Third Thoughts

Cheap Trick

Large coordination problems are not solved by programmes, mandates, or moral narrative. They are solved by removing friction where costs actually accumulate, making the better behaviour cheaper, and then getting out of the way.

Australia once understood this. Then it forgot.

How Cheap Trade Was Actually Created

Modern trade became cheap, fast, and reliable because two simple physical innovations attacked the real bottleneck: handling.

Shipping containers made ships easier to load and unload and allowed them to carry far more usable cargo per trip. Before containers, ships sat in port for days or weeks while cargo was moved item by item. Containers turned thousands of items into a single unit, moved by cranes in minutes. Turnaround times collapsed. Labour costs fell. Theft and damage dropped. More cargo moved per voyage.

There was no state programme. No mandate. No moral case. Operators adopted containers because non-adoption meant higher costs. Reality enforced the standard.

Pallets solved a related but different problem. They guaranteed that goods could be loaded and unloaded efficiently regardless of where they originated or where they were going. Forklifts, racking, trucks, and warehouses could interoperate automatically. The critical insight was pooling: pallets did not have to be returned empty to their point of origin. Reverse logistics disappeared. Efficiency scaled.

In Australia, the state played a limited, competent role: a one-time seeding of palletisation after the war to remove handling friction. There was no extractive pricing, no permanent standards bureaucracy, no entitlement logic. Once the efficiency gain was embedded, the state exited and the system commercialised. The productivity gain remained.

That era looks, in hindsight, like the last period in which Australia was governed with an instinct for ending problems rather than managing them.

What Changed

Later policy abandoned the Cheap Trick and replaced it with permanent systems.

GST can be steel-manned. As the economy shifted from goods to services, the old wholesale sales tax eroded. A broad consumption tax made sense as a replacement. GST was sold as a swap that would allow income and company taxes to fall.

That never happened. Spending expanded to absorb the new revenue. GST became a ratchet: a new tax layered on top of old ones. Pressure to constrain government disappeared. Exit was removed.

NDIS can also be steel-manned. The intent—to support people with genuine disabilities—is legitimate. But the scheme was designed as a permanent entitlement, not an outcome-bounded intervention. Administrative layers consume enormous funding. Providers are rewarded for ongoing dependency, not functional improvement. There is no systemic pathway for recipients to graduate to independence.

If large numbers of people were reliably exiting the scheme stronger and self-sufficient, the media would be saturated with those stories. It is not.

FBT is the purest failure. It was justified as fairness: some employees received cars or lunches via employers, others did not, so tax the benefit. In practice it criminalised flexibility in remuneration, imposed absurd compliance costs, distorted behaviour, and created entire industries of avoidance. It improved nothing. It simply enforced a moral notion of fairness at the expense of efficiency and agency.

The Pattern

Cheap Trick systems share the same structure:

Modern programmes share the opposite:

Containers and pallets succeeded because success made them invisible.

GST, NDIS, and FBT fail because success would make them obsolete.

The Lesson

Make the better option cheaper.
Let agents choose.
Let reality enforce the standard.
Then leave.

That is the Cheap Trick.

It built modern trade.
It once characterised Australian governance.
And its absence explains why so much policy now exists to be maintained rather than solved.