Page 1542 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 18 May 1993
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the world calling themselves national twenty-first century study teams and carrying on studies into the future of their countries. When we started this study a few months ago there was no reason to begin from the notion that we were inventing the wheel. A great deal has been done. The article poses the question: What exactly is a twenty-first century study? It answers that rhetorical question in this way:
It is a serious analysis of long-term alternatives for a nation or a region, with a number of specific characteristics -
characteristics, I think, that the Government ought to note carefully -
it is multisectoral, stressing the connections between sectors; ... it is aimed at finding sustainable strategies, in terms of both environment and social justice ... it takes a longer term look than the standard five-year national plan ... and it seeks to provide opportunities for people to participate in democratic choices about their future.
There are fairly basic characteristics about such a study. It also states:
To be a competent futurist, ... three things are essential -
and I want to emphasise these -
to be able to think long term and imagine things that we may never experience ourselves; to think in a systems way, spotting the connections and feedbacks between different phenomena; and to have a global perspective - not just seeing things in terms of one country or one culture.
And, in our case, not just seeing things in terms of one region or one culture. They are fairly fundamental things, and they were said by the Australian Commission for the Future only a year or so ago.
When we look at our study, where do we find those characteristics and those fundamentals reflected? The answer is that we do not. In other words, this is supposed to be reflecting a vision for Canberra 30 years downstream, and it is reflecting no vision at all. What we have is a bunch of papers which are not multisectoral but are written in isolation each from the other. There is no cross-fertilisation at all between the authors of those papers. The multisectoral thing went out the window.
I think my greatest criticism of it is that it lacks vision. It lacks that ability to imagine things that we may never ourselves experience. If we are not doing that, what are we doing? The major thing that is missing from this paper is a recognition of the fact that the major catalyst for change is change in technology and that we need to be predictive and imaginative about that. I suppose you could say that there is an exponential rate of change in technology in the world. If you looked at the last 50 years, you could say with some degree of certainty that that rate of change will be replicated in the next 30 years, since the rate of change is becoming more rapid.
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