A large-scale, structured process bringing together everyday Australians across generations, communities and regions to explore shared values and build national direction.
A National Conversation is a large-scale, structured process. It brings together everyday Australians across generations, communities and regions to explore what matters most, identify what we share, and build a shared direction for where we are headed as a nation.
Done well, it builds tools, trust and systems that allow communities and governments to make ambitious, long-term decisions together, and stick to them.
explore how we're building it →Done well, it builds tools, trust and systems that allow communities and governments to make ambitious, long-term decisions together - and stick to them.
From farmers and nurses to students and grandparents - a National Conversation brings people together from every community to find shared direction, and give leaders the mandate to act on it.
National conversations have been run at scale and proven both possible and transformative. Each model was designed for its specific context, culture and institutions, and Australia's will be too.
Public values embedded into law.
The Wales We Want process (2013-14) was a year-long national conversation that asked citizens what they wanted the country to look like by 2050. Their responses directly shaped the wording of the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 and established seven statutory goals that governments must now plan against.
200,000 citizens shaped the country's next chapter.
Forward Singapore was a 16 month process engaging more than 200,000 Singaporeans in refreshing the country's social compact and co-designing a roadmap for the nation's next chapter. The process translated citizen values into policy commitments and resulted in more robust channels of public engagement in decision-making such as the Singapore Government Partnerships Office.
Civic-tech helped surface national consensus.
vTaiwan is an open grassroots civic-tech process that brought Taiwanese citizens, experts and government together to deliberate on contested national issues. Using digital tools to map where people agreed and disagreed, the process reached rough consensus on complex questions and the government acted on more than 80% of policy proposals that emerged.
800,000 people shaped a vision for the future.
When Finland marked 100 years of independence, it turned the moment into a national conversation. The framing was simple: what kind of Finland do we want to build together? More than 800,000 people responded through 170,000 events across every region.
Australia needs its own model for a National Conversation, one designed for who we are and the Country we share.
It has to work for the nurse finishing a late shift in Adelaide and the farmer managing drought in western Queensland. For the student in Sydney and the small business owner in regional Victoria. And for the communities who have cared for this Country for tens of thousands of years.
That is why FFT is convening 'The Lab' - to build a uniquely Australian model, designed to take us from a country banking on 'luck' that is running thin, to one of deliberate choice.
The Lab works in three stages, building relationships before design, testing before delivery, and finalising ahead of the 2028 federal election.
Before moving into design, we took three months to build the relationships this work depends on, ensuring representation across political views, regions, communities and generations, including First Nations peoples and historically marginalised groups.
For 12 months, six Development Tracks run simultaneously. The network brought together in the foundation stage works side by side to develop, test and pilot different dimensions of the model in real communities.
Learnings from across previous stages are brought together into a clear, implementation-ready model, alongside an acceleration of the political engagement that has underpinned the Lab from the beginning, ahead of the 2028 federal election.
Two distinct things, one setting up the other. The Lab designs and tests the model. The National Conversation is the large-scale process the Lab makes possible.
A cross-sector initiative, convened by Foundations for Tomorrow, that designs and tests how Australia can run a credible National Conversation. It produces two things:
A large-scale, structured conversation that brings Australians together to explore what matters most and shape the country's long-term ambitions. It builds:
The Lab's job is to develop the model - with the intention of seeing it implemented in future. While the Lab will run pilots, these are small-scale tests of specific parts of the design to learn from and iterate against - not the National Conversation itself.
The Lab is made possible by our Core Partners, Expert Advisors and Community Network. Meet the team →
