The Future Summit 2009 was two days of discussion on Australia’s future challenges and opportunies by the Australian Davos Foundation.
The idea is terrific – all too often Australia’s political, business and economic discussion is bogged down in soundbites and opportunism. So an event that gets people thinking beyond the next opinion poll or financial report is welcome.
While it did spark thinking, it was probably not in the way many attendees hoped.
Twitterer IRLDexter asked Suits,suits,suits… Does the style and conformity reflect the thinking?.
Sadly, the answer was “yes”.
The Future Summit showed the Australian establishment is pretty well homogeneous. There’s not a great deal of dissent among the nation’s political, public service, academic or business elites.
Probably the clearest example of groupthink was in the economic discussions. The various panels’ opinion of the future can be summarised with “Australia’s right mate; once the Chinese get their act together we’ll be back on track to a self funded, negatively geared retirement, powered by nuclear energy and clean coal”.
That’s nice, but that view really lacks vigour at the very least it’s a lazy view of Australia’s future direction. We need more heretics and more new ideas.
On the economics front a few heretics, say a Steve Keen, might have pointed we need a plan B just in case the Chinese economy doesn’t come to our rescue.
The Future Summit is a great idea and hopefully its going to continue into the future, but to provide some real forward thinking and debate, we’re going to need more outsiders to upset the Australian establishment’s narrow view.
I look forward to next years summit. Hopefully we’ll have some heretics, entrepreneurs and younger voices to balance the establishment’s complacent conformity.
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