If you read the coverage of yesterday’s self-styled “National Reform Summit”, it appears the whole day was devoted to serious people expounding serious ideas about what changes need to be made to reform Australia, and why. Lots of solid ideas and prescriptions, most of them cogent or admirable, all in a spirit of collegiality and bipartisan good intent.
What you didn’t hear — and what guarantees this summit will not produce any meaningful results — was any serious or practical discussion about how to reform Australia. Not the ideas — the political and administrative execution.
If this were an entrepreneurial event, it would have spent at least half its time devoted to a concrete, specific, workable execution plan. Facilitated by implementation experts, not ideas experts. All the greatest ideas are worthless if they can’t be executed, and that is Australia’s logjam.
Everyone knows Australia has a future growth problem. Everyone knows we have dysfunctional government. Everyone knows there is no national strategy.
What’s missing isn’t policy ideas, it’s execution. What’s missing — and what yesterday’s “summit” failed to discuss, let alone address — is an intensely pragmatic step-by-step blueprint on how government delivers reform. A practical, political formula for change, not merely the reasons for change.
So, respectfully, here’s a suggestion to the summit organisers, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review: convene another full-day meeting later this year devoted only to implementation. Invite execution experts like Michael Kroger, Peter Shergold, Tim Gartrell, Gail Kelly, Mark Textor, Terry Moran, David Thodey, Mark Carnegie, Bruce Hawker, Lynton Crosby, Ken Henry, Lucy Turnbull, Geoff Walsh, Helen Silver — and don’t let them leave the room until they have formulated a practical implementation plan built around the political and institutional variables, realities and obstacles. (Private Media would be delighted to co-sponsor this National Implementation Summit, if a mongrel media upstart would help broaden the base).
Otherwise, it all ends in hot air. It ends like the story of modern Australia — lots of talk, rhetoric, goodwill, newspaper marketing hype and no practical outcomes.
The National Reform Summit was born out of frustration with our national polity where decision making is based solely on a desperate urge to be re-elected rather than negotiating sound, acceptable policy. It was a genuine attempt to break through the pettiness, squabbling, strutting and manoeuvring of our politicians to get a stalled ship of state moving again.
It could not resolve differences and develop acceptable practical policies in one day. It is sad to think that we have to virtually bypass parliament, setting a parallel deliberative structure, to get anything done in this once great nation.
Well said Eric. Enough already about the issues we all know about. This is why Internet Australia has called on the Government and the Opposition to come together with industry groups, unions, academics and civil society groups to plot the pathway to a digitally enabled economic future. The idea is to create a set of deliverables that are agreed in a bipartisan way and which we can work towards collectively, irrespective of who holds government. A plan to create 21st Century jobs to replace those already lost and those about to be lost as another round of technological change takes hold over the next decade or two. If we don’t solve the job creation dilemma then the rest of the “problem issues” will be largely irrelevant. If we can create a strong digitally enabled economy then we might have half a chance of sorting out the rest. Oh, and effectively leaving politicians out of yesterday’s talkfest (bar their opening statements); what was that about? We need to involve our elected representatives every step of the way. They are the ones who have the power to make things happen. But left out of the planning process they’ll hardly be inclined to take up other people’s suggestions.
Real vision for the future has been sacrificed on the alter of getting elected and all our political parties are guilty of it, having fallen into the hands of strategists aged about 30 who know stuff all about life.
So it is sound bites, photo ops, gotcha moments on TV, knee jerk reactions to the polls, daily “announcables” for the 24 hour news cycle and policy on the run.
The media has played its part, focusing on trivia, side shows, ratings and personalities. Crikey rightly has a go at the Tele but itself is not innocent. The daily excoriation of Tony Abbott is so predictable and consistent that it is clearly a political campaign. Then you blame him for having no policy in spite of relentless opposition from the Senate.
Things will need to get a whole lot worse before reform becomes possible.
I have to agree. We don’t lack ideas, well those who aren’t in the coalition don’t lack them, but execution is impossible, and this is only going to get worse.
In fact we need an entirely new form of government, but that ain’t gonna come, and I don’t know a system that humans couldn’t F#$% up, but we need one.
I would take issue with one point of Mr Hand’s (only one?). I would not refer to the ‘hands of strategists’. It demeans the word strategy, which to me means to look beyond the next news cycle. Tacticians, sure, but not strategists.
You may well complain about Crikey’s excoriation of Tony Abbott, but without ‘oppositionism’ Tony has nothing. He doesn’t exist except in what he is opposed to, and what he is opposed to is ‘those other people’.
Abbott only gets what he deserves on Crikey, and all the support Abbott gets in News Corp hardly seems to help, and I think their reach is greater than Crikey’s.
I can’t agree with Brekky that we, as a polity, lack ideas.
It is the nature of too many of the ideas currently in the air that scare the bejazus out of me.