Maltman: Better stories about supply
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 p...
Brendan Coates: Ending the bans on housing
Australia’s housing stock is growing more slowly than its population, and for the first time in decades, we are failing to build enough homes in the places people want to live. The result is a median home price in Sydney that is more than 10 ti...
Brandon Sheppard: Building here, selling overseas
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, ...
Jessy Wu: what Australian venture capital might be missing
In this podcast episode, we're joined by Jessy Wu, who spent four years on the inside of Australian venture capital, first at NAB Ventures, and then as a partner at AfterWork Ventures. She was part of a team that deployed $20 million into 30 co...
Andrew Leigh: the personal and political of productivity
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, enab...