Tag: australia 2020

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Australia 2020 Summit “destined to fail”

Another negative piece about the Australia 2020 Summit, this time from geneticist Michael Lardelli in The 2020 Summit — more hallucination than clear vision. He reckons it’s “destined to fail”.

Let me quote a couple more lines from the [ALP policy] website:

“The Australia 2020 Summit will examine… How we best invest the proceeds of [current] prosperity to lay the foundations for future economic growth.” And “How… we plan future population growth at a national and regional level, given the constraints of water shortages and sustainability?”

The trouble with these statements is that they assume the possibility of future economic growth and the inevitability and even desirability of population growth. But economic growth requires energy. A clear, objective view of the facts shows that by 2020, Australia and the rest of the world will be deep in an energy and food crisis of epic proportions.

Lardelli reckons that not even the Greens can openly suggest that future economic growth is impossible or that population growth is undesirable.

I don’t think we should write off the Summit just yet. These are Australians we’re talking about. If the Steering Committee tries to shut down true ideas-generation, I reckon our “best and brightest” will fight back with vigour.

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Australia 2020 News, 14 March 2008

Summit deputy chairman Professor Glyn Davis reckons Australia’s universities should be run like the American higher education system.

Professor Davis will argue in a speech today that America’s higher education system is more stable than Australia’s because it is more decentralised, with legal and financial responsibility primarily in the hands of the states. Universities are also given more power to set their own tuition fees, and students are offered a wide range of institutions from which to choose.

Well, “he will have argued”, because this was this morning’s newspaper reporting something that hadn’t actually happened yet. Newspapers know the future.

Apart from that, nothing much new to report. Everyone is presumably busy going through nominations. Tomorrow I’ll look to see what the blogosphere is saying.

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Australia 2020 News, 13 March 2008

I wonder if Australia’s Jewish communities will be suitably placated by having their own kosher pre-summit summit on 14 April, since the main Australia 2020 Summit on 19-20 April clashed with Passover?

Meanwhile, the process of selecting the 1000 “best and brightest” (minus the politically-handy pre-selections) started yesterday. There’s “more than 10,000 applications” to deal with — though previously the figure was 7000+ so who knows who to believe.

[Summit vice-chairman] Professor [Glyn] Davis met Mr Rudd on Tuesday to review progress for the huge gathering. A team, including Victorian public servants and some of Professor Davis’ staff, is working on the agenda, while a Queensland bureaucrat is helping with background material for the summiteers.

Mind you:

The committee also has lists of possible summiteers sent in by the public and CVs that are not accompanied by formal applications.

I’d have thought that being unable to follow the published nomination process would automatically exclude you from being Australia’s “best and brightest”.

It’s sounding like we’ll know the list of 1000 early next week.

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Australia 2020: recent articles

Here’s what other people have written about the Australia 2020 Summit recently:

  1. Science communicator Professor Julian Cribb says “Your Ruddiness, the problem with your summit… is that it is already thinking too small, although it professes to think big.” Hear hear! We must solve the problems facing humanity as a whole, he said. “This isn’t a joke. For the last eight years the world has eaten more food that [sic] it has produced, and the gap is widening as demand rises and production stagnates. Meanwhile Australian governments, Coalition and Labor, have done their level best to ensure a future food crisis by winding back agricultural science in this country and agricultural aid overseas.”
  2. In The Australian, Mike Steketee asks us to Forget ideology, just focus on ideas. “A start to considering ideas on their merit would be not to pigeonhole them according to who puts them forward.”
  3. In An ambit claim for the Ruddfest 2020, Valerie Yule says that a fair Australia can also be prosperous. “Australia Fair would still be able to Advance,” she says. “‘Fair’ means fairness in opportunities, fairness in rewards, and fair dealing.”

For completeness, in my last post I mentioned the Media Watch report, and the Centre for Policy development’s ideas for what happens next. What else have you seen?

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Australia 2020: The Disillusionment

Photograph of Kevin Rudd from The 7.30 Report

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.

Continue reading “Australia 2020: The Disillusionment”