Australia 2020 summit: scenario planning on a national scale?

The Rudd Government is convening an Australia 2020 Summit at Parliament House on 19 and 20 April to help shape a long term strategy for the nation’s future.

The Summit will debate and develop long-term options for the nation across 10 critical areas. It is not clear whether the summit will actually do scenario planning.

The objectives are described as:

• To harness the best ideas across the nation
• To apply those ideas to the 10 core challenges that the Government has identified for Australia – to secure our long-term future through to 2020
• To provide a forum for free and open public debate in which there are no predetermined right or wrong answers
• For each of the Summit’s 10 areas to produce following the Summit options for consideration by government
• For the Government to produce a public response to these options papers by the end of 2008 with a view to shaping the nation’s long-term direction from 2009 and beyond.

Comments

[Jim]

For the rest of the 20,699,000 people not invited to the 2020 Summit, I created a wiki called Oz Ideas (http://ozideas.wetpaint.com) to be our forum to list and vote on the best ideas to improve Australia. It’s free. It can be anonymous, and I’m not doing it to make money. I just think teachers, tradies, and techies probably have just as good ideas for this country than the experts, so the site acts as a national online brainstorming session.

Since the public often needs a bit of entertainment to go with their public engagement, I created a fun video on Youtube of Kevin Rudd break dancing. It’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQZa17-Dt_4. See what you think.

Cheers,
Jim