The two policies Dom Pym reckons could make Australia a world superpower

When a new federal government started asking the startup community what it actually needed, Dom Pym didn't send a submission. He texted people. Between 10pm and midnight one night, he asked Founders and operators directly what they'd change - then watched hundreds of responses roll in over text and LinkedIn, alongside feedback gathered through community channels.

Dom - co-founder of Up and one of the most active investors in the Australian ecosystem, with $85 million deployed personally - collated the lot into twelve policies. On Life After Launch, he told us the two he believes are nation-changing. His words: get these two right and "we will literally be a world superpower."

Policy one: free universal childcare - with a twist

The most popular idea in the entire pile, driven predominantly by responses from women, was free universal childcare.

The startup logic is blunt maths. Women are half the population, and childcare costs remain the single biggest structural barrier keeping primary carers - still overwhelmingly women - out of the workforce. Remove the cost and you unlock a workforce expansion no innovation grant could ever match. As Megan raised on the show, a Founder can't even claim childcare as a business expense today, despite it being the thing standing between them and running their company.

Then Dom's son added a build that turns the policy from generous to radical: give parents the choice. Go back to work with childcare fully covered - or stay home and get paid for it. Not a token payment, but a genuine salary comparable to what the childcare would have cost. Dom reckons the numbers work out to a saving of hundreds of billions once you account for the economic activity it unlocks. Only a handful of countries have attempted anything close, and in his assessment, none has done it well. The prize for the first country that does: becoming the best place in the world to have a family and a career at the same time.

Policy two: delete the R&D tax incentive. All of it

Dom's position on the R&D tax concession is not a reform proposal. "Kill the whole thing. Shut it down. It's an absolute abomination."

In its place: a dollar-for-dollar matching system that routes government support through funding channels that already know how to pick and back companies - venture capital, syndicates, crowdfunding. A startup that convinces professional or community investors to put in a dollar gets a dollar matched. The government stops trying to assess R&D claims through paperwork and instead piggybacks on the diligence the market is already doing.

He's taking it to the right rooms, too - Dom recently spent a dinner making the case to Robyn Denholm, the Tesla chair who is heading up the review into Australia's R&D system.

Why this pairing matters

Dom's argument is that the two policies attack opposite ends of the same problem. Childcare fixes who can participate in the economy; R&D matching fixes how ambitious companies get funded. One country doing both, he reckons, becomes simultaneously the best place in the world to raise a family and the best place to build a company - and no country currently holds either title convincingly, let alone both.

Whether the government picks them up is an open question. But the method behind them is its own lesson in how this ecosystem works: hundreds of Founders and operators answered a late-night text because someone with standing bothered to ask. The ideas came from the community. Dom just did the collating - and now, the door-knocking.