Stilgherrian » maxine mckew

Australia 2020: The Disillusionment

Stilgherrian — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:15:37 +0000

When Chairman Rudd announced the Australia 2020 Summit the euphoria kicked in like a clean hit of a fresh new political drug. After 11 drab years of John Winston Howard, Change! Big, bright colourful change with sparkly bits and the sound of a thousand sitars! But now the euphoria’s wearing off. We’re coming down — and the Main Event is still a month away.

Kevin still looks pretty cheerful, though, doesn’t he. Why is that?

Look back through everything I’ve written so far and you can see the moodswing. “Chairman Rudd’s got a clever strategy going,” my first post began. Another post was headlined Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!, quoting Maxine “Toadslayer” McKew and agreeing that the nation was ready to start a new conversation about its destiny. At the end of February I even nominated myself.

Given Rudd’s claim that his government would be open and transparent, and develop policies based on evidence, it all sounded pretty good.

As days go by, however, it’s become increasingly clear that the potential of the event will be stifled by the political “need” to placate the same old whingeing lobby groups, the same old middle-class middle-aged white men in dark suits (just flick through the Steering Committee) and, it seems, the “need” to pre-load the agenda with specific topics to… well, let’s explore that.

There’s two brilliant critiques of the process so far. Please, read them in full before continuing — though I’ll give you a summary here if you’re in a hurry.

The ABC’s Media Watch ran a story this week, I’m having a Summit and you’re invited, which highlighted Rudd’s technique of openly inviting specific high-profile journalists and getting key media outlets to nominate “ordinary Australians” — ensuring they’d be supportive.

In the past couple of weeks, the Prime Minister’s Office has invited twenty media organisations — they’ve sent us a list — to select a reader, listener or viewer and to pay for them to go to Canberra.

That’s not including News Ltd’s big kahuna, John Hartigan, who of course is chairing one of the summit sessions.

It’s not surprising that News Ltd papers have eagerly joined the search for summiteers.

Like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph…

“You can help shape our future”
— Daily Telegraph, You can help shape our future, 3rd March, 2008

Australia’s 1000 “best and brightest” is gradually diluted.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Policy Development’s article Beyond the 2020 Summit asks us to imagine what we actually do after this magic weekend.

You would think that the Government’s stated objectives for the Summit would be a good place to start. Here we scrutinise just two: harnessing the best ideas across the nation and producing options for consideration by Government.

Objective: To harness the best ideas across the nation.

This might be difficult to measure and doing so will be a very long-term exercise. For those who missed out on their opportunity to present their ideas at all, it is probably a sore point. Candidates had to write 100 words to justify their inclusion and many with wonderful ideas would not have considered themselves worthy of consideration. From amongst those bold enough to apply, can we be certain that the Steering Committee did not filter out potentially radical ideas in their participant selection process? No matter how open-minded the selectors, it is certain that the Summit was a select group rather than a genuine opportunity to generate the best ideas Australians could offer.

Objective: To produce options for consideration by the Government.

This is hardly a firm commitment to do anything in particular with the ideas. As well, there was a promise that a public response would be produced by the end of 2008. The decision-making process is hardly transparent; it is not clear who will decide which ideas are capable of being shaped into concrete policy responses. This objective, unfortunately, will most likely lead to contributors at the Summit passively awaiting the Government’s response. Moreover they will be unaware of how the output of the Summit will be processed. Of course they are the ‘lucky’ ones. Those who never made it, especially those who will potentially be affected by policy responses emanating from the Summit, will feel even more obsolete.

The authors rather wish that the Summit’s objectives had instead been modelled on some principles on best practice in community engagement that are expressed in The Brisbane Declaration 2005, endorsed by over 2000 attendees from 44 countries of the International Conference for Engaging Communities, a conference hosted by the Queensland Government and the United Nations.

The CPD proposes what some people may think a radical solution for the follow-up. Instead of bureaucrats analysing the options behind closed doors, you choose 100 random citizens for each policy area and have them evaluate the ideas.

The randomly-selected citizens are presented with ideas from the Summit and able to obtain clarification from the authors. Rather than just private submissions lodged through the Summit website, all Australians are encouraged to participate in e-panels (electronic issues-based forums) that simultaneously discuss the ideas. The randomly-selected citizens have access to all these views as well, including new ideas or concerns that emerge.

This is remarkably similar to an idea first floated by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970s book The Third Wave: if you truly want parliament to represent the people, you could just choose a representative sample of the people. Randomly. It’s one of many fascinating ideas he runs through.

It’s also remarkably similar to Mark Pesce’s proposal, How to listen to 21 million voices.

Hey, I think they might be onto something here. Open, transparent policy development!

Gosh.

Now I’ve already written how I don’t think “representation” should be the model for selecting participants, but this seems a great way of involving everybody.

So, Dear Chairman Rudd and well-suited Steering Committee members (and Cate Blanchett), you have a choice.

Treat the Australia 2020 Summit as a political exercise to create the perception of a new long-term vision for Australia and pat yourselves and a smiling PM on the back.
Actually harness the potential of new ideas. Use some of the best resources of our nation — our minds, our wonderful, varied multicultural and multi-experienced minds, all of them! — to process and filter and come up with something really new. You could even use the Summit to showcase the kind of open, transparent, evidence-based government you’ve been talking about.

So far, alas, it looks like you’re choosing the same old cynical, corrupt Option 1.

Binge drinking is guaranteed a spot on the agenda, apparently. Important perhaps, yes, but I’d have thought the topic panels would decide their own agenda — you know, fresh ideas from the panellists to think “outside the box”.

How many other topics have already been loaded this way?

Well, we don’t know, because there’s been no news from the summit secretariat in a fortnight! You think there’d be something to say, even if it was just to confirm officially how many nominations you’d received, how far you are through the selection process, when we’ll know who’s selected, whether you’ve chosen the tenderer to run the event yet, when the timetable for the summit will be announced — that sort of thing.

We can accept that this is all being made up as we go along. After all the world is made up as we go along. In the 21st Century, though, some of us are used to seeing that “background chatter” as things get done. It helps reassure us that things actually are getting done — and done honestly — even though it might not be fully polished and glistening in the sun yet.

Wow, there’s transparency for you.

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So who’s ready for the future? Who’s not?

Stilgherrian — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:18:12 +0000

Maxine McKew and I aren’t the only ones who think Australia is ready to start a new conversation about our identity. The Australia 2020 Summit secretariat received 7251 nominations for the 1000 spots. I wish them well with the winnowing — and wish myself good luck with my own application.

The real fun now is seeing who’s actually ready for the future, and who just wants to stifle discussion.

Human rights lobbyist Howard Glenn puts it well, and shows that he’s ready:

Why am I enthusiastic about a relatively small two-day conference in April? Because it is a big gesture which says clearly that we have permission to start thinking about the future again. The flow-on effects are already starting. Schools want to have their own future summits, difficult long term issues are emerging for community debate. And that’s before it’s all really started.

It’s only two days and 1,000 people. Who gets to go is not as important as the fact that it is occurring at all, and that there’s such media attention to the attendance. Some will see it as a revival of the mythical Keating elites; the start of European-style social planning; a talk fest. I see it as the start of a restoration of confidence in Australian culture, identity and ingenuity, and a faith that we can think about future challenges, and find what we need to face them.

So what about everyone else?

Looking through recent news stories…

Opposition leader Brendan “Mr 9%” Nelson reckons the summit will be a dog’s breakfast. Looking at the state of his own party, I guess he’d know a dog’s breakfast when he sees it.
His deputy Julie Bishop branded it an “elite” event — yes, she’s imaginatively dragging out that Howard-era term of denigration, which apparently is not negative when applied to “elite athletes”. Somehow she knew this before she’d even seen the steering committee, let alone the full list of attendees. “Elitism is dead,” says the deputy leader of the party full of lawyers and private school attendees. Yes, that’s certainly reflected in the polls, luv! Keep up this mindless negativity and your stay in opposition will be a long one.
All sorts of people with a “special interest” whinge that their own specific focus isn’t mentioned by name somewhere: Gisela Kaplan on the environment; Duncan Riley on tech; Yvonne Zeniou on the parents of disabled children. Folks, a “vision for the future” is not just a list of jigsaw pieces.
Disappointingly, steering committee member Tim Costello focuses on the problem of teenage binge drinking which, while perhaps a problem that needs addressing, is hardly “a vision thing”. Let’s hope the “strengthening families and communities” topic doesn’t become a shopping-list for wowsers craving a return to some mythical golden past of endless backyard cricket.

People are wanting to talk about the future. Grass-roots websites have sprung up at Summit2020.org and CounterSummit Australia2020 and OzIdeas and BangTheTable and I’m sure there’ll be plenty more.

Is it only the federal opposition that’s afraid of the conversation?

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Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:00:27 +0000

If History is the set of stories we tell ourselves to explain the Past, then I guess Society comprises the stories we tell ourselves about the Present — plus the conversations which create our Future. I suspect that’s why certain people seem to be excited by the Australia 2020 Summit: Australia does seem to be starting a new conversation about its own identity.

The other day I quoted an historian who said that the Prussian enlightenment [of the 18th century] was about conversation. “It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects,” he said. So I’ll be so bold as to suggest this new conversation will lead to the Australian Enlightenment.

Yesterday I read two pieces which reinforce this idea of a new conversation. The first was Maxine McKew’s First Speech to federal parliament as the Member for Bennelong.

Let me extract (some might say “butcher”) just one thread from a speech that deserves to be read in full, and add my own emphasis:

The seat of Bennelong… provides a near perfect snapshot of how the country is changing. Join the throng on the weekend in the Eastwood mall and you will find that Rowe Street is both a modern-day Babel and a dynamic part of cosmopolitan Sydney…

For some, these changes are unsettling. But there is a younger generation that is entirely at ease with who we are and what we are becoming. Exceptionally well educated, many have secured a second degree from an international university and are multilingual. Some will be in mixed-race marriages. What they all have in common is that they will see their professional lives as crossing borders. They will be citizens of the world, trained here initially but orbiting around the world and working and playing in those places that will enrich them.

They will still call Australia home, but when they are in Delhi, Hong Kong or London, what story will they be telling about home? How do we want the Australian story to look for the coming generation? …

What we need is a new imagining, a revived sense of what is possible. The negativity and the tedium of the culture wars will not get us there.

But look at our history with all its warts and all its failures and you will still find plenty to inspire wonder, hope and optimism. You will also find that, if there is a common animating principle in Australia, it is that we look forwards, not back…

What people want now, I think, is an intelligent national conversation.

The prevailing orthodoxy, to this point, has been that, because we are enjoying such bounty, we are indifferent, to the point of being somnolent, about the bigger societal questions. Well, I happen to think that 2007 demolished that idea. Most of the commentators missed the mood shift. But it is there. It is real. All sorts of people know that politics and policymaking matter. Our national spirit matters. The lesson for me from the past year is that there is a great reservoir of goodwill that lies untapped beneath the surface of our national life, and smart governments will find ways to liberate and direct it.

And behold! Chairman Rudd has proclaimed the Australia 2002 Summit. With hopes in many quarters that it won’t be 1000 of “the usual suspects”, maybe that new conversation can begin.

However the second piece, Mark Pesce’s article How to listen to 21 million voices, reminds us that we need a truly national conversation — all 21 million of us, not just The Chosen 1000 at the summit.

In 1962, T.S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [claimed that] the greatest revolutions in science happen when ‘outsiders’ enter an established field, seeing it with new eyes.

These outsiders make observations which the boffins have simply ignored or discounted, because they disagree with the orthodox consensus. Over time, outsider observations become the new orthodoxy, which is itself overturned when another outsider enters the field. Funeral by funeral, science inches forward.

The Prime Minister has created something of a paradoxical situation: he’s reaching beyond the comfortable bounds of the government bureaucracy with the 2020 Summit, searching for new ideas, yet, because of the nature of the boffin universe, the most revolutionary and far-sighted of these new ideas would be anathema to those same boffins.

The summit is far more likely to confirm conventional wisdom than challenge it.

Mark suggests we could use Wikipedia-like tools to create this national conversation.

The Prime Minister must make clear that the 2020 Summit is simply the tip of the iceberg — that the boffins are only the most visible example of the expertise available to solve the nation’s long-term problems and invite the rest of the nation to participate in a broad sharing of ideas and expertise.

Rudd should promise that the 2020 Summit itself will be captured in video and audio recordings, with photographs and documentation that will all be placed online, in real-time, as the summit is taking place.

He can ask Australians to create blogs which track the progress of the event, noting everything as it happens.

Australians should be invited to use instant messaging, bulletin boards and other systems so that their own questions, reflections and comments could be incorporated into the summit.

The other day I said I’d be setting up the Topic 9 blog to cover one area of the discussion — and that will finally be happening on Friday. But it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the rest — blogs, wikis, whatever tools are most appropriate.

We shouldn’t wait for The Guv’mint to do it, either. Anyone can get the process going. GetUp is a fine example of people who’ve managed to Make A Difference without being “official”.

I supposed I should start talking to people, eh?