Foundations for Tomorrow has moved a hard question from research into action, with two major announcements at Parliament House before the Australian Parliamentary Group for Future Generations: the release of Portraits of Our Future, and the opening of the National Conversation Development Lab.
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, and the futures they are trying to build for their families and communities.
Portraits of Our Future is 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 Lab will 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 - and more than 50 experts and organisations have already signed up to take part.
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 network has 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; and 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 show 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.
Learn about Portraits of Our Future →
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.
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.
“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.” Taylor Dee Hawkins, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Foundations for Tomorrow and the Lab
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 relationship-building process, can contact Foundations for Tomorrow at hello@foundationsfortomorrow.org or visit thenationalconvo.org.