Opinion- 11 December 2004

 

 

 

 

Suppose and Suppose -

 Harry Robinson


Suppose a scientist were made Australia's Top Banana with the power to design the nation's future -- what profile would he or she draw for the Oz of, say, 2050?
Perhaps we should look to our major political parties for blueprints; after all, they are always spouting policies. The current prime minister has told the world that he has no time for "the vision thing." It's likely to lose many votes and win few. His followers in the coalition parties obviously agree so the government is rusted on to the status quo. Members feel compelled to vote money for high schools and -- reluctantly -- universities so long as those universities behave themselves and turn out lots of graduates with HECS debts. Just to keep the country lolloping along, some graduates in law, commerce and medicine are necessary. But it is all right to ignore universities when they get above themselves and begin to talk about funds for discovery and such, well ... vision things.

So far as the elected government is concerned, Oz needs no re-designing. The mould is pretty right and the country can trudge along its well trod road.

Look across the political chamber and see if the Labor opposition has any ideas for the Oz of 2050. O crikey! What a noise as the members call each other names and dispute everything and everybody. Scratch the surface, though, and you do find them united on one credo: they all believe they should keep their parliamentary seats, salaries and perks no matter what. Never mind visions or grand plans. Stick to the basics: a safe seat for life and a fat super payout at the end. Their political forefathers did have visions and notions of reform. They knew where they wanted to take the nation. Gough Whitlam made a mess of finance but he turned the lights on for thinking people. (And abolished university fees.) Bob Hawke saw that the trade unions had become a drag so he turned their lights out with the wages/prices accord. But his sense of adventure was limited. He made Barry Jones Minister for Science and, when Jones began to raise horizons, Hawke fired him. The Keating legacy, too, is ambiguous in spite of his talk about big pictures. We never saw so much as a rough draft. He worked hard and achieved some successes but huge blank spots in his education led him to make an unwise liaison with the Indonesian dictator Suharto. His penchant for personal abuse helped bring on his 1996 defeat. The ALP has not bothered itself with pictures since. Hawke and Keating were good at correcting mistaken policies of the past: the future was another country.

OK, that's not the whole truth. Mark Latham in the recent campaign did project a future of a kind. In his warm-up he proposed that all good dads would read to their children every night. Toward the end he floated a promise to put every over 75 into a hospital bed free of charge. From cradle to grave it was the old nanny state format rejigged. A dead notion. Latham was virtually silent on advanced science and his proposals on education were smudged with the class warfare of old.

The ALP is no place to find a national future.

Outside political parties our Top Banana could examine the vision of John Laws who exhorts his listeners every morning to "keep the dream alive." He offers no details, no specifics for the dream. It seems to be a milieu in which social dissidents will be sent to jail forever while free men will be good blokes, great mates. They'll be kind to their women, so long as they stay one step behind, and everyone will enjoy sentimental pop songs along with the bad taste of masscult. Oh, don't forget that everyone will own, drive and worship a Toyota. Lawsy's dream world will have all the charm of a big Mac. It will go nowhere but will dumb itself down to a sticky end.

The nation could devote itself to sport, to sweeping the next Olympics and the next, to proving that our flannelled fools are the greatest flannelled fools, to capturing every world cup of every football code known to man. This might get us a world reputation as quirky people with a strange obsession for sweaty games and no brains at all.

Then there's the blind alley of agriculture. Would the Top Banana scientist plump for a nation still scratching mediocre returns out of our abused continent in 2050? Peasants in four-wheel drives? Hardly.

Scenarios abound. The multinational corporate scheme in which big companies become so many big brothers, faceless, heartless but all-powerful. Shades of Huxley's Brave New World.

Once upon a time the then premier of NSW, Neville Wran, suggested building expertise in financial services as the thrust of our industry. He wanted us to steal the business from Hong Kong and Singapore. The idea had some potential but it was not strong enough.

Top Banana could look at the education scenario -- schools, colleges and unis to serve us and south-east Asia with first class teaching. A nation of chalkies. Certainly better than a nation of swimmers or one of farmers. Top Banana might examine this one closely.

However, there's a more promising line. Let's turn the lights up to bright. One home grown visionary has clear ideas of how Oz should look in 2050. Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith and now president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has been preaching a gospel of faith-in-science for decades. His message in brief is that we are destroying our living space, that our thirst for energy is tearing at our air soil and water, that science and technology have remedies, that people need patience to make use of the science we already have, that we can have energy and a healthy earth too --- so long as we use the scientific mind.

Ian Lowe has had many, many disappointments thanks to a lumpen public and even more lumpen politicians intent only on the next election. Yet he has persisted in delivering his message again and again. All the more reason for the Top Banana to dwell on the works of Ian Lowe.

The Lowe approach would not cover all aspects of a design for the Oz of 2050. While he treats the physical environment superbly, he does not pretend to draft the arts, history, law, education and the rest of the spectrum of civilisation. Top Banana could use him as a paradigm for the most desirable nation of Oz in 2050 -- one in which the discipline, use and application of the mind rules our every endeavour.

 

[Note 13/12/04: Ian Lowe has an opinion piece published in the December 13 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald. "Environmental losses cannot be paid back"]

 


Harry Robinson -- for 25 years worked in television journalism in Oz and the US and was for several years air media critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald.