Opening the National Conversation Development Lab
Foundations for Tomorrow releases Portraits of Our Future and opens the National Conversation Development Lab at Parliament House
CANBERRA, 24 March 2026.
Behind Every Long-Term Policy Failure Is a Person Who Felt It First.
What does it actually cost a country to govern without a long-term vision? Not in economic projections or policy abstractions, but in the daily reality of people's lives, their plans, their security, the futures they are trying to build for their families and communities. Today, that question has moved from research into action.
Foundations for Tomorrow (FFT) has moved that question from research into action, with two major announcements made today at Parliament House before the Australian Parliamentary Group for Future Generations.
The first is Portraits of Our Future - a landmark research collection that follows fifteen Australians across every state and territory, documenting how the absence of long-term national planning shapes real lives across fifteen policy areas. The second is the opening of the National Conversation Development Lab (the Lab), which will deliver an 18-month initiative to design and test a large-scale national dialogue about Australia's long-term future, launching operations in June 2026.
Together, they represent a serious commitment to doing that work with communities, not just for them. That commitment is already generating traction: more than 50 experts and organisations have signed up to participate in the Lab.
Years in the Making
The Lab builds on more than five years of research, advocacy, and movement-building by FFT and a growing coalition of organisations, researchers, civic leaders, and Parliamentary champions. Together, this growing network of supporters have backed the introduction of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill 2025 and the formation of the 30+ organisation Intergenerational Fairness Coalition.
That work produced a defining insight: a successful Australian National Conversation cannot be the work of specialists alone. It must be built with communities, developing in Australians the shared capacity to grapple with long-term questions together. Portraits of Our Future is the most powerful expression of that conviction.
Portraits: Painting a Picture of Our Future
Portraits of Our Future was designed to pay honest attention. FFT worked alongside Australians whose lives span the breadth of the country: a fourth-generation Tasmanian farmer; a Lismore mental health practitioner; a 76-year-old Queensland woman planning thoughtfully for her final years; a Traralgon man who spent his career powering the country and now struggles to see his place in its future.
Each portrait pairs lived experience with rigorous policy analysis. Together, they illustrate what is easy to lose in policy debate: when a country defers its hardest long-term questions, the cost accumulates in real lives across housing, aged care, education, the environment, economic security, and civic participation.
Why the Lab
Australia needs a serious, structured, and inclusive process for building a shared long-term national vision and the civic infrastructure to sustain it. A genuine National Conversation cannot be handed down from above or delivered by specialists. It must be built with the people it is ultimately for, developing the shared capacity to reason through difficult trade-offs, find common ground, and hold leaders accountable to a direction that outlasts any single term of government.
The Lab is the careful, collaborative work of creating those conditions. Over 18 months, it will bring together communities, institutions, civic leaders, and researchers to prototype the governance architecture, engagement methods, inclusion safeguards, civic technology, and policy pathways required at this scale.
Today's meeting at Parliament House, co-chaired by Dr Sophie Scamps MP, Senator Maria Kovacic, and Ms Ash Ambihaipahar MP, opened a three-month relationship-building process to assemble the coalition of partners and leaders who will shape the Lab's design. From June 2026, community pilots will test that design. The Lab's outputs, including a Shared Inquiry Framework, tested engagement methods, and a proposed policy tool, will be delivered to Parliamentary leaders ahead of the 2028 federal election for multi-partisan consideration.
Taylor Dee Hawkins, Co-Founder and Managing Director of FFT and the Lab, said, "Australia has the appetite for big conversations. What we have lacked is the shared capacity to have them well; the skills to reason through difficult trade-offs, the networks that cross divides, and the civic infrastructure to turn what we agree on into decisions that last. The Lab is how we build that capacity before the conversation begins."
Australia has the civic tradition, the institutional foundations, and the public appetite for comparable ambition. What it has lacked is the serious development phase that turns a good idea into a durable process. Something that the Lab is well-placed to deliver.
Get Involved
Parliamentarians and community leaders interested in hosting a community pilot from June 2026, and organisations and individuals wishing to join the Lab's three-month relationship-building process, can contact Foundations for Tomorrow at hello@foundationsfortomorrow.org or visit thenationalconvo.org.