We hoped for better, Kevin

Rainwater tanks were ruled out by our convenor as more energy intensive than desalination plants! Demand management measures were scoffed at because South East Queensland, it was declared, had reduced consumption by a third when they were told to.

Ideas metamorphosed overnight. Our Water stream said government should buy up more water licenses which turned into: “We could expand the use of a wider range of market mechanisms to acquire water entitlements from over-allocated systems …”

The biggest water idea was to involve Indigenous communities in not making the same mistakes in the now wetter far north that have been made elsewhere. It became “Australia will also have become a global leader in tropical water system conservation and sustainability.”

The Rural stream was more frank and said “Water security can be enhanced by … greater use of high rainfall areas of the north of Australia” and called on the Federal Government to “… commission a total soil and hydrological survey of north and north-west Australia by 2010 to inform future production opportunities”.

Ideas got condensed into what we once called mission statements, like having a “dynamic, innovative and climate resilient water system” but turned out to be code for new and privatised sources of water like desalination.

I wish I could be a more enthusiastic summiteer, but putting 1,000 “brainy” people into the workshop mill did not produce much more than laudable vision statements and ideas that have been around for years.

I worry that 2020 has let the government off the hook. Nothing here seriously challenged the election promises, like the $31 billion in inflationary tax cuts or other ill-considered initiatives, common to both major parties. The ideas that were in any way concrete did not add up to the expectations of a laudable vision and indeed they tended to be even less ambitious than current policy and more in keeping with the former government’s conservative agenda.

“Supporting kids by funding students according to need and encouraging more private investment” and the “Learning for life account” sound to me like pushing more kids out of government schools and a voucher system that even the Howard Government baulked at. Focusing on the connections between “quality teaching and productivity” is surely just more testing and performance pay. “One curriculum” is straight from Julie Bishop’s agenda as is imagining this would free up funds for children in schools.

Ensuring all primary school kids have fresh fruit at least once a week is surely not enough to keep them healthy and it’s hard to see how working with industry would deliver fresh food to Indigenous communities. The government, like the last, has ruled out food labelling and banning junk food advertising to children, and regulating allowable content of unhealthy ingredients would be a minefield. The bionic eye turns out to be not a new idea at all and I frankly hope I never have to rely for first aid on kids trained by volunteers in emergencies like the Bali bombings.

Private philanthropic flows to Indigenous organisations and private school scholarships and health and education compacts for Aboriginal kids also sound very “Coalition”.

We hoped for better than this, Kevin. Go back to the drawing board and to the serious work that has been done by summiteers in their day jobs and by your colleagues in the Parliament and by the many worthy organisations, groups and individuals that put up good, considered public policy.