C-Hour
Adapted from the 23 September 2026 plan. The proposed system is open to development with participants.
A useful beginning
Artificial intelligence is opening new ways to learn, create, organise and work. This plan connects that growing capability with Mutual Futures: shared ownership, more possible lives and a productive community in which people can learn throughout life, try different work and make room for care, travel and rest. Jobs and Skills Australia identifies substantial potential for AI to assist people in their work, with results shaped by how organisations adopt it and develop their practices. [E1]
Australia already has growing AI businesses and research capability. The National AI Centre and CSIRO describe an ecosystem that combines adoption of overseas technology with Australian development, with much activity concentrated in cities. Their research also identifies increasing demand for AI skills. [E2] Trusted places offer a natural starting point: community organisations, clubs, schools, libraries, workplaces and local gatherings.
The urgency is practical. Skills take time to develop. Relationships take time to earn. Decisions about ownership, data and access become harder to change once systems are established. Communities that begin now can help decide what AI is for, retain useful local knowledge and develop their own ability to build and repair things.
Make human contribution visible
As AI expands what we can achieve, we need better ways to recognise the human contribution that makes shared abundance possible. People pass on life experience, care for one another, create art, restore Country, mentor emerging talent and bring ambitious ideas to life. Elders bring authority through their experience, relationships and judgement. The reciprocity ledger makes these contributions visible, connecting the time people give with the knowledge, confidence and capability a community develops together.
As AI makes some outputs faster and cheaper to produce, the contribution record preserves the human time and responsibility involved. The outcome record shows what changed. Neither a large pile of generated content nor a large total of hours is enough on its own.
More freedom across a lifetime
Universal Intelligence is a central aim: practical access to AI, learning, creation and simulation, together with the ability to understand and change the systems we use. Universal Adequate Income is the companion aim of material sufficiency through changing stages of life. Mutual Futures connects these with a productive base of businesses, shared services and skills. The financial arrangements need to be developed in their own right; C-hours recognise the voluntary contribution that helps this wider society flourish. [P1]
Try Everything Once opens supported routes into different kinds of work. Just-in-time learning helps someone acquire the knowledge needed for the next real task. Intermittent Retirement makes rest, care, travel and further learning part of a life that can have many chapters. These ideas give the transformation a human direction: more agency, broader capability and time to enjoy what we build.
A live, useful pilot offers a place to begin while the larger ideas develop. Worthwhile work and honest accounts of what happens would give us something real to learn from together.
The everyday scale of contribution
The supplied paper Unpaid Work, C-Hours, Societal Costs describes an incomplete ledger: much of the work that sustains households, relationships and community life is missing from ordinary financial accounts. Its sections 1.1 to 1.4 examine the scale of unpaid work, its uneven distribution and the consequences of neglecting it. That is a central foundation for this plan, with the statistical context updated below. [P2]
In Australia's 2024 Time Use Survey, people aged 15 and over who undertook unpaid work averaged 4 hours 25 minutes a day on domestic activities, looking after children, caring for adults and volunteering. Among participants, females averaged 4 hours 53 minutes and males 3 hours 52 minutes. Survey changes mean these figures are not fully comparable with the older 2020 to 2021 figures used in the supplied paper. [E4]
The International Labour Organization's 2018 report drew on 64 countries representing two thirds of the world's working-age population. It estimated 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, equivalent to about two billion people working eight hours daily. This is a historical estimate of an immense existing contribution, not a forecast of C-hours or a current global census. [E5]
The societal stakes are also substantial. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety account for 12 billion lost working days and US$1 trillion in lost productivity annually worldwide. [E6] This gives scale to one area of societal cost discussed in the supplied paper. It does not establish that unrecognised unpaid work causes all those losses, or that a reciprocity ledger would recover them. Stronger relationships, shared care and meaningful participation are aims to pursue and evaluate in their own right.
Everyone, everywhere, every day
The ambition is for everyone, everywhere, to be able to earn C-hours every day of their lives through meaningful contribution. Much of that contribution is already happening: raising children, supporting family, maintaining a shared home, helping friends, passing on skills and sustaining community life. A rostered event is one doorway into this system; everyday life is its much larger setting.
The hope is recognition that feels easy, inclusive and wholesome. Existing contribution matters without an organisation first inventing an activity for it. Households, carers, friends and community groups bring different experiences of giving and receiving. Those experiences would help shape how recognition works, including what feels intrusive, burdensome or simply unnecessary.
The aim is a culture in which contribution is noticed and appreciated throughout life. Giving, receiving, resting and returning are ordinary rhythms of life. The question for the ledger is how to fit around them gracefully, without making a daily quota or a transaction out of a relationship.