What were the big ideas emerging from the 2020 Summit? In amongst the calls for reviews of this system and that (after all, calling for a review of something is a mindbogglingly novel idea) and the establishment of commissions here, there and everywhere, there were some interesting ideas, but very few novel ones.
The idea of a citizens’ cabinet online was broached, as was the idea of smart energy and water meters so that people can measure their personal environmental footprint. There were a number of other interesting ideas, but I’d say many of them belong in the private sector (including the smart meter idea). The Healthbook idea, for example, is one that might be useful, but should involve the government as little as possible (i.e., perhaps in a regulatory role only).
After the summit, Tim Costello and Kevin Rudd were accused of hijacking the outcomes document. Some of the delegates say that a few of the top ideas appearing in the outcomes document were barely, or never, discussed. Other delegates complain that they were railroaded by the facilitators.
Overall, I’m incredibly disappointed with the “top ideas” that made the summary document. I’m sure there were other, more novel ideas that were raised which haven’t been included.
The trouble with these sorts of exercises is that either certain people in positions of power get to assert their ideas at the expense of others, or the “top ideas” are actually a kind of lowest common denominator consensus, which means none of the truly great ideas make the cut.
1 reply on “The 2020 summit: farce or force for the future?”
Come on, this was a two day summit; you can’t possibly expect that anyone could propose a novel idea and get a committee to agree to it in that timeframe. Even if they could, governments don’t exactly have a great track record on implementing novel ideas. As I see it, the idea of the summit (other than as an obvious PR exercise) is as a filter, i.e., get a bunch of smart people in a room, and if they can agree on anything, then it’s probably a decent idea. Realistically, these were the only ideas a government was likely to adopt anyway.
I agree with you that these exercises end up representating lowest common denominator consensus, but one could argue that that’s the point.