The Mound - #20 - Australian SuperCoach
Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems
In the AFR today, AustralianSuper chair Don Russell doesn’t think Australians should be obliged to bear the risk of funding national infrastructure projects when they’re already reducing the load on public funds by saving up for retirement.
He does admit that there is a competitive need to invest in the construction of things like affordable housing, aged care, and the energy transition - but ultimately, he says, funds have a legal responsibility to their customers, and not to the government.
So, yeah, on these occasions Big Super is DTF (down to fund) but they’re kind of seeing someone already and it’s pretty serious so let’s all just communicate, yeah?
Elsewhere in the paper, online betting company Betr is looking a little worse for wear as now two out of three founding, funding partners have exited the business. Absolutely not-helping the bookmakers during this period is that people are still cashing in on Betr’s insane launch promotion in which new customers could, as a gift for signing up, get paid out for any successful bet at the rate of 100:1. A mistake so god-damned collossal the Penrith Panthers’ victory last week saw the bookmaker cop “the largest single pay-out in Australian gambling” - around $40m to the Panthers’ roughly 40,000 backers. If the house always wins - we’d have called this a race to the bottom.
Now, whilst Betr are unlikely to dig their way out of this one, they could dig their way into a new one - with a new shovel, brought for them by the scariest boss of all: Government.
Here’s how we fix it:
We suggest Betr enacts the greatest pivot in corporate history to become the world’s first SuperFund / Bookmaker hybrid, a way for the average Australian to make the craziest bet that a man can make: the on-time and under-budget completion of a Government project.
By combining this nation’s two great loves - gambling and the observation of construction sites - we might usher in a new age of unprecedented civic engagement. In such a future commuters might honk with glee as yet another freeway upgrade causes them to miss a trial shift or their daughter’s dance recital; entire pubs could be built around the little plastic observation windows of construction sites; and instead of listening into post-match interviews with awkward, tight-lipped athletes, my children might dream of one day becoming even awkward-er, even tighter-lipped engineers (who are for some reason just as sweaty on-camera as the athletes were).
At the very least, having real skin in the game might finally give all our fathers the courage required, upon seeing six workers set to a one-man job, to roll down their windows and to display a rage usually required for the final minutes of a nailbiter at the MCG.
You’re welcome, Australia.
