Allan Fels, former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, says that we'll know by year-end whether last weekend's 2020 Summit was a success. To judge the success of the summit by the number of its ideas that are acted upon and become policy is very Australian. We like concrete outcomes. We distrust ambiguity.
To assess the summit in these terms would be very Australian. It would also be very wrong.
The summit has succeeded. It has succeeded because, after 11 years of a government that was distrustful of new ideas and hated dissent, it has indicated a new openness to both. Ideas and debate will be the long-term engine of our economy and our security. On Monday this week Chris Richardson of Access Economics predicted a buoyant 2008 for our economy, riding on high commodity prices fuelled by China's boom. He is probably right. But minerals cannot sustain us indefinitely. The United States has long understood that their economy is based on the sale of ideas and services. When the post-war international trade and financial architecture was built over 60 years ago, the US vetoed the establishment of the proposed international trade organisation because of a fear it would harm US interests. Yet about 25 years ago the Americans began arguing for the establishment of the World Trade Organisation.
The US had moved from being the world's pre-eminent manufacturing nation to being the world's pre-eminent ideas factory, and they understood this. America needed other nations to pass and enforce domestic intellectual property laws to protect American intellectual property and to open their economies to American services. But America couldn't be seen to be insisting on this unilaterally; it needed a world trade organisation to ensure member nations changed their intellectual property laws and opened up to services trade to protect America's interests.
Modern sophisticated economies are based on services and intellectual property. Ours is. Nearly 80 per cent of our economic output is services. Yet somehow we still don't seem to understand that what is truly valuable today are not things, but ideas. Hence, our share of global services exports shrank from 1.45 per cent to 1.15 per cent in the decade to 2005 simply maintaining our 1996 share would have added $10billion a year to our exports.
Hence, my university generates world class solar power technology and the Germans commercialise, and profit from, it. Hence, education is our third largest export earner, behind only coal and iron ore, and we support education exports poorly. Hence, we earned 40 per cent more from educating foreign students last year than from our combined exports of beef, wheat and wool, yet the immigration department remains obstructive with visas for some foreign students.
There is far less support for education as an export than there is for our agricultural and mineral commodities. Between 1995 and 2004, on the latest OECD figures, Australia's expenditure per tertiary student remained constant while 17 countries increased their expenditure: the US by 30 per cent per student, Italy and Ireland by about 25 per cent and even Mexico by 10 per cent per student.
In a competitive world, this is bad news for our long-term living standards. Given the contribution education makes to export earnings, it is madness. Why doesn't the Government better support our universities? The Howard government was like the audience member at one of my speeches, who, when I said education was a major export earner, protested: "Education can't be an export, universities do it here." The Howard government simply didn't get it.
The Rudd Government has a better grasp of education's importance, but so far there's little hard evidence of substantial new funding. Yet the summit was an important step. For a nation to treasure its universities it must treasure ideas; and not simply practical ideas, but all ideas. And the summit was all about ideas. The summit didn't do the deep thinking needed to respond creatively to the massive challenges facing us: climate change, peak oil, and the risk of global financial instability. No one-weekend event ever could.
But the summit cost the taxpayer very little. Most participants were self-funded. Most facilitators and workers donated their time. And the summit has already succeeded at many levels: by educating the 1000 participants and challenging them to think more broadly than usual, by filling newspapers with their ideas and, most importantly, by welcoming creative ideas in the national discourse.
Professor Buckley is at the Faculty of Law, University of NSW.