Australia needs a festival of ideals rather more than a festival of ideas, as proposed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for this year's Passover. Not ideals as meaningless slogans, of the sort that parties on both sides have foisted on us for too long, nor ideals as some sort of spiritual, ethical or moral template. But targets, perhaps seemingly impractical ones, about which most can agree.
When John Kennedy set NASA a target of putting an American on the moon by the end of 1970, not an American astronaut had yet left Earth, and almost all of the science involved was untested or unknown. But the target was achieved.
We may not be the United States, but it is surely not beyond our power to determine, as an ideal and a target that, say, all Aborigines will be satisfactorily housed by 2011, or that we shall resolve irrigation water allocation issues (including present over-allocations) by then.
Ideas people are not usually the best for working out how to achieve such targets. But they may have more boldness and imagination in imagining the targets, and setting them within a context, than the sounder, more practical, bureaucrats, engineers or even politicians given the job of allocating and rationing resources to put the ideas, and ideals, into effect.
A very good example might be the United Nations millennium development goals which have proven far more effective in achieving aid outcomes than 50 years of well-meaning but often ineffective national and multinational programs.
There is nothing particularly new about the general millennium project goals. They contain the sort of vague slogans also used in announcing the Passover summit.
The project wants to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development. One might have been able to say in 1960 that these were more or less Australia's aid goals.
What lifts the millennium project from the ruck is the way they have moved from that to setting clear targets, with timetables. On eradicating poverty and hunger, for example, the target for 2015 is to have reduced by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, and by half the number suffering from hunger.
There are interim targets, and regular reports on the state of progress in achieving them. The goal for child mortality is to reduce the current mortality rate (for children under five) by two-thirds.
In each case, the number of targets set is modest: one or two. The hope is audacious, yet plainly achievable, if the resources are put in. Achieving the target cannot be done by a single set of actions, or with the same solution for all, but inevitably implies a host of subsidiary achievements.
One will not, for example, reduce child mortality by two-thirds until at least two-thirds of the at-risk children have in-house access to clean water supplies, so if you want to achieve this you better develop a plan for water supplies. And, perhaps, housing.
Australia's challenges are not of the sort for which the millennium goals were set, but the model remains a good one. That's in spite of the fact that, locally, some types of such target-setting have a bad name since Bob Hawke promised that by 1990 no children would live in poverty a bad name probably accentuated by the fairly profitless arguments about 2050 or 2020 target-setting with emissions.
Nor do we want targets of the ambiguity and vagueness of "outcomes statements" in modern appropriations Bills which are a fraud on the Constitution, the public purse and the English language. An outcome such as "achieve safer workplaces" means everything and nothing.
What has the capacity to have teeth is a promise that by 2020 we will have fewer than 10 deaths and 20 serious injuries a year in each of the mining, agriculture and building and construction sectors. Does it seem macabre to say that 10 deaths in mining is acceptable? (The current rate is about 27 a year.) Why not none? Why not, indeed, if the population is prepared to wear the hardship that this will impose upon them as much as on mining companies. A good subject for an argument.
A better argument than one involving people, even of our best and our brightest, or our noblest and luvviest, who will think that the summit should be primarily about how we ought to give greater subsidies to the arts, make more rivers run free, or more appreciate Aboriginal culture. Discussions about such vague goals are a waste of time, since no one will much disagree (or dare to) anyway.
The consensus, or even some sparkly idea or phrase, will not help politicians, or administrators, set priorities, ration resources, or measure progress towards the ideal or goal. Any more than will most of the inevitable politically correct demands that every idea, ideal or goal be subdivisible according to impact by race, sex, age, physical, mental or intellectual disability. That sort of stuff how ideas are to be realised is best left to the implementers or their invigilators as they go along.
One could, for example, probably drive the numbers of deaths of miners down to 10 a year by providing an automatic fine of $50million on any mining company, regardless of negligence, whenever there was a death (and, say $20million for serious injury). That might be incentive enough to make insurance companies insist on an even higher set of safety standards. But such an idea would not work in agriculture, where most of the deaths are of owner-operators, with no resources to pay.
A genius once proposed, as a way of cleaning up the Mississippi, that millions of words of environmental regulations be scrapped for a single principle that towns draw water two miles downstream from where they (and industrial and agricultural operations within their jurisdictions) discharged their waste.
A certain practicality is useful. I bet that the education subcommittee will have earnest people explaining why curriculums should have more foreign languages, more history, more mathematics and science, more civics, more physical education, and more everything else.
We cannot have all at once, unless we double the school day. Likewise, those with ideas for spending other people's money on more hospitals, universities, national parks, theatres, galleries, etc should be prepared to propose what, as a consequence, we spend less upon.
Good ideals, like good politics, involves choices.
Yet too much practicality is fatal, particularly if the focus is on aims and outcomes rather than means of achieving them. There are always new ways of achieving things, and sometimes, a good deal of genius in delivery from people who would never be invited to such a talkfest, or who, if they were, would never get a word in edgewise as the geniuses, top minds and grand wits strutted and interrupted. Few of these leading Australians, whoever they turn out to be, got to be thought of as such for hiding their talents or failing to thrust themselves forward.
Jack Waterford is Editor-at-Large.