Rocky Road Towards The Future
The Age
Friday June 17, 1994
The commission set up to prepare us for the future has become bogged down in its own battle for survival, Karen Kissane reports.
IN THE 1890s, C.Y. O'Connor dreamed of building a Western Australian pipeline to carry water from Mundaring to the Kalgoorlie goldfields.
He was derided and persecuted for his vision. He continued to work towards it but was driven to despair by public resistance.
Eventually he rode his horse into the surf on South Fremantle beach and shot himself dead, just as the first water trickled out of his pipeline at Kalgoorlie. Today the Commission for the Future, set up to embody a national vision for Australia, is fighting a similar battle against the odds.
Visionaries in this country have often come to a bad end, says Dr Peter Ellyard, who tells the O'Connor story. And he believes that the Commission for the Future, which he used to head, has suffered for being before its time - no puns intended.
It was established in the 1980s when the buzzwords were pragmatism and realism, when greed was good and economic rationalism dominated the corridors of power: ``To be visionary was to be a social outcast, a leper." Dr Ellyard says that now, as at the end of every century, people are more willing to debate the future, concerned about what a new millenium will bring. But will they have a Commission for the Future to help them do it? The commission, which was set up to promote education and debate about science, technology and social change, is in disarray. It has lost its chief executive and most of its staff, and most of its board members will soon be changed. The commission has abandoned attempts to help pay its way through private consulting work. It is debating whether to change its name and its function and is seeking refuge through merger with a larger body. The most likely spouse is Monash University.
A spokesman for the commission said yesterday that several possibilities were being considered. The office of the Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, said no proposal regarding Monash had been put to the minister, Senator Cook. Monash would not comment in the absence of Professor Mal Logan, the vice-chancellor involved in the talks, who is overseas. But it is believed the bride and groom are happy with the proposed match and await only parental approval - from the university council and the minister - and a dowry, in the form of guaranteed federal funding.
The commission's discreet approaches to Melbourne University late last year received a cooler welcome. The deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Boris Schedvin, says: ``They wanted quite a number of things, including free accommodation and access to legal and financial services. We weren't able to give them accommodation ... We also believed that the organisation had run out of steam. I don't think anyone would argue with that."
People who have worked with the commission say it has fallen victim to a clash of cultures and the crunch of recession. The brainchild of former science minister Barry Jones, it was set up to inform Australians about how science and technology might change their lives.
It was hoped that this would enable people to debate how such change should be managed, in terms of public policy, rather than passively accept whatever developments it might bring for good or ill.
Supporters saw it as idealistic, critics as self-indulgent. Mr Jones once said that the commission's philosophy, that there could be values beyond material values, had infuriated sections of government: ``The mere possibility that there are non-economic values is seen as heresy in places such as Treasury and the Department of Finance."
When Mr Jones was dumped from the ministry in 1990, the commission lost its gladiator in Cabinet. This coincided with recession and increasing emphasis on cutting government spending, and the commission was threatened with abolition. The board instead persuaded the Government to put it on the path to privatisation, and Susan Oliver, a technology strategist, was recruited as director to implement this.
She found the task disheartening. ``In our culture, tomorrow's the future," she now says. ``Next week is about the limit of our planning and our thinking. We see anybody who thinks deeply as a wanker; we perceive thinking through all sorts of issues as a waste of time. We have a very anti-intellectual approach generally in Australia, and that makes it difficult for an organisation such as the commission to succeed."
Ms Oliver set up a consultancy and research unit that hired its services out to private companies. This earned the commission $300,000 to $400,000 a year to supplement its government funding, which had been cut from $1million to $500,000. But, according to board member Rick Farley, it needed $1.5 million. Ms Oliver says much of the extra money earned by the consulting had to be used to cross-subsidise the commission's glossy magazine, `21C'.
Ms Oliver says she begged government departments to give the commission tasks - ``There were any number of inquiries and reviews that needed a long-term perspective" - but got little response. ``I don't think they could imagine what we could do," she says.
``Governments in other countries generally use such bodies much better than we do here. The times I walked around Parliament House (to give briefings) were many and exhausting but I didn't get any benefit from it. The closest thing we had in government to someone who supported us and understood was Ros Kelly." The commission had no clout because there were no votes in supporting it, Ms Oliver says.
She resigned after a board decision last March to abandon the commission's consulting work. ``As soon as the research and consulting group disbanded, the thinking area of the organisation was gone except for me. How could I be the Commission for the Future myself? That's a big ask."
Ms Oliver says Australia needs such a commission, and that ignoring the importance of practical long-term planning leads to disaster.
``Policies we put in place today are going to have a good or a bad impact on the future. The perfect example is the 1950s and the post- war baby-boomers. One day all these people are going to retire; that should have been foreseen and plans put in place to provide them with retirement income. As it is, a lot of people who retire in 10 or 15 years will live in poverty thereafter."
The commission's founding director, Rhonda Galbally, says that the university merger proposal is a chance for the commission to be reborn, and to refocus on its original goal of involving Australians from all walks of life in decision-making; she believes it lost direction with the private consultancy. But the commission has had an enormous impact given its limited resources, she says, and given birth to many babies that are now sturdy children, including wide public knowledge about the greenhouse effect, futures studies in schools, and Asialink, which it founded as the Asia Education Foundation.
Board member Rick Farley, who is also executive director of the National Farmers Federation and known for his economic rationalist views, argues that the commission deserves public money. ``It is difficult for any organisation whose charter is to promote public debate to capture the benefits economically of what it does ....
There's justification for government intervention where the market fails."
Dr Ellyard says bodies such as the commission are needed to help Australians look at not just what will happen in the future but what should happen. ``The Asian dragons to our north have always had a 20- year vision," he says. ``Think of the 1960s, when JFK said we would go to the moon and back in a decade; no one had a clue how to do that at the time. Today, Malaysia is on a gigantic Apollo mission for the whole country; it's a 26-year job, `Malaysia 2020'. In the eighties, it has been `Asian dragons: 100', `Anglo-Celts: zero', and that's because of an abandonment of long-term strategic planning."
© 1994 The Age
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