The Stats Guy: Let’s turn this place into Australia’s ‘pilot state’
One Australian state offers the ideal testing ground for innovative experiments that could help solve Australia – and the world’s – future problems, writes Simon Kuestenmacher.
If you want to see the Australia of the future, you don’t need a time machine. You just need a ticket to Hobart.
Demographically, Tasmania looks less like the rest of Australia and much more like Germany – older, slower-growing, talent-hungry and shaped by small regional towns that quietly hollow out while a few sponge cities soak up what remains.
The age profile below shows that the 65-plus cohort in Tasmania makes up 22 per cent of the population. That’s much closer to Germany (23 per cent) than the rest of Australia (17 per cent).
The very problems that will challenge the nation in coming decades (skills shortages, ageing, regional decline) are not forecasts in Tasmania. They are lived reality. And that’s precisely why Tasmania should become Australia’s “pilot state”.
Australia thinks of itself as a young migrant nation. Tasmania is the exception.
The median age in Tasmania is 43, or a full five years older than the national figure and only a whisker younger than Germany.
Obviously, some local government areas in Tasmania are much older still. That is not a minor deviation, it is a different demographic universe.
Birth rates are low. Youth out-migration is real. Ageing is relentless.
And when you combine a small island economy with dispersed regional towns, you get the classic European challenge – places that slowly empty out while a few centres (Hobart and Launceston) swell as “sponge cities”, absorbing population, services and investment from everywhere else.
Tasmania today is living the demographic story the rest of Australia will experience tomorrow.
A state with a small labour pool, low net migration and an older population will always struggle to fill certain roles – aged-care workers, hospital staff, tradies, early-childhood educators, disability carers, bus drivers (crucial for the functioning of local communities in a state that doesn’t have a single tram or train), paramedics and other essential public-facing workers.
Germany faces the same problems right now, but on a much larger and far more financially lucrative scale.
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Any Tasmanian solution to these challenges would benefit the rest of Australia and unlock a ready-made export market in Germany.
Let me make the case for turning Tasmania into Australia’s “pilot state”.
Every country needs a place where bold ideas can be trialled without risking national-scale failure. New Zealand famously works this way for global tech firms who test out features with our Kiwi cousins first. Silicon Valley used to. Estonia still does for digital government.
Tasmania offers the ideal testing ground for innovative experiments. It’s a small state but its population is large enough to make experiments on a large-ish scale logistically manageable.
Tasmania’s demographic challenges will soon hit every other state. Its government is used to innovating on a shoestring budget.
More importantly, Tasmania has a great track record of ingenuity and of out-of-the-box thinking.
Tasmania reimagined what a museum is (MONA), drew visitors to the state during its least attractive season (Dark Mofo), established a niche tourism market out of thin air (the Blue Derby Mountain Bike Trails) and turned the expectations on what a top-class hotel experience is on its head (Pumphouse Point).
The ability for Tasmanians to think laterally has been proven many times over – let’s put it to some decent use.
Tasmania is the natural lab rat for Australia’s demographic future. I, of course, mean that in the most affectionate German way possible.
OK, let’s better stick with the “pilot state” idea for now.
I made AI spit out a pilot version of the visual too (and asked it to not include a stadium in the visual to keep the peace).
Let me just throw out a few ideas for some pilot projects that I think Tasmania, or more likely a single local government area, might want to consider taking on.
Pilot program 1: Solving essential-worker shortages with automation
Let’s start with the bus driver shortage, which plagues every state and territory but is more pressing in aging and fully road-dependent Tasmania.
I imagine the Tasmanian pilot to work something like this: A small, geographically contained network of self-driving, van-sized public transport vehicles is set up to operate in regional towns that cannot recruit enough drivers to run reliable services.
We switch to a fully self-driving network and utilise the existing bus drivers as mobile trouble shooters, as permanent passengers showing the new riders how the service works.
Safety would be the priority. The technology is already out there. Let’s bring it to Tasmania. Federal money, global technology.
If it works in Deloraine, Devonport or Sorell, it will work anywhere. Australia gets the evidence, Tasmania gets the investment (and solution to a specific skills shortage problem) and the local player gets an exportable service for ageing Europe, or the old and rich Asian nations of Japan and South Korea.
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Pilot program 2: Reinventing aged care (just a little task)
One of my all-time favourite books (besides The Count of Montecristo and The Invention of Nature) is Frédéric Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.
The book presents an astonishing array of innovative, self-managed, deeply human-centred companies.
One of the most impressive examples is a Dutch self-managed ambulant aged-care team delivering better outcomes at lower cost than traditional models.
Tasmania should run a pilot of such self-managed ambulant home-care units.
As a country we must double the aged-care system in the next 15 years. We know that the current model isn’t scalable anymore.
This is not fluffy theory – these models are already dominating the Dutch market. They reduce bureaucracy, improve job satisfaction, boost retention, and give older people continuity of care that no rotating shift roster can match.
Pilot program 3: Regional resilience experiments
Regional Tasmania already faces the dynamics that will hit regional Victoria, NSW and Queensland eventually – declining working-age population, ageing communities, services becoming unviable, local labour shortages and pressure on councils to maintain infrastructure with shrinking rate bases.
This pressure cooker of demographic change makes Tasmania the perfect environment for testing new models.
Regional skills exchanges, where councils pool specialised labour (surveyors, planners, engineers). Mobile service teams set up to cover multiple LGAs.
LGAs share digital permit systems, experience common planning back-ends, and might as well share procurement.
Tasmania could really show the rest of Australia how to maintain liveability under demographic stress.
To make the Tasmanian state government love me, I suggest that Canberra should bankroll the lion share of these pilots.
Tasmanians cannot shoulder projects of this magnitude by themselves. But the federal government should subsidise these pilots heavily, since the southern state ages faster than the rest and provides a perfect laboratory (hence the lab rat image).
Tasmania faces all of Australia’s future problems first. Every pilot is nationally relevant.
Tasmania is small enough to try bold ideas yet big enough for them to matter, and what works there can scale nationwide because you do not need 26 million people to test a mobility network, just a tidy state of 571,000.
Heck, even a single Tasmanian LGA would be enough.
Australia urgently needs proven models before the ageing wave hits and this is preparation rather than indulgence.
Successful Tasmanian pilots could even become export industries for ageing societies across Europe, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, which are hungry for technologies and service models that help them cope with demographic decline.
Too often seen as a charming outlier of art festivals, whisky and mountain-bike trails, Tasmania is in fact a preview of Australia’s demographic future. A natural laboratory for the country’s policy future and a potential global exporter of ageing-society solutions.
If Tasmania innovates, Australia learns. If Tasmania succeeds, Australia succeeds. And if Tasmania becomes the nation’s pilot state, the whole country gains a roadmap for the decades ahead.
Australia needs this, Tasmania is ready, and all that is missing is a government bold enough to fund the experiment.
Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.
