Advancing Economic Growth in Lake Macquarie, Australia
Guest blog by Tim Browne, LEG ’25
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Leading Economic Growth program has been an important step in building my awareness and understanding of the models, tools and processes that I can use to tackle economic development in Lake Macquarie. Moreover, as the CEO of Lake Macquarie’s Economic Development Company, I have already started using the knowledge gained throughout the program to further progress our mission to advance Lake Macquarie’s economy for new and existing businesses and residents by facilitating employment and economic growth through attracting investment, fostering innovation, advocating for infrastructure and building Lake Macquarie’s identity. The program has allowed me to better frame the specific growth challenge I worked on, and through iteration, that has improved my approach and operational capability. Lake Macquarie has several growth challenges, and while I focused on unlocking land, the learning process can be applied to other growth challenges.
The program discussed the importance of framing your growth problem accurately and being specific. I initially described Lake Macquarie’s growth challenge predominantly as “insufficient employment land.” As I worked through several assignments, it became clear that this framing was inaccurate and did not reflect the real challenge. Lake Macquarie does not suffer from a lack of land; rather, because of the complicated nature of the process, it takes far too long to unlock the land we have. As a result of lessons from the program, the growth challenge can be more accurately defined as: Lake Macquarie cannot unlock land for job-generating development due to institutional, regulatory, and infrastructure barriers that slow, complicate, or prevent post-mining land transition.
I landed on this definition by following the PDIA approach. The fishbone analysis I completed in week 3 compelled me to break down the growth challenge into its subparts. This exercise identified the interactions between environmental approvals, rehabilitation, planning, and land-use decisions, including the need for collaboration and coordination with a significant number of local, state and federal government agencies. I determined that the challenge is a complex problem and progress depends on shared authorisation, iterative experimentation, coalition-building, and a clearer flow of information through the system.
The importance of knowhow in shaping a region’s economic future resonated with me and drove me to reflect on the knowhow in my city. The approaches outlined challenged my thinking of Lake Macquarie’s economic future. Our city has a strong industrial, mining, power generation and manufacturing history. These dominant industries, manufacturing and coal mining, have contracted from 37% of local output in 2011 to 23% in 2022. Notwithstanding, our city has added 22,000 jobs in the same period. We are in the heart of the energy transition, with a large power station and coal mines planned for closure. We also have the technical skills and associated trades (the know-how) and existing energy-intensive industries, so we need to be able to keep these industries here whilst transitioning to different forms of energy. “Grey to green” allows us to build on the capabilities we already have, which, from an economic development perspective, we can build and maintain jobs for the knowhow and people we already have, not for people who aren’t here, as taught by Professor Hausman.
In Assignment 4, I suggested that public inputs are highly dimensional, making it difficult for governments to know what is required to effect meaningful change. High-potential industries often require highly specific public inputs, specialised infrastructure, regulatory flexibility, land-use certainty or new institutions. Ensuring we build meaningful relationships will provide credibility with both the public and private sectors. In Australia, we have a lot of low-bandwidth organisations, having individual conversations between multiple organisations and government agencies. Moving to a culture of learning and adapting will allow Dantia to become a go-to organisation for business and government.
Learning about and then applying the binding-constraint approach helped me determine where my efforts should be spent to realise the greatest impact. First, our regulatory and approval pathways for post-mining land are stagnated, anchored in 45-year-old legislation that, in my view, is not fit for purpose in today’s environment. Current legislation focuses on environmental rehabilitation, risk management, and planning controls, which are determined at the start of the project and may, in fact, have 20 or 30 years of operation before beneficial land use can be considered.
Another practical, directly applicable takeaway from the program was the value of starting with small, achievable entry points identified using the fishbone diagram. I have a bias towards action and firmly believe in the benefit of quick wins. They have the power to catalyse support for an idea or project, provide tangible outcomes that people can see and demonstrate that change can happen.
The program introduced key design and iteration concepts. The exploration of positive deviance and latent practice crystallised the need to identify local firms that already demonstrate strong performance in talent retention, innovation or supply chain integration. Instead of assuming all progress must come from something new, I learnt the importance of understanding the examples of businesses and organisations that are already successful but may not be well known, and of applying similar business systems and processes to other organisations, as this is likely to be beneficial.
Similarly, looking at best practice examples from around the world was incredibly helpful. I looked at different examples of precincts that may provide an option for Lake Macquarie to maximise the capacity of universities, TAFE, and large organisations to build stronger capability networks. Learning from Helsinki, I recognised that precincts are not just geographic; they rely on leading institutions and organisations. We are benefited by two universities in very close proximity, in addition to other vocational education facilities, which we could use as anchor institutions. We also have a long history of innovation, with several successful businesses having started in an incubator hub in Lake Macquarie. Building a precinct to attract businesses to locate operations will help retain our talent, as we will provide employment opportunities. This aligns closely with our region’s need to support talent retention and accelerate knowledge diffusion.
The learnings from assignment 9 also resonated with me. I found the Brookings framework, the measurement tool, best suited to my specific growth challenge. Brookings suggests that we can focus on three areas: growth, prosperity and diversity and inclusion, each of which has clear measures. Growth measures include the number of jobs (whole economy and new firms) and gross metropolitan product; prosperity includes changes in annual salary, living standards, and productivity; while inclusion involves the employment rate, the poverty rate, and median wage. We want land unlocking to generate jobs. Changes in GMP will indicate whether we have attracted high-value, high-paying roles, and changes in jobs in young firms will tell us how well we have attracted new firms to Lake Macquarie. Productivity is a key economic issue in Australia, and Lake Macquarie is not immune. Seeing improvement in this measure will demonstrate that we are providing increased living standards for our residents, another measure of prosperity. Keeping the employment rate low will indicate more people are in work. We would also want to see higher median wages to lift the bottom 50% of wage earners, providing more opportunities.
I have found this course very rewarding, and I have learnt a tremendous amount. Whilst I have done various elements of economic development throughout my career, it is only in the last 2 and a half years that I have held a role solely focused on economic development. The aspect of this program that I liked the most was that the models, approaches and tools are very applied and can be used literally the day after I learnt them to help drive jobs and investment in Lake Macquarie.
Utilising the learnings in my work, I think there is a significant opportunity to position Danita (Lake Macquarie’s Economic Development Company) as a high-bandwidth organisation. Rather than talk about and advocate for general aspirations which all cities have, I will lead the team to clarify our consultation and advocacy strategy to focus on removing our binding constraints so we can achieve the best outcomes for our city. Further, we aim to build on understanding local capabilities and supply chains and use this to guide targeted industry development. I see significant potential for Dantia to adopt a PDIA approach as we test ideas, revise and review our thinking through analysis of evidence and learning from what worked and what didn’t work.
The Leading Economic Growth program has provided me a fresh perspective, grounded in academic research and practical and applied tools, models, and approaches on how I can successfully achieve Dantia’s vision of having Lake Macquarie considered Australia’s most thriving regional city. It’s given me a clear process to understand what’s really going on in the Lake Macquarie economy. I feel confident that, through the adoption of the learnings, Lake Macquarie can be a city where people can live, work and play.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 63 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2025. These are their learning journey stories.