NEW: Colin Benjamin
Thursday, 29 November 2007
The future is now
A friend has directed a venomous response to what he describes as this column’s gross inaccuracies.
He
disagreed with my call that the election result could have been closer
if there had been another week of Costello fear-mongering. That
Bennelong could have been saved from Maxine McKew the dancing media
queen, and Fran Bailey would have been accorded a place in history for
championing the cause of small business in McEwen, had the election
been held one week later.
To set the record straight, a
futurist is somebody who speculates about what may happen, rather than
combining the skills of the Delphic oracle with the hubris of
scientifically validated predictions.
I have never
claimed to have a crystal ball that is accurate enough to meet the
standards set by Philip Adams’ sceptics. Futurists can only draw upon
consideration of prior experience, unsound judgements and a sense of
the possible to get people to expand their horizons.
Give
Roy Morgan’s Gary Morgan and Michele Levine their due. They were almost
spot-on in predicting the two-party vote for the major parties and
reported the change of government for the last six months in Morgan
Polls.
But the real issue is not the election result or
the accuracy of future predictions, but the extent that Malcolm
Turnbull, the likely Liberal leader, and PM Kevin Rudd can work
together in a consensual manner to generate a better and more positive
national future.
The real danger we now face is that
“the future” is now limited to a series of three-year scenarios
designed to retain the reins of power rather than construct sustainable
prosperity via community engagement in the process of generating
preferred and desired scenarios for our shared futures.
Already
Keating’s “true believers” and Howard’s “battlers” are asking whether
KEVIN07 has any view beyond KEV10. In a series of focus groups we have
just run for Morgan Research, originally designed to explore views of
2020 Australia (reports soon to be released), we found that only the
“young optimism” and “socially aware” segments were looking beyond the
end of this decade.
As I have indicated in earlier blogs,
there is a very high correlation between seats that have swung to Labor
at this election and my “unsurety”
index that measures the relative level of anxiety, mood swings, panic
attacks and stress that led to a visit to the local GP in the last
year. (Bennelong, Corangamite and Wentworth notwithstanding.)
John
Howard picked this up with his 1996 family comfort factors and the
white picket fence. Costello changed horses to play on the coming
financial crash in consumer confidence to get a swing back in the last
weeks of the 2007 campaign.
Rudd was this week’s winner
as “Mr Calm” with a safe pair of hands that can reassure people that
the sky is not going to fall with the election of his new unionists and
that he has “a plan” for almost every worry about the world.
Nearly a decade ago, during the 1998 federal election campaign, The Australian newspaper published an editorial titled “Future is the missing election issue” saying inter alia:
What’s
missing is any feeling that the Prime Minister and the Opposition
Leader have a sense of the future. As the old century ends and a new
century beckons; as our society struggles to cope with unending change;
as globalisation both threatens and tempts us; as economic turmoil in
our region upsets our views of our place in the world-our leaders have
nothing to say … They need to offer their thoughts about the kind of
society they would like to see; about how we might meet the challenges,
problems and opportunities facing us; about how we re-order our
relations with our region to make our place in Asia meaningful in hard
times; about what this means for our relations with the power and
financial centres of Europe and the United States … Leadership
requires a sense of vision.
(The Australian; 12.09.98)
For
those blog readers who have got this far down the column, let me place
on record some thoughts about the rest of this year that will be worth
watching as signs of the coming times:
- Oil will go over $US100 a barrel even with the Saudis pumping it out and Iran obliging with a little more.
- Gold
will go over $US900 as people react to Virgin’s takeover of North Rock
and paying back a cool £11 billion down payment on debt to the British
Treasury. - Citibank will lay off more than 10% of all its 45,000 employees as it struggles to stabilise its financial sales.
- Retailers
who have the affluential households as their customer base will
continue to sell flat screens, home and holiday entertainment systems
and GPS navigators to guide them to their next deal while the rest of
the market looks for bargain basements. - There will be a
flight to quality investments in Australia with the big banks and the
large commodity suppliers continuing to supply the BRIC (Brazil, India,
Russia, China) economies. - Peter Shergold (head of the
Department of Premier and Cabinet) and Ken Henry (the head of Treasury)
will be asked to find ways to maintain the education revolution, ratify
Kyoto and defer anything that can be delayed until the US economy is
stabilised after George W’s attempt to pump up his final election year
exit along with his amigos Tony and John.
Now
that we once again have a confirmed economic conservative with fresh
ideas as a PM prepared to use the dreaded “f-word”, maybe we can go
back to the future and ask our new mandarins to look beyond climate
change, computers for every youngster and the Chinese commodity boom to
a reinvestment in strategic futures and long term vision generation
with Shergold.
Can we revisit the decision to favour the
Productivity Commission orientation to a positivist paradigm by
restarting the Futures Commission and the Australian Public Service
Futures Forums and the Australian Science, Technology and Engineering
Council and similar strategic think tanks?
Can we try again to enter the 21st
Century and go beyond the year 2000? Is it too much to ask that we
teach futures research – innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship –
breaking a pathway to tomorrow rather than revisiting the myopia of the
past productivity rationalism, Australian history and a revised White
Australia dictation test to every potential new citizen?
Surely new leadership must encourage a new followership that is able to establish the sort of 22nd Century we are trying to move towards. (Visit the future at http://www.2121.org)
To read more Colin Benjamin blogs, click here.
