From education to environment, to energy production, to agriculture, it feels as though we are on some nightmarish merry-go-round of rhetoric and policies that descends a little further each time it does a revolution. 

The pressures of a perpetually and increasingly fast-changing world has meant people from all camps; politicians, activists, society in general, are just trying to keep up with the changes under an every-increasing scrutiny. 

Each faces scrutiny from the other, from the media and from the meteoric rise of social media, which is ever-present.

The outcome of this is that an increasing pressure has ensured there is no time to say, “Hang on, whoa, lets just take a moment to think how this could work better”.

The problem with ever-present scrutiny and pressure to succeed means there is no room to fail – there isn’t even room to consider failure. 

The problem with this, as I suspect any creative will tell you, is without the possibility of failure creativity cannot happen. 

Without creativity we cannot imagine the truly revolutionary solutions that can drive the world forward into an exciting new chapter. 

Now, I am not championing failure as a successful model for policy and solutions, but I do think that without giving our leaders and society the chance to explore, examine and develop without jumping on every tiny nuance or comment then we doom them to stay within the known, the safe, the defendable. 

And this will never result in new ideas or revolutionary solutions. 

Sometimes to make the meteoric breakthroughs that define human progress, we must go back to the drawing board and be radical, fanciful and even a little bit crazy to discover something new. 

With people racing to stay ahead of the scrutiny, stay on the front foot, proactively defending themselves from the inevitable and impending criticism, there is no time for people to sit down together and approach things from an entirely new angle. 

It is much simpler, easier and safer to fall back to ideological stances and beliefs that have seen us through to this point. 

The problem is, old thinking creates old solutions. 

If we could scrap everything that had gone before, if there was no precedent to how our children were educated, if we could forget the mistrust of previous failed environmental proposals, if we could re-imagine what energy generation looked like, what could we create?

Perhaps it’s time to give our leaders some breathing room, and trust them to use that to re-think the way we are doing things and in a bipartisan way create something new and wonderful, something that could not have been imagined without that breathing room. 

And with that, our leaders should honour the trust placed in them and not squander their time, effort and resources with petty squabbling, finger-pointing or needless debate, but invest it in cooperatively re-imagining Australia. 

Let’s forget what has gone before, look at what we have now and use the knowledge we have brought with us to find new ways of approaching all areas of society. 

Let’s become the leaders of a new world that has been created with thought and imagination, not knee-jerk reactions and outdated rhetoric.