Nostalgia and the grand narrative

The current public nostalgia for Paul Keating tells us much about the state of the nation. We lack, according to the Keatingistas, 'a grand narrative'. To some extent we are reaping the harvest of the Howard years; the mean-spirited years the locusts ate, by increasing middle-class welfare, instead of deploying our national capital to infrastructure spending and investment in people through education and training.

Central to Australia's future is our geostrategic location. This is the sweet spot, a first world country adjacent to the emerging global powerhouses of East Asia and South Asia. Despite all the hype about China, my argument is that there should be equal or greater focus on South Asia – India, Sri Lanka. Pakistan – where the lingua franca of business and education, and thus of globalisation, is English; where we share postcolonial heritages, and a commitment to the ideals of a democratic polity, and within that, freedom of expression.

Given our geostrategic location, why is it that every Australian school child is not required to learn a second language at school , starting as early as possible ? Which brings us to education.

Education

The quality of our education system – in secondary education and post-secondary education - is the biggest drag on our national competitiveness and productivity. The recent Productivity Commission report on teacher education should send shock waves through every education faculty, every university admissions office, every state education department, and every employer group in the country. Unfortunately, it won't. We need an upside down model of teacher education where the best and the brightest aspire to be school teachers, not highly paid doctors and lawyers.

And let's not flatter ourselves about the quality of those leaving secondary education and entering university. And here I write as one who has direct dealings with the product of our secondary education system: first year undergraduates, the majority of whom lack critical communication and thinking skills, and have to unlearn bad habits fostered by the 'naplaning' of their educational experience. 'Naplaning' is an exercise akin to trepanning, in which part of the brain is removed through 'teaching to the test'. This breeds a generation of students wedded to strictly following instructions, joining the dots, ticking the boxes, overseen by helicopter parents always hovering overhead.

Speaking of higher education, enormous progress has been made in improving the quality of higher education teaching over the past decade. This is in spite of the antipathy of the Howard government towards the university sector, and the chronic underfunding this begat. Further reforms in higher education are necessary. We need much more sophisticated instruments for measuring both research outcomes and teaching impact. Current teaching quality measures in higher education based around student satisfaction essentially measure popularity. Not even the Logies rely on audience popularity as the sole criterion for awards any more. Finally, with the exception of some summer programs, why does the expensive teaching infrastructure of our universities lie idle for nearly half the year?

The current "skills shortage" shows just how inept governments have been in workforce planning, especially in the vocational education and training sector, which everybody knows has been a basket case of decades.

Science

Despite this, the quality of our scientific research continues to amaze me. Our track record in turning those innovations into marketable goods and services is improving but still poor. As is our inability to insist on value adding to agricultural and resources before they leave the country.

Social entrepreneurship

Just as we have some outstanding scientists, like Ian Fraser (a Scotsman by birth), we also have some outstanding social entrepreneurs. One such is Chris Raine, the 24-year-old founder of Hello Sunday Morning, the online alcohol moderation initiative.

Politics and public administration

The quality of our public administration, particularly at state and local government is appalling. The philosophy of 'new public management' has been an abject failure in execution. Witness:

• The complete inability of our defence procurement capability to purchase any materiel on time and on budget;
• The complete washout that passes for public policy on the Murray Darling Basin, and the associated issues of water allocation and environmental flows;
• The failure to redress chronic ill-health and poverty among indigenous Australians.

If, as the popular aphorism has it, a fish rots from the head, what then of our political leadership? Of most profound concern is the fact that the majority of members of the Federal Parliament came to that position through being party or union apparatchiks.

That is, from birth, they have been creatures of the party, with little or no experience of the world outside the party machine. Those that do have life experience, like Andrew Wilkie, the independent Member of the Denison, who served in the defence force and the intelligence community, are vilified for being flaky. Wilkie, and his upper house colleague, Senator Nick Xenophon, are advocates of the big bang theory of change; a model exemplified by Paul Keating. "Creeping incrementalism" says Keating, in a speech published in Afterwords: the post prime ministerial speeches, is not change. Keating's speeches are worthy of study, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the articulation of a countervailing point of view. Read them with the mental image of Paul Keating in lycra or budgie smugglers in mind.

Our current political leadership on all sides - principally because of the minority government - is incrementalist. Frank Furedi recognised this in The Weekend Australian recently (19 November, 2011) when he discussed how leadership is circumvented by risk aversion and the culture of risk management (which can be quite punitive). So I have another task for the Productivity Commission: What are the risks and costs associated with a culture of risk aversion in a culture and community whose future is defined by risk taking and innovation?