Somewhere between being an attentive father and husband, amateur political blogger and obsessed cyclist, I find time to ply my trade as a consultant. Through my day job, I’ve become acutely aware that, other than optometrists and soothsayers, there are only two types of people in the world who actually draw meaning from the term “vision”: being consultants and political bloggers. While I might think that makes me a “visionary”, it actually means I’m just a strategy-geek and the rest of the world goes a little glassy-eyed every time I take to the whiteboard. Quite rightly too.
“Vision”, unfortunately, is a vague and nebulous concept that can hide all manner of sins. It’s unfortunate because, in a number of my recent posts, I’ve been guilty of referring to the need for governments to articulate an engaging vision for our country. Now, for those of you playing “bullshit bingo”, you’ll note the triple word play in the preceding sentence (articulate, engaging and vision), plus the double word score for getting them in alphabetical order. While, for those of you still reading at this point, first of all, hang in there because there’s some cool images to come and, secondly, something of a defence of the case for vision...
Despite its limitations and connotations (or perhaps because of them), “vision” is the right word when talking about something as complex and uncertain as the future of a country. After all, what we’re talking about is defining an overarching direction or potential image of our society with lots and lots of wiggle room. Regardless of this ephemeral quality, “visions” are important, even essential, to the extent that they force us to think about the kind of nation we want, the kind of nation we can actually be and the challenges and barriers we face to get there. In that sense, vision is not a “thing” or a statement or a description, rather it is a process that causes us to think about the future in a serious way. Because the future is conjecture and assumption, and is more unpredictable than we’d like to admit, the real power of vision is most evident not in its articulation, but in its absence. That is, it is evident in the failure to think about, describe and plan for a desired future. It is evident in the failure of vision.
Australia suffers from a failure of vision in many areas – health, energy and education are well-worn discussion topics. Another particularly interesting, and strangely invisible area, is our failure of economic vision. It is interesting because we don’t have to look far back into western political history to find dramatic examples of the effects of such failures that are eerily similar, at least on the surface, to what we have here in Australia. Examples that under-score the power of vision in its absence – where successive governments failed to prepare a nation for the future in the face of impending and unavoidable change on a massive scale. Examples that show how a failure of vision turned the opportunity for national advancement into social conflict and turned the chance for evolution into extinction.
At present, our economy is driven by and addicted to an unprecedented resources boom. Such is our dependency on this boom that no-one seems willing to ask the question: what happens after the rush? Thinking beyond the boom seems to be outside the scope of our vision. It seems we are doing little to prepare ourselves for an Australia that is not riding on the back of the coal train or the iron-ore ship. We have seen this blindness before. While the specifics of the situations may have their differences, the similarity lays in the failure of governments to articulate and drive a long-term agenda to avoid an impending crunch point. In this case, a crunch point where an entire industry becomes “uneconomic” – as will surely happen in large parts of our mining and resources industry in time (if it isn’t happening already). Thus, in the following images, we may see a glimpse of our future. Our vision if we can’t get vision right ... [fades to static]
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