When everyone wants something, but no one can decide how to pay for it‘Everybody wants to rule the world’, sang Tears for Fears, a line later reimagined by Lorde that still resonates today. In northern Australia, everybody wants something: Defence wants resilience; Indigenous communities want opportunity; states want infrastructure; and the federal government wants deterrence. The Peninsula Development Road (PDR) on Cape York is one such case study. The Office of Northern Australia sits awkwardly in between, able to coordinate, but without the authority or budget to close the gap. We need a new model that explicitly recognises the dual-use nature of northern infrastructure and allows beneficiaries to fairly share costs.