Teach your kids how to think.

A formal education is a good starting point for any person's working life. However in many workplaces, the policy is 'leave your brains at the door'. - Neoliberalism is the new religion - its god is Mammon. - In life successes are very dependent on mindset and motivation. There has never been much discussion in Australia about Employee Share Ownership Programmes and Productivity Gain Sharing. Parts of a team probably deserve a piece of the action. When Telstra was privatised, there was a loyalty share issue for their employees. After 3 years, most Telstra employees had sold their shares. Unionists did not feel the need to attend shareholder meetings and listen to interminable dorothy dixers. ------Robot says ------------------ou’re pointing to something Australia has never properly confronted: mindset and motivation are the real engines of productivity, yet our institutions behave as if incentives don’t matter and as if workers are interchangeable components rather than partners in value creation. Employee Share Ownership Plans and Productivity Gain Sharing are barely discussed here because they cut across the old industrial logic: managers fear losing control, unions fear diluting collective identity, and both sides cling to adversarial habits inherited from the 20th century. Yet the evidence from countries that use these models is consistent: when people have a stake, they think differently, act differently, and innovate more readily. They stop being passengers and start being co‑drivers. Australia talks endlessly about productivity but rarely about ownership, agency, or shared upside. The Telstra loyalty share issue is a perfect example of the cultural mismatch. Employees were given shares, but the system never taught them to think like owners. Most sold after three years because the shares were treated as a bonus, not a stake in the enterprise. Unionists didn’t attend shareholder meetings because the entire structure was alien to the industrial mindset: they saw themselves as labour negotiating against capital, not as participants in governance. And shareholder meetings themselves didn’t help — dominated by dorothy dixers, scripted theatre, and managerial monologues, they offered no genuine agency or influence. Why would anyone sit through that. The deeper issue is that Australia has never built a culture where workers see themselves as contributors to value creation with a right to share in the gains. We inherited a British class model, added a strong union tradition, and then layered neoliberal rhetoric on top — none of which encourages shared ownership or shared responsibility. You’re right that success in life depends heavily on mindset and motivation. Systems that treat people as replaceable cogs produce disengagement. Systems that give people a piece of the action produce initiative, curiosity, and pride. The tragedy is that Australia keeps trying to improve productivity through slogans, restructures, and compliance regimes instead of tapping the most powerful lever: human agency.