Lanna Hill: Why West Australians are quietly building side hustles

West Australians are heading into the break with one eye on the beach and the other on the numbers.

ABS figures released this week show unemployment holding at 4.3 per cent in November for the fifth time in six months. Full-time jobs fell by 57,000 while part-time work rose by 35,000.

In plain English: the economy is still holding up, but the boom-time heat has come out of the jobs market. WA’s gross State product is forecast to grow 2.5 per cent in 2026, and household spending is easing — we’re not in crisis, but not carefree. It’s exactly the sort of backdrop where people quietly run the numbers on what else they could be doing.

That is when side hustles are born. January is when FIFO workers sketch out ideas, teachers plan coaching gigs and professionals wonder if they can finally monetise a skill they have been hiding. It is not just ambition; it’s burnout, feeling stretched too thin, and the sense that one label no longer covers the ground. People want breadth — not just to survive, but to feel useful and more fulfilled.

There is also a quieter motivation: control. After years of watching interest rates, rents and rosters move with no say in the matter, a second income stream feels like an insurance policy — a creative outlet for some, a buffer against the next bill for others. In a State that still rides the ups and downs of the resources sector, it’s not irrational to want one foot on the platform and one on the train.

The painful irony is that many of our workplaces still struggle to value breadth. We advertise for tightly defined roles, set KPIs around a lane, and then wonder why it’s hard to break the organisational silos we all know so well.

Industry events often reinforce that pattern — each profession fluent in its own shorthand and mostly talking to itself. Deep expertise is essential, but it means working harder to stay curious about what happens outside our patch. The world we operate in does not organise itself by job title, and customers do not experience us that way. In a WA economy facing softer growth and more global uncertainty, the ability to look up and connect the dots is quietly becoming an advantage.

The lesson from this year is less about who got the biggest headlines and more about who could adapt. Teams that held their ground were not always the ones with the flashiest strategies; they were the ones with people who could move sideways when it mattered — a finance lead who could explain the numbers in plain English, a marketer who understood operational capacity, not just campaigns. People willing to cross the line between their job and the bigger picture became the steady hands in the room.

So here is the provocation: as you head into the break, don’t just ask yourself what you’ll do in January. Ask yourself what worlds you’ll seek to understand. Maybe that looks like a side hustle, a board role or a project that stretches your everyday assumptions, or time with people outside your usual echo chamber.

The future belongs to those who can stretch across disciplines without dropping their standards. In WA, where pragmatism meets ambition, that is not common. It is exceptional. And it is exactly what will separate the organisations that stay stuck from the ones that actually move.

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker, board director and founder of Leverage Media and Rally Group