A question worth putting to your board this year.

Are we relying on commodity prices to protect margins, or are we using this window to structurally improve the business?

This is why it matters for FY2026-27.

Australia's resources and energy exports are forecast to earn A$416 billion in FY27. That's a record-level base, and A$42 billion above the December forecast. Strong year.

Underneath it, the picture is harder. Mining productivity has fallen five years running, down 3.2% in 2024-25 alone, the largest fall of any industry. Labour is the most expensive in the country and headcount is flat. Iron ore earnings are easing as Brazil and Guinea add supply. The energy shock lifting LNG earnings is lifting diesel and chemical costs at the same time.

Good prices can hide weak recoveries, poor mine planning and thin leadership depth for a while. They don't fix any of it.

We've written up our full view of the year ahead. Seventeen pages on the economy, commodity by commodity, the project pipeline state by state, five constraints, three scenarios and where we think executive demand will emerge over the next 12 to 24 months. Nineteen sources, all public, all checkable.

If it's useful to your planning, it's here.

A high gold price hides a lot. A falling one doesn't.

In January, gold set a record above US$5,500 an ounce. By late June it had fallen below US$4,000 for the first time since November 2025, closing out what several market analysts have described as the metal's worst quarterly decline since 2013. As of mid July it is trading around the US$4,000 mark, roughly a quarter below the peak.

Keep that in perspective. Four thousand US dollars an ounce is still, by any historical measure, an extraordinary gold price. Nobody running a decent Australian gold operation is in trouble at these levels. This is not 2013.

But something important has changed, and it has less to do with the price itself than with what the price was doing for people.

AUKUS Isn't Short of Money or Technology. It's Short of People to Lead It

Australia's Manufacturing Ambition is Running Ahead of Its Industrial Reality.

Australia’s infrastructure problem isn’t funding. It’s the capacity to deliver.

Australia has the critical minerals. Building the projects is the hard part.

The visible part of the energy transition is the solar and the turbines. The part that decides whether it works is the grid behind it, and that's where the cost blowouts are piling up.

Henderson and the reshaping of WA’s economy