Systems and signals: Australia’s brand story must grow up

In July 2001, my partner and I boarded a late-night flight out of Madrid bound for Lima, Peru. Our real destination was Cuzco and, from there, Machu Picchu. Lima was simply where the plane landed, plus a friend had an ex-girlfriend there who could show us around. She managed cigarette promo teams, so we ended up touring the bars and clubs of Miraflores and Barranco with lycra-clad Marlboro promo staff.

I mention it because back then, spending time in Lima felt optional. A stopover city at best, Lima was sprawling metropolis you endured before the “real” adventures began. But today, Lima means something else entirely.

According to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, Lima is home to the best restaurant in the world, Maido. In total it has four restaurants in the current top fifty, plus a fifth, Central, which was named best in the world in 2023 and now sits permanently in the hall of fame. With five of the world’s best restaurants in one city, Lima isn’t somewhere on the way to somewhere else anymore, it’s a reason to book the flight.

“Best of” lists are easy to dismiss. They can be glossy and subjective. But they’re also a kind of infrastructure: they consolidate attention, reduce the paralysis of choice and tell a certain kind of traveller what’s worth crossing an ocean for.

Despite the excellence of our dining scene, Australia only has one restaurant, St Peter (in Paddington, Sydney), on the 51–100 list (proof, if needed, that the team behind The World’s 50 Best didn’t consider their own name an obstacle to expansion). But there’s an even more powerful way to plant a country’s flag on the global culinary map: get your own Michelin Guide.

In November last year, Michelin confirmed a deal with Tourism New Zealand to launch an inaugural Michelin Guide Aotearoa New Zealand. Conspicuously absent from the announcement was an Australia edition. Reporting at the time suggested the price of entry (said to be around $40m split across national and state tourism bodies) was deemed too much when weighed against the hundreds of millions already committed to Australia’s global advertising and major events push. Australia didn’t say “no”. But it did say not now, and not at that price. Then the past fortnight happened.

Chef Clare Smyth at Oncore (Crown)

On 14 February, Peter Gilmore and his team at Quay (in Sydney’s Rocks area) served their last snow egg and and Australia lost one of our most iconic dining experiences. This coming weekend, it will be the turn of Clare Smyth’s Oncore to shut their doors for the final time (Oncore is the Sydney-based sister restaurant to London’s Core where Clare Smyth became the first and only female British to win three Michelin stars in the UK).

I ate at Oncore once, and I’ve only dined at Quay a single time since its major 2018 renovation. Both experiences were stellar, with price tags to match. But patronage by locals like me isn’t the lifeblood of dining rooms at that level. Their economics are reliant on big-spending out-of-towners: interstate visitors and, especially, overseas travellers. People who come for the best a city and a country can offer, and who want external proof that it’s worth making the trip. The Michelin Guide remains the most powerful global signal of that worth.

What’s good for our restaurants is good for the rest of us. Because great restaurants don’t just monetise the visitation that’s already here. They drive visitation and become a reason to travel, not a bonus when you arrive. And great restaurants don’t just inspire travellers to fly long distances (to Australia, for example). They also inspire travellers to disperse far and wide in search of the best a country has to offer, whether to Ynyshir a two Michelin star restaurant on the remote mid-Wales coast, or perhaps to Brae in Victoria’s Otways hinterland (if only there was a global source to guide them).

Which brings us back to Michelin and to something larger than our restaurant scene. At times, Australia’s brand story still behaves like it’s frozen in a brochure from the 1980s: beaches, natural beauty, casual charm and endless sunshine. It’s not wrong, it’s just incomplete. Great beaches are not a substitute for a personality.

The author Matt Jones

The adult version of Australia is broader, deeper and more cultural. It’s food and drink, of course, but also art, architecture, music, design, theatre, the diverse texture of our cities and the rich experiences of our regions. Over the past decades, Australia’s national and state tourism champions have invested billions in blockbuster campaigns and major events.

Much has been done to amplify our old self-image; far less to make the broader idea of Australia legible to the world. In that context, $40m to plug our restaurant landscape into a global system that already influences where high-value travellers go starts to look less like indulgence and more like an investment in key infrastructure.

The deeper lesson isn’t about Michelin or about budgetary priorities of our destination marketing bodies. It’s about a leadership preference that shows up in almost every category: we prefer making ads to optimising systems, and we prefer telling explicit stories to sending subtle signals.

Why? Because advertising is visible. People can see what got made with their dollars. And storytelling is countable, with eyeballs, clicks and shares all captured neatly in a report. Meanwhile real effectiveness is slippery, influence hides its true form, signals are subtle and systems do their work quietly.

This is about to matter more than ever, because we’re sprinting towards the great sloppification of everything: AI-generated content self-replicating at an industrial scale, agentic bots spamming every feed they can find, and us cognitively-limited humans sheltering from a permanent firehose of noise we are woefully under-equipped to deal with.

Grow up would ya: Another still from Tourism Australia’s 2006 campaign

In that environment, “more stuff” just becomes ambient sludge and the good will be bundled with the bad, not because audiences lack discernment, but because their attention is finite. And the winners will be the systems where people choose to focus that finite attention to shield them from the content chaos.

The Michelin Guide is one of those systems. It creates its own weather. It doesn’t just describe a dining scene; it changes how a country and its story is read. The Australian restaurant and visitor economy would have been stronger for its presence, ensuring our cities appeared on bucket lists for reasons beyond a bridge, a tennis tournament and a stopover on the way to a reef.

More broadly, for all of us, our jobs will become less about telling louder stories, and more about understanding the systems through which people will still make their decisions while filtering out the noise: how they will search, choose, prefer, buy and recommend you. Then it’s about the signals you send via those systems: we made this for you; people like you like things like this; you’re in the right place.

In the years ahead, content will be cheap and noise abundant. Signals that still get through will be at a premium. And systems, quiet rails that filter and guide our choices, will more than ever decide what gets found, what gets chosen and who wins.

Matt Jones has an eclectic background, combining economics, politics, brand experience and gin. To read more, see the biographical note at the end of his first column for Mumbrella on why SXSW Sydney failed.