The Wallabies haven’t won the Bledisloe Cup in more than two decades, but Rugby Australia has set itself the lofty task of winning the prized silverware every second year.

In addition, RA, who are being led into the game’s most important five years in the game’s history by former Wallabies Phil Waugh (CEO) and Dan Herbert (chairman), say only defeating the Lions next year and finishing in the top four of the 2027 (men’s) and 2029 (women’s) World Cups will be thought of as success.

The governing body also declared they wanted to see the Wallabies re-emerge as the world’s number one side over the next five years, with a 70 per cent win percentage across both teams in gold targeted.

RA announced the lofty ambitions on Tuesday morning as part of a five-year strategy paper called “Green and Gold”.

“I think you have to give the public and all of our stakeholders and fans some lofty ambitions otherwise what are we aiming for?” Herbert, who started at outside centre in the Wallabies’ last World Cup triumph in 1999, told reporters on Tuesday morning.

“We’re aiming for excellence. High performance, in particular, is about excellence and winning, and we want to get back to winning ways. We’ve done a lot of initial work to create the platform to succeed.”

The bullish mood comes after a rebuilding season, where Joe Schmidt led the Wallabies to six wins from 13 Tests.

The 46 per cent win rate came off the back of claiming just two wins from nine Tests (22%) in 2023, as Eddie Jones’ much-celebrated return spiralled out of control and saw the Wallabies crash out at the pool stages of the World Cup for the first time.

“It’s only the very start,” Herbert said.

“If you look at where we were 12 months ago to now, I think we’ve come a hell of a long way but I still think we’ve got a hell of a long way to go. It will take a number of years before we get to that number one position, but I do think we have the players and the people involved across the game to allow us to get there.

“What’s written here today we think is achievable.”

RA’s strategy is covered under three key pillars identified – Performance Excellence, Participation Growth and Promotion Effectiveness – but all three are inextricably linked and, ultimately, the governing body won’t get close to fulfilling its goals unless the Wallabies start to win. Indeed, Waugh revealed that 86 per cent of the game’s revenue still came from the men’s 15-a-side version of the game.

After reaching the men’s World Cup semi-final in 2011 and the final in 2015, the Wallabies and the Super Rugby sides underneath the national team have nosedived in recent years.

Indeed, since reaching the final weekend in London in 2015, the Wallabies have won just 44 of 108 Tests (41%) since.

Asked whether the goals were realistic, Waugh pointed to the rapid improvement of the Irish and South Africa sides over the past decade as evidence that swift turnarounds are achievable.

“It’s an aspirational goal,” the former Wallabies captain said.

“The strategy is from ‘25 to ‘29, we know that’s a short runway to get to number one, and if you look at where we are right now across all our programs – Wallaroos, Wallabies and across our sevens – we’ve made good progress but we’ve got a long way to go to be number one.

“It’s not beyond reality to envisage being number one throughout this five-year cycle. If you look at where Ireland and South Africa were a decade ago and you look at where they are now and the journey that they’ve been on to get to arguably being the best one or two teams in the world, it’s achievable, we just need to ensure that we deliver and execute.”

Whether or not RA is in the position to help drive success on the field will in part come down to whether the governing body can get a significant uplift on its current broadcast deal.

RA’s current $29 million annual broadcast deal with Nine Entertainment and Stan Sport expires at the end of 2025. Their exclusive negotiation period with Nine expires on December 31.

Waugh admitted RA currently doesn’t have the revenue to service all of its needs.

“Right now, we don’t have the revenue lines that we require to do everything we’d like to do,” he said.

But Herbert, who replaced Hamish McLennan as RA chairman late last year, said additional financial resources didn’t guarantee success.

“High performance, if we look at that aspect of the game, it’s not about gold plating,” he said. “You need to have sufficient resources but spending more doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better result as we’ve seen in the past.

“That’s where we use the word alignment. We need to get more out of what we’ve got right now.

“We’ve now got two of the Super Rugby clubs that are under RA, and we’re working very closely with the other two as well, so that alignment, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at something, sometimes you’re not going to get the result, but we feel we’ve got very strong alignment across all of our Super Rugby clubs from a high performance perspective.”