Rohan Mead: The enduring role of co-operatives in Australia's future

25 June 2025

On Tuesday, 24 June 2025, over 80 policymakers, business leaders and co-operative champions attended The BCCM and Australian Unity Icons Luncheon, hosted by Australian Unity. The luncheon marked the launch of the International Year of Cooperatives 2025 (IYC 2025) in Victoria.

Rohan Mead, Group Managing Director and CEO of Australian Unity, welcomed guests to Spring Street with a powerful reflection on the legacy and future of co-operatives and mutuals in Australia. In his keynote address, Rohan marked the launch of the International Year of Cooperatives in Victoria by tracing Australian Unity’s origins back to the 1840s friendly societies – early pioneers of egalitarianism and mutual aid. He reminded attendees that the co-operative movement has long been intertwined with the foundations of Australian democracy, before turning to the critical role co-operatives can play in tackling the nation’s

Rohan Mead addressing The BCCM and Australian Unity Icons Luncheon

Read a transcript of Rohan Mead’s speech

On behalf of Australian Unity, thank you all for joining us here at Spring Street to celebrate the International Year of Cooperatives.

Together, we all play a significant role in our economy and across the globe, co-operative and mutual organisations play very significant economic roles.

I’d like to pause a little on the history of the economic contribution and the development of Australian Unity, the firm whose head office you’re in today.

In 2015, to commemorate Australian Unity’s 175th anniversary, we commissioned historian Alex McDermott to produce a work that explained the values and culture that have shaped this particular company.

More than a decade on, the reflections from this book, which was titled “Of No Personal Influence”, still ring true.

The history of Australian Unity is also a history of friendly societies and mutual organisations in Australia, and indeed, an historical reading of our modern nation itself.

Friendly societies were founded in Australia in the 1840s, along the model of their counterparts in the United Kingdom. However, they were very different organisations here than the largely closed guild organisations of the country of origin.

For starters, many societies were technically illegal in Britain until about 1850. They thrived, but they were technically illegal. This was because of the fear of a continental uprising in the context of French Revolutions and other revolutions across Europe.

The UK felt that any structured organisation such as a friendly society—there’s a hint in the title—could in fact facilitate uprising.

So it’s with that revolutionary fervour that perhaps we gather here today.

In Australia, however, the founders of friendly societies placed a very high premium on egalitarianism. They openly encouraged not just workers, but men—from all classes and all religions—to join these societies. I must confess in the very earliest years they were only for men.

It was the spirit of egalitarianism that inspired the eight people that came together to form a friendly society in 1840 to help fellow Australians in times of hardship that established this organisation.

They laid the foundations for the Australian Unity that we know today.

Over this now more than 185-year history, the organisation and our members have been linked to Australia’s major events and its demographic shifts.

In the 1880s, Victoria was in the grips of an annexation crisis, stemming from residual border tensions with New South Wales and concerns about foreign powers in the Pacific. The more things change, as they say.

It was during this time that one of our major antecedent organisations, the Australian Natives Association, developed its political influence and started seeing itself not just as a friendly society providing benefits and services, but as a voice of its members—a voice of those who were born here and whose fate was here.

Australia’s first and second prime ministers, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin, along with the first Australian-born Governor-General, Sir Isaac Isaacs, were members of that Australian Natives Association.

Among other esteemed early members and of the associated women’s organisations, for example, the Australasian Women’s Association, were Dame Ellie Milmer and the suffragette Vita Goldstein, who was the first woman to nominate for the Federal Senate in Australia.

Within the social laboratory of the friendly societies, ordinary people practised the basic arts of governance and democracy, electing officials, keeping accurate financial records, and debating issues of community importance.

The roots of Australian Unity stem back to the roots of this nation itself, with the federation movement very largely driven by the Australian Natives Association.

Reflecting on these moments, Australian novelist Thomas Keneally argues that federation is one of the top three defining moments in Australian history, saying that the utopian expectation is still there in Australians, and any attempt to diminish equity in institutions—to turn education or health into a commodity—gets resisted in Australia because we believe that the federal compact in the Commonwealth is that we should all have a place, perhaps not one of equal dignity, but of basic shared dignity at the table of the Commonwealth.

Before I go on, it’s important to acknowledge other less laudable aspects of federation, particularly the institutionalised White Australia policy and the racial exclusion and marginalisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non-European migrants.

While we have many reasons to recognise our progress, we still have a long way to go to address the past wrongs and become a truly reconciled nation.

Australian Unity continues to play its part, we hope, in seeking to advance reconciliation in our own personal journey to build a more inclusive future for Indigenous Australians.

Guided by our own Reconciliation Action Plan, we’re focused on supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through meaningful careers, culturally appropriate care, and strong community connections.

We turn to well-being more generally, measuring community and social value, and the impact of firms such as this one.

As a co-operative and mutual organisation, our purpose is about delivering positive impact to our members and the broader community.

Australian Unity’s delivery of community and social value is evident from our history and the group has evolved in response to and in support of our communities through the pressing social issues of the times.

In the nineteenth century, Australian Unity established community pharmacies to address concerns over the costs and quality of medicine. In the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds, doctors were mixing their own medicine, with variable results. The friendly societies intervened in terms of the community benefit.

That’s an example of us providing health benefits to cover treatment costs and offering financial and personal security to the community under various banners.

During the post-war era, we developed social infrastructure such as hospitals, medical centres, and aged care and retirement living in communities.

Today, Australian Unity is one of the largest well-being companies in the country, with an annual turnover now approaching $2.5 billion. We have more than 370,000 members, over 700,000 customers, and some 10,000 employees.

As a social enterprise and mutual organisation focused on health, wealth and care, Australian Unity has a clear vision to work in areas where we can have the greatest social impact.

In this manner, and like other companies across the globe, we have to continue to work every day for our right to compete.

We are very distinct in our shape today from the shape of the 1800s. For example, today we are Australia’s largest provider of care services into the homes of Australians—a very distinct set of activities compared to what we were doing in the 1800s.

For 25 years, we’ve also invested in the delivery of the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index in partnership with Deakin University. This study provides insights into the well-being of people across Australia and is helping to create a comprehensive and accepted definition of what well-being actually is and what it looks like across our communities.

In the last two years, we’ve seen personal well-being of Australians fall to its lowest level on record. People are feeling the pressure of the protracted cost of living and housing affordability crises and years of low or stagnant wages growth.

Sadly, our younger Australians are perhaps feeling it the most compared to those over 50 and 55.

Being able to demonstrate how our activities—including our investments, products and services—are contributing to community well-being in this context is critical, and we believe it is critical for the whole sector.

In 2021, we developed our community and social value framework in partnership with Social Pensions Australia to track and measure the impact we deliver to members, customers and the broader community.

The value we deliver has also been recognised with the receipt of our own mutual value measurement accreditation from the BCCM. Thank you, Melina. We are very proud to receive this.

We see significant and growing benefit in measuring community and social value, including being able to capture the essence and value of a member-based organisation that financial and accounting standards are not able to do on their own.

Let’s turn to a specific challenge confronting the nation and where co-operative and mutual enterprises (CMEs) might play a role.

As I noted, the very roots of our organisation are based on egalitarianism of access. One area where this will be important in the coming decades is how our health system will support the growing and changing needs of our ageing population.

Looking ahead, we worry that the business systems in health are increasingly serving some while excluding others. Australian Unity has been vocal about the demographic pressures on our health system for some time.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the systemic challenges in healthcare have now become so fiscally serious that if we don’t attend to the policies supporting the sector, we will see very real impact on the future prosperity of Australians.

The central challenge for governments is to focus on system redesign rather than deploying a fire hose of government funding for yesterday’s infrastructure—a sector that was designed for a different era and different purposes.

This issue is one of the most pressing of our time and it worries us, in part because we experience the consequences of poor policy on vulnerable populations, but mainly because we worry for the community that major problems such as this are not being confronted and appear too hard to fix.

We would like to see a situation where the community becomes once more engaged in debates about what kind of government support we want. We need conversations about what we expect in terms of the major policy issues and the trade-offs, quality and costs of implementation.

This is a conversation that Australian Unity, because of our history as well as our operation, seeks to stimulate and to be actively involved in.

As some 80,000 baby boomers turn 80 years old in 2027, not only will our outdated healthcare systems be unable to cope, but it will also have massive financial impacts on other activities in the economy, drawing workers away from other sectors.

Australia must improve the effectiveness of the care economy—including health, aged and community care and the NDIS—by responding thoughtfully to these demographic pressures.

We’ve got to get on with building a set of sectors and systems that are designed for the reality of coming decades, where large proportions of Australians are going to be over 80 and large consumers of health, aged and community care services.

As we celebrate our co-operatives and mutuals today, I would like to plant the idea that we, as one of the set of industrialised societies, continue to err in this type of thinking and in response to this type of challenge with a response of silo deficiency, which can become a siren song of disaster as the multiplying silos leave us weaker and weaker in being able to optimise across the whole system.

We need to recognise that this fundamental weakness in the historical path—a path that has yielded so many benefits but which is now threatening our adaptive capacity—must be readdressed.

In this challenge, the co-operative and mutual enterprise has a special contribution to make.

We are maverick firms in economic terms that can flaunt the boundaries and some of the rigidities of our current economic systems and business models, and hopefully, with a high degree of community trust, in partnership with those communities, address the evolving needs of Australians, as we have done over many years today.