Boooooooooo

The dispute over Welcome to Country ceremonies at ANZAC Day events has been framed in familiar terms. Who is at fault? The people insisting on the ceremony, or the people booing it?

That question is attractive but unhelpful.

The conflict is reciprocal. If the ceremony is included, some attendees experience that as inappropriate and bear a cost. If it is excluded, others experience that absence as a loss and bear a cost. There is no arrangement that leaves everyone unaffected. The issue is not who caused the harm. It is how the rules governing the event allocate that harm, and whether that allocation makes sense.

This was the central insight of Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who reshaped how economists think about externalities; unavoidable trade-offs that arise when different uses of a shared setting collide. Harm in these cases is not one-sided. It arises because different people want incompatible things from the same institutional space. Any choice privileges one use over another. The implication is straightforward. Disputes like this are not resolved by finding the offending party. They are resolved by examining who decides, what costs that decision imposes, and whether a different arrangement would reduce those costs.

In the ANZAC Day context, authority over the form of the ceremony is not centralised. Different ceremonies are organised by different bodies, including the Australian War Memorial, local branches of the Returned and Services League of Australia, and civic authorities. In each case, there is a decision-maker. Once that is clear, the question is not who is at fault; it is whether the current arrangement is the least costly way of managing the conflict.

This is not unique to public ceremonies. It is how conflict works inside organisations.

Consider the return-to-office debate. Managers emphasise coordination and oversight; employees emphasise flexibility and lower commuting costs. Firms often treat resistance as a problem of effort or commitment. That is a misdiagnosis. The conflict is structural. Bringing workers back into the office reallocates costs across groups. Employees lose flexibility; commercial landlords, city-centre businesses, and transport systems regain demand. No arrangement delivers all of these benefits at once.

Cashless businesses present the same logic in a simpler form. Refusing cash reduces handling costs and risk. It imposes costs on customers who rely on cash, through exclusion or inconvenience. The transaction is unchanged; the rules are not. The business is allocating the terms of exchange. It is not avoiding conflict; it is choosing where the cost falls.

These are not exceptional cases. They are routine. Yet firms persistently ask the wrong question. They look for the offending party rather than examining the rules that generate the conflict.

A more productive approach begins with three questions. Who decides how this shared resource is used? What costs does that decision impose on others? Could a different arrangement reduce those costs, even if it cannot eliminate them?

Conflicts persist because changing arrangements is costly. Negotiating is costly. Measuring impacts is costly. Tailoring solutions is costly. Faced with those constraints, organisations default to uniform rules. Uniform rules are cheap to administer and predictably generate friction. That friction is then attributed to the people complaining rather than to the rules themselves.

The ANZAC Day controversy will not be resolved by identifying a culprit. It reflects a clash of preferences over a shared institutional setting. Any allocation of authority resolves that clash in favour of some and against others. The same is true inside organisations. When conflict recurs, it is rarely because one side is unreasonable. It is because the rules governing the interaction are poorly matched to the trade-offs they are meant to manage.