Page 1543 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 18 May 1993
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Let us look at the last 50 years. Let us go back to 1943 and look at the change that has occurred in Australia since then. We did not have jet aircraft in 1943 and we had no TV. There was some TV in North America and some basic TV in England, but we had no TV until 1956. We had no such thing as microwave ovens, we had no washing machines, essentially, and we certainly had no dishwashing machines. We had a totally different lifestyle. If you project that order of change at the same rate over the next 30 years, what is Canberra going to look like? These papers do not even begin to address the problem.
In terms of the rate of change, I want to make reference to a book that was published only five years ago - in 1987. There are some interesting statements here that make you wonder about this rate of change and where we are going to go. The book is called Building Bridges: An Australian Guide to Making Technology and People Work Successfully Together, 1987. It reflects the thinking, even as recently as that. In a section headed "The Aussie way", it states:
Research into successful companies, both in Australia and overseas, has shown that Australian business values different things from overseas companies. Surveys on the most successful businesses in America, for example, asked the managers to define the secrets of success. Answers almost universally included comments on human relations programs, staff training, and creating environments designed to attract the right people. Successful Australian companies asked the same questions completely left out such items. Their emphasis was on investment and marketing. People weren't mentioned at all.
This was only five years ago. If you asked the same question today, I submit that you would get the same sorts of answers they got from Americans then. They go on to refer to Japanese companies, as follows:
Japanese use collaboration. They discuss decisions with all the people involved in implementing them.
That was the difference between Australia and Japan only five years ago. On page 33, and this is an interesting one, under the heading "The technology bomb", it talks about office technology, as follows:
Most companies introducing word processing realise that the secretary only spends part of her day typing.
The rest is spent screening phone calls, making appointments, filing and so on. So the sensible thing to do is to have a terminal shared by a number of secretaries who have to leave their desks to use it. While they are word-processing, they aren't there to screen calls, make appointments and do their other tasks. This may cause problems for the managers, who will certainly find it annoying. So companies put in a typing pool with the secretaries farming out their typing to specialist word-processor operators.
How far away from today's world is that description, and that was only five years ago? At pages 71 and 72 it talks about the introduction of computers, under the heading "Technocrats, please read". Referring to computer managers, it says:
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