Evaluating 2020: Part I - Perspectives

Evaluating the 2020 Summit is a massive task which the Great Kevin has rightly decided cannot be guaranteed until the end of the year. It remains to be seen whether this is a Pizza Hut style deal where failure to deliver hot reasons will result in the delegates receiving their money back. Accordingly, Peregrine will devote two posts to the Summit. For openers, a brief look at perspectives of the Summit.

What you make of the Summit depends largely on your perspective. Conservatives largely consider it a contemptuous revival of Keating-era elitism, journalists a cynical political exercise in ideological suffocation, attendees a robust exchange of ideas and ultimate settlement on a surprising number of themes. Bloggers (of the idea-based rather than ideology-based kind) are divided between those who consider it the start of a new Rudd post-politics order, a stupendously unoriginal recycling of ideas and a wasted opportunity. Poor old Brendan Nelson does not seem to know what he thinks of it and appears to be still reeling from his encounter with the representative of the Sex Workers Union.

The Summit has again highlighted the discomfort Australians have with the idea of an elite group of intellectuals showing their faces in public, however it also offers the encouraging idea that we do not mind big thinking and ideas themselves. Nelson's political response could have been stronger, or at least coherent, if he had complimented the idea of the Summit but criticised the lack of ordinary Australians, or in the alternative, announced his own counter-summit, or some such gathering beyond his nebulous listening tour. The Summit's profile, focus, purpose and relevance stand in stark contrast to Brendan's aimless tour lacking both form and substance. If the good ship Nelson comes any further onto the reefs of irrelevance, he will be donning a black wig and taking up resident on Lygon Street.

In short, we like ideas, but as an egalitarian nation, we like our share in the conversation. The lesson from this weekend, a reiteration of Malcolm's Republic referendum, is talk down to the people at your peril. It will be very interesting to see how Liberal resident intellectual Malcolm Turnbull responds to the new climate of big thinking and government recasting given his form as head of the elitist vanguard.