As Parliament reconvenes and business leaders prepare for the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable, we must resist the comfort of familiar paths and instead push for bold reforms that deliver real change.

Consult Australia members will be represented in Canberra at the Roundtable through our memberships with the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia. In the lead-up, ministers have been consulting widely. We’ve already sat down with Infrastructure Minister Catherine King to offer ideas on lifting productivity – more on that in this issue of Consulting Matters.

But the outcomes from this Roundtable must be more than talk. Australia’s productivity challenge is now more than two decades old. Solving it will take ambition and a willingness to learn from what hasn’t worked in the past.

We often talk about the so-called ‘low-hanging fruit’ of productivity reform in our industry. Standard form contracts, digital by default practices, streamlined procurement, fair risk allocation, pipeline transparency, better workplace cultures… the basket is overflowing with obvious opportunities. Yet these reforms have proven not so low-hanging after all. If they were, we’d have picked them by now.

With the infrastructure agenda shifting towards energy and water (a theme we explore in this month’s Consulting Matters), we have a golden opportunity to reset. We can’t afford to replicate the adversarial contracting models that have hampered progress in transport infrastructure.

Engineers are perfectly placed to lead this shift. Our recent Engineers with Influence event, co-hosted with Engineers Australia, underscored this. Engineers are expert problem solvers. “Thinking differently is in our DNA,” is how one participant put it.

Doing things differently is also at the heart of the Champions of Change message. Diversity drives innovation, fresh thinking and smarter decisions.

This conversation continues at the 8th Annual Champions of Change Industry Lunch on 27 August in Sydney. We’ll hear from keynote speaker Dr Niki Vincent, Victoria’s inaugural Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner. She’ll be joined by a panel of Champions of Change leaders Belinda Virant (Arcadis), Barbara Crossley (Umwelt) and Greg Kane (WSP), who this month steps into the role of Champions of Change Chair. We warmly thank outgoing Chair, Arup’s Kerryn Coker, for her leadership.

Next month will be a busy one, with the launch of the 2026 Consult Australia Awards program, finalising our new strategic plan and seeking nominations for the Consult Australia Board in advance of our AGM in October.

Through it all, our call remains clear: choose ambition over repetition, and seize the opportunity to lead differently, decisively and better.