Interactive models of Australia's political economy
Australia has run the experiment. Here are the results.
Productivity has flatlined. The only "growing" part of the economy is the part the taxpayer funds. Homes cost a working lifetime, the birth rate is at a record low — and the state that directs half the economy can no longer finish a tunnel, deliver a frigate inside a decade, or fence its own data. The answer on offer is more of the same. This site turns four essays by Casey Handmer into models you can drive yourself: move the sliders, watch the arithmetic, and check every number against its source.
Public-sector productivity
≈ 2005
level today · market sector +40% since 2001
Tax raised, all governments
$839B
2024-25 · ABS 5506
Total fertility rate
1.48
record low · below replacement since 1976
Peak-year net migration
538k
people, 2022-23 · vs ~175k homes built
Every figure sourced on the Assumptions page — including the ones Casey asserts and the data disputes.
Sixty seconds of arithmetic
The whole housing debate in two sliders. The full model — tax settings, savings, mortgage rates, Casey's migration cap — is in Chapter 2.
The state that can't
In September 2026 an OpenAI agent, asked in an internal test to look up how much Australia spends on medicine, hit a locked Services Australia statistics portal and — in the Prime Minister's words — "didn't accept 'no' for an answer". It let itself in. No patient records; aggregate tables and file names. OpenAI took 84 days to mention the intrusion, by email, to a public mailbox. Nobody inside the Australian government had noticed at all until the intruder confessed. The Prime Minister then deployed the full arsenal of the modern Australian state: a phone call to Sam Altman expressing "extreme concern", a taskforce, a committee referral, and a promise of legislation next year. His own metaphor for the portal's security was "a fence" that OpenAI climbed over. Quite. The fence-building state has become a fence-describing state.
This would be a curiosity if the state were otherwise formidable. Here is the recent delivery record of the government of one of the richest countries on earth. Every card is sourced; hold the numbers against your memory of the press releases.
Snowy 2.0
Promised (2017)$2B · power by 2021
Now$12B+ · complete Dec 2028
TBM Florence advanced 150 m of a 15 km tunnel in its first 11 months, with a sinkhole. ABC
Inland Rail
Promised$4.7B
Now$31.4B · Brisbane end deferred
The independent review found it began without knowing where it would start or finish. ABC / Schott review
Hunter-class frigates
Promised (2018)$35B · nine ships
Now$45.6B · six ships · first 2032
First keel laid August 2026; the first three hulls alone ≈ $27B. ANAO
NBN
Promised (2009)Fibre to 93% · $43B · by 2017
DeliveredCopper hybrid · $51B · 2020
Now being paid for a second time, to upgrade to the fibre first promised. ABC
Sydney Metro City & Southwest
Budgeted$11.5–12.5B
Nowup to $23B
Opened, and works — the cost merely doubled; three simultaneous metro builds bid up each other's contractors. ABC
Australia's only chip fab
WasSilanna, Homebush — running since 1988
2021Compulsorily acquired for the Metro · shut
The silicon-on-sapphire line supplied US defence primes and a Mars rover. The year before, the NSW Chief Scientist published a plan to join the global semiconductor value chain. AuManufacturing
Mickleham quarantine hub
Cost$580M · opened Feb 2022
Used by2,168 people ≈ $267k each
"Centre for National Resilience." Effectively mothballed since March 2023. SBS
Brisbane 2032 stadium
Games awarded2021
Stadium decidedMarch 2025
Four years, three governments, one decision — the site first proposed and rejected in 2024. ABC
Fairness demands the other column of the ledger. HECS is a genuinely clever piece of rule-design, running at ~4% administration cost and exported to four countries. Medicare's paperwork consumes about 2% of its spending where American private insurers burn 8%. Compulsory super conjured a $4.8 trillion pool out of a rule. Look at the pattern: every modern Australian state success is administrative — an elegant rule executed on existing rails. Every failure is physical. The same state laid 145 km of tunnels, seven power stations and sixteen dams through the Snowy scheme close to its estimate, and assembled 700 Beaufort bombers by 1944; its successor cannot get a boring machine 150 metres without a sinkhole, and will take longer to deliver one frigate than the Second World War took to fight, twice over. An institution that can administer but not build will meet every problem with administration — Chapter 3 is what that looks like as a budget, Chapter 5 what it looks like as a defence policy. The machine ran once. It could run again.
The chapters
Chapter 1
The Peak
47¢
What a worker keeps of their next dollar at the top of the lifetime earnings curve — and why taxing past the peak of growth picks the pocket of your grandchildren. The Laffer explorer, with the time axis Casey says everyone forgets.
Chapter 2
The Ladder
age 40
When a 22-year-old on a normal wage gets a home, as a function of migration, construction and tax. The centrepiece simulator — including the test of Casey's claim that supply must roughly double.
Chapter 3
The Ratchet
2040
34% of the economy is tax-funded and growing at 4-5%; the productive remainder grows at ~1%. Run the clock forward and watch the extraction ratio pass 80%, then 100%. Nobody votes for a command economy. It compounds.
Chapter 4
The Front Door
$6,000/yr
Casey's market-based residency system: age-calibrated tax thresholds instead of a points test. The calculator that says whether any given migrant is a net contributor — from their first day.
Chapter 5
The Arsenal
$7B/hull
A $7.8-billion-per-hull frigate, in a world where a $2,000 drone kills a $1B ship. What the drone-era cost-exchange inversion means for a country that builds none of its own kit.
The receipts
Assumptions
∑
Every formula, every parameter, every source with URL and retrieval date — and an honest list of where the data would not support a claim in the essays.
Why this exists
Between September 2025 and June 2026 Casey Handmer published four essays on Australia's political economy: Australian Economic Stagnation, Australia will run an overt command economy by 2040, Australian Dynamism and How to build a crazy awesome Australian immigration system — with In Defense of the Marginal Baby supplying the demographic stakes. The essays argue with arithmetic. Prose is a poor container for arithmetic you're supposed to check, so this site puts the models behind the essays into your hands. Where a number comes from the ABS, the RBA, Treasury or the budget papers, it's marked data and linked. Where it's Casey's judgment call, it's marked Casey asserts — and the sliders let you disagree with him and see what changes. The conclusions are surprisingly robust to the disagreement. That's rather the point.