The Agenda Behind 2020

As usual the local Brisbane News didn't have anything in it's coverage of the 2020 summits, but praise for the magnificence of the ideas from Australia's finest and brightest minds, never questioning the how, when, where or why such a programme was called for from the general community.

The Cartoon in one paper said a lot though, it depicted Rudd at the rostrum with a popular and respected Australian female actor standing along side and the words below said something like, By 2020 no Australian child won't know who Kate Blanchet is, very funny stuff and it was interesting to see the live TV coverage because the number of actors and musicians present was noticeable amongst the participants.

The top ideas came as no surprise to me though and were simply Labor agenda items and the follow up of previously unused Labor policy, the majority of which was about the next five years rather than, as the name of this forum quotes, looking at ideas over ten years away in 2020.

While we are still running the same old Labor ground of selling off public assets, this time public ownership in our Airports, to create money for needed public infrastructure, read Hospitals, the great ideas forum brought the rabbits out of the hats in the form of the Republic issue, The Tax reform agenda, much harsher business regulation and some big spending on other infrastructure

While it is inevitable that Australia will become a Republic, you could question the timing of spending so much money on something that should be done in prosperous times, rather than taking money from the public purse that the majority of Australians would prefer to see spent of the Health situation, fixing some of the problems of State governments that haven't increased health spending to keep it up with population increases for over 10 years, and education, roads, water and other infrastructure are in pretty much the same condition, and that is needing some large injections of money, first.

All things aside, others can call it initiative from the Rudd Government, but a large number of people are in two minds about this process, one school of thought says this Government doesn't have a clue and is trying to get a handle on what the community wants as quickly as they can and a second mindset is that this will replace going to the people on a lot of issues and give the Government some kind of mandate to do certain things they want to.

So, who's taking a book on how long it will be before the reintroduction of Death Duties in this country?