I’ve always been an admirer of former New Zealand All Blacks captain, Richie McCaw.

His presence on the rugby field was worth five men.

Tough. Relentless. Dominating. Leading from the front.

Richie famously played in the 2011 Rugby World Cup final with a broken foot—defeating France by one point—and then backed it up with another World Cup victory in 2015 where the All Blacks defeated Australia.

He was a sporting leader who could deliver under immense pressure.

Last week, my ten year old son, Jonathan, was sick at home with the flu. So I decided that it was a good time to introduce him to Richie through a documentary on his life called ‘Chasing Great’.

I wanted Jonathan to learn that for every success in life, there is always struggle involved.

Hard work. Planning. Disappointment. Commitment.

That there are no short cuts on the road to victory.

That’s what the documentary is about: how Richie McCaw became the greatest rugby captain in New Zealand’s history.

He always had a plan and process, and he worked very hard to become the best.

Yes, he was fit and strong. But victory began in his heart and mind.

That’s where his coolness under pressure came from in the 2011 and 2015 World Cup finals.

The part of the documentary that has stayed with me over the past ten days was Richie’s plan to win the 2015 World Cup.

How he was prepared to change and adapt his strategy for the final leg of his journey.

This was important after winning the 2011 World Cup, where he was exhausted after putting his body on the line in front of his home crowd.

So Richie worked with a clinical psychologist and the author of ‘Perform Under Pressure’, Dr Ceri Evans, to build a plan for victory in 2015.

He described the challenge this way:

“How am I going to do that again? I was really concerned about having that same draining feeling that I got from 2011. I actually had a discussion with Ceri and I said: ‘Have you got any ideas about how you look at that?’ And he thought about it and he said: ‘If you try and repeat it and do it the same, it’s a recipe for disaster. You have to do it different.’ I remember going away from that conversation actually feeling really good about it. It has to be different. It’s got to be different. I want it to be different. And that made it quite exciting about how we are going to do this.”

Dr Evans described Richie's mindset in climbing that final mountain of his rugby career:

“He’s almost like an explorer in a way. He likes the uncharted territory. He wants to go to places and take the team to places that no one else has been before. In many ways, the idea of being first is a different one to just winning.”

This part of the documentary got me thinking about the Liberal Party, and the broader centre-right movement.

We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing.

Even if it feels comfortable. We’ve got snap out of it.

The world has changed, and we need the mindset of an explorer as we go into uncharted territory.

As I wrote in early July, Australia is facing a number of crises in energy, housing, innovation and government.

Power prices keep rising.

There aren’t enough homes for Australians.

We are at risk of missing the AI revolution, and falling behind other nations.

Many people no longer trust the government to act in their best interest.

You can feel the tension out in middle Australia.

Discontent with the political consensus is raw, even if it’s politely whispered. But the eyes give it away: ‘You’re all in it for yourselves'.

That’s why we can’t accept the terms of debate from Labor. We’ll lose every fight that way.

Nor can we accept the settled consensus of the centre-left.

Instead, my instinct is to shatter it.

I know many of you feel the same way. Otherwise we may as well close down, and do something else with our time and energy.

Instead, we need to go exploring to find our way back home.

We must adopt a bold strategy, take calculated risks, and reshape the political frontier.

As the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, ‘…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

That’s what I learned last week from Richie McCaw.