At 32, perhaps it’s just that I’m no longer considered “yoof”, but I’ve always been dubious of the notion that there are great undiscovered pearls of wisdom in the “best and brightest” of our young people just waiting to be heard. In most part, get a bunch of nice polite, articulate middle-class yoof together – and that’s what these types of gatherings inevitably are, and you get a nicely-put-together summary of the thoughts of the middle-class community in which they circulate in, with an extra helping of naivety. And so, it seems, it is with “The Future By Us: Young leaders imagine Australia beyond 2020” – a collection of essays based around the themes of the 2020 summit edited by Hugh Evans and Tom O’Connor and written by various twentysomethings, most active in various NGOs of one kind or another.
We have Anna Rose on the environment, complaining about the market and then proposing a personal carbon trading scheme, thus pushing the entire Australian population directly into a carbon market. Or economist and GetUp director Simon Sheikh disciussing the risks of our purported overdependance on resource exports, and proposing various educational initiatives (let’s use new technology to make university courses more accessible…whoever woulda thunk it?) to create a “knowledge economy”. Whether these ideas are bad or not (and the specifics of course vary) it is hard to view them as anything other than a precis of ideas that have long been floating around in their disciplines – and, frankly in the case of the stuff on innovation, out of Kevin Rudd’s mouth most of the way through 2007.
You might hope that a piece about the future of media, by a young journalist who has grown up with the internet, would show some understanding of the effects that universal information accessibility might have on her profession in a way that an older colleague might not. But Chloe Adams, a former Herald-Sun journalist now working for ABC News Breakfast, has a raft of very odd proposals, from content regulations on Australian-based web video to “preserve Australian culture” to “self-regulation” of the amount of “celebrity content” in Australian-based news media and more besides. Pretty much all of it is based around the erroneous assumption that media organizations control which of the items they offer are actually perused by their readers. Nobody is forcing people to watch Today Tonight, or click on stories about Jade Goody. Or Ben Cousins, for that matter – why celebrity news is considered the standard-bearer for wasted resources, while sport doesn’t even get a mention, is unclear. In any case, Adams hasn’t grasped the simple truth about “quality” media – all that those that care about quality media can do is make sure it is available for those who choose to peruse it. As much as one might like to, there is no longer any way to stop people fulfilling their desire to consume schlock if that’s their choice. That a working journalist has so little understanding of the new media of which she will spend her career working is frankly quite astounding.
And on it goes. The quality of the arguments in the other essays are similarly variable, from the thoughtful (Katie Dunlop’s piece on intimate partner violence seems pretty good, though it’s an an area which I still don’t know enough about) to the cringe-inducing (Hugh Evans is a freakishly charismatic individual and consequently very good at inspiring people to contribute to good causes; some of his thoughts on military strategy, however, are painful to read). But I very much doubt many of them would elicit more even the mildest of surprise from the LP readership. Considered in totality, the most likely reaction would probably be a bored disappointment with their combination of conservatism, predictability, and, yes, naivety.
If these are the best fresh ideas that the yoof of today can come up with, get prepared for more of the bloody same.
I couldn’t agree more. I get very angry at the idea that I am somehow being “represented” by these various spokespeople for youth…
They’re generally the comfortable upper-middle class, privately educated types who don’t have to work very much while at uni, and can devote lots of time to various ‘forums’, ‘guilds’, ‘councils’, ‘youth parliaments’, etc.
PS I’m 26, so I’m probably out of the demographic too
You may be out of the demographic Matt (as am I) but if you are anything like me, you thought exactly the same thing when you were younger. Alumni and Honor societies seem to be full of the same kind of people.
Get off my lawn.
I think Robert’s point works both ways to be honest – I don’t think banality or naivety are the sole province of young people who get paid/encouraged to put forth their point of view in public.
“If these are the best fresh ideas that the yoof of today can come up with…”
They aren’t the best or freshest ideas! What they are is the ideas of – as you pointed out – middle class white kids who have access to the opportunities and resources and networks that mean they are asked to write essays on such things. They’re some of the most privileged yoof around and they’ve often achieved what they have via sticking with the status quo (and with a limited amount of self reflection about the fact they’re doing just that).
The people in the demographic that are doing things that are perhaps more ‘radical’ or ‘fresh’ – or that show real insight or ‘wisdom’ – are off doing them in their own grass roots, underfunded and generally ignored by the mainstream way. Most likely far, far away from anything with “2020″ printed on it.
Pretty depressing, I admit, Robert; but then I found 2020 very “stuck in the past’s paradigms”, as I posted at the time. Although I haven’t read the above, so don’t know the selection criteria, they seem such a contrast to those of a few decades (and not so many decades) ago that saw us heading for the stars, living building domes on the Moon & Mars, with housework done by robots – what the ###***?? hell happened to that one, you slacko inventors? I want it NOW!
Does youf still want to cure all humanity illnesses, fly to the stars, beam Scotty up, try to imagine building a Tardis? Obviously tigtog’s 16yo does; so does a 16yo bright young hard-science lover, SciFi film-phreak, heavy-metal fan who spends time with us (wow, respect from youf for my old vinyl collection – ELP & a first pressing Black Sabbath!!) so they’re out there somewhere! Go to big science exhibitions for schoolkids, and “amazing!” is well earned. Ditto art exhibitions. Ditto rock eisteddfods & music-for-schools spectaculars. So what the hell happened to the anthology?
On tigtog’s blog, I wrote (?ranted) about what “petite bourgeoisie [sic]” did to Children’s Lit in the 70s & early 80s when son found them too boring to read: the stifling effect of the over-the-top politically correct, socially correct, environmentally correct and other “corrects”; the My paradigm and opinions suit all and you’re damned if you don’t adopt them brigade; the “We’ll all be rooned” doomsayers; those who think we shouldn’t reach for the stars until all the ills of the particular social barrow they’re pushing have been fixed; fit the “Role Model” or you’re anathema & we’ll drive you out fanatics. We all know them. Sadly, all too many are teachers from pre-school to post-doc. Even more sadly, tabloid print & AV media love launching crusades against the different … those who get into positions that let them set the criteria, usually of conformity and mediocrity.
Having lived through discrimination – class, religious, racial, country of origin, speech accents, sexual and so on – I think there’s a new type, a new Puritanism spawned by the passionately “correct”, which tried to confine “acceptable” to 1 SD (if not less) around a mean they set. We’ve just lost a slot in the 20/20 World Cup to it. It cost us the “world’s best cricket brain” through behaviour that was a lot better Keith Miller’s; a flawed genius of a match-changer with a thirst less than Boonie’s – in fact, how many of our cricketing greats would have survived the same criteria? (OTOH Criminal behaviour – inc drugs, rap, assault etc – does need to be punished.
Roombas – not perfect but a good start – now I just need a robot that deploys and empties Roombas.
Yes, I wonder if you aren’t holding comfortable upper-middle class, privately educated “yoof” to a higher standard than their same-old older counterparts. Is there really some magic age where meritocracy kicks in?
The ‘demographic’, as far as I can tell, has always been anyone more than a year or two younger than we are.
i’m not sure that Anna Rose really fits your critique – she’s pretty involved in grass-roots activism and has been for a while. i’ll admit i know her and respect the work she’s done on Power Shift particularly – http://www.youthclimatecoalition.org/powershift/wordpress/?gclid=CKbP-Ial_5oCFRUupAoduDvLeA
plus robert – is it really rare for people concerned about climate change to propose market-based solutions? her idea is hardly a ‘market’ in the same way that climate change is the fault of the ‘market’ for not internalising the cost of carbon pollution. her ‘market’ is based on pretty severe restrictions – and it’s an idea that doesn’t seem to be floating about in the white middle class that i live in!
To be fair, not all of the writers are white – the communities chapter is written by a young woman of a Middle Eastern background (dunno whether she’s actually a practising Muslim or not), the indigenous chapter is written by an indigenous man, and so on.
That said, even those chapters are pretty banal. The indiginous chapter talks about a treaty and a national indigenous representative body (both sound ideas, if, again, hardly new) but the writer completely ignores the practicalities of achieving such a treaty, or comes to grips with why such an organization doesn’t already exist.
Emma: agreed. This is perhaps just a symptom of a wider problem, and heck, I’m pretty damn white and middle class too. It’s just that this less than awe-inspiring collection of essays gets a forward from Kevin Rudd and endorsements from Hugh Jackman and, believe it or not, Missy Higgins.
Anna Rose is a genuinely passionate and hard-working advocate. I strongly disagree with some of her proposed solutions.
And does Missy Higgins have any – ahem – personal observations to offer? Is it a likely bestseller based on her paragraphs???
Robert: Any chance of another post on the dire lack of snow fall in the alps ?
You could start it by saying CSIRO models predict….
I guess that this is what happens when you drag people away from their media saturated lives for a brief moment of introspection.
I suspect, though, that there is an evolutionary process under way here. As media intensity increases and fragments, young peoples connection with it is changing in a way gives them more freedom to choose. And in the process the school leavers that I am seeing show a new type self determined confidence and they are hitting the streets running with a sense of purpose. Consecutively with the fragmentation of media there has been (in NSW at least) a very impressive strengthening of education outcomes. Or perhaps this is just in my area. So I think that Rudd struck a tweeny bunch of twenty somethings who are still searching for their place in the mess that is community.
But I would have to say that being young and naive is OK, nothing to be ashamed of. It goes with the territory.
One issue I would like to pick up on here is the mention of class. Robert, you make the point that when you get middle class youth (or presumably any middle class age cohort) to write essays you will get a collection that fits within the broad intellectual outlook of that class.
But is that necessarily true? If we were to catalogue all the “radical” or “revolutionary” ideas developed over the past couple of hundred years, would we really find that those from a low-education, modest (relative to their country and time) financial backround would be disproportionately associated with them? It strikes me as a pretty big generalisation and there seems to be a base assumption that only the downtrodden or those working at a “grass roots” level have different/interesting/worthwhile ideas to offer. Setting aside for one moment that in many fields the term grass roots doesn’t have much meaning, many working at the grass roots level are in part able to do so because of the comfortable financial circumstances they grew up in. In the field of development for example, which I have had some experience of, if you head to countries like Uganda, or Cambodia, or India, nearly all the activists you come into contact with have a middle class background – indeed that background helped to provide the education and opportunity to be there in the first place.
In my view the problem with the essays is much less to do with class, as it is who selected the essays and authors in the first place. It was never commissioned to come up with truly radical ideas, so there are none. It wouldn’t have mattered a jot whether those commissioned had been working class/grass roots or not.
Get some middle brow, middle class totally beige people at the heart of the Nepotistic Wonderland of Smug and ask them to use their imaginations and be really surprised that what they imagine ain’t much.
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Wow! What a shock!
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Gen Y’s contribution to culture thus far is Facebook. That’s it. Says it all!
First time poster, long time lurker here. I finish my degrees in a few weeks and I couldn’t agree more with the first poster. I won’t be surprised when I see many of the young intellectuals fighting bravely on behalf of my generation behind the book workings for Goldman Sachs, BCG or Mallesons in ten years time. I also find it highly amusing that a group of young climate change ‘activists’ see fit to fly themselves around the country (more often than not with the flights paid for by others, part-time jobs are for plebs) attending various conferences when surely a meeting in each capital city with an internet link-up would be more appropriate. All this said, I do believe that truly original ideas can originate from the middle class. We won’t however, find these ideas in books such as ‘The Future by Us.’
A ha! Endorsements from lipsnigers and Hollywood megastars should have clued you in to the true seriousness of this endeavour. Does Kevin’s intro make him sound a bit like Jeff Kennett c. 1996 by any chance?
It sounds like this is a book commissioned by oldies for the sole purpose of allowing them to tell themselves and anyone who might suggest otherwise that the young ‘uns do get a look in from time to time. The comfort, class and old school ties of Chloe, Anna, Katie et al are largely beside the point, as is the relative lustre of their baubles…
think Emma’s nailed it @18. Just reading the cover would have been enough to make me veer back in horror and go find something worthwhile to read. Like this!
I appreciate the effort to feed this smug young collective a dose of humble pie (preferably soon enough to divert them from their apparent headlong rush towards careers spent writing opinion pages for Fairfax). Still, I do find myself as a mid-twenties type endlessly frustrated at claims that people like this are representative of my… cohort, I suppose*. And you can forget about ‘best and brightest’. Blech.
*since the phrase ‘Generation Y’ can’t pass my lips unaccompanied by liberal cursing and just a hint of froth
I think I’d give more credence to what the current crop of octogenerians have to say.
While I’m not defending or condoning this book, it does seem like many on the list haven’t read it yet.
I’d add my voice to those who point out the hard work and depth of knowledge Anna Rose brings to the climate change debate. As I haven’t read her chapter I won’t comment further.
Having gone through the process of writing a book for a trade publisher over the past 15 months, what I would say is that it is surprisingly difficult to present complex ideas in a platform like this. There are commercial imperatives which constrain the ability of authors to write in the depth one might expect from a book. When you consider further that a book of essays has an almost inevitable lack of focus and uneven nature, perhaps it’s the case that we’re being too hard on the authors of The Future by Us?
There is a circuit for young, hard-working achievers. Youth parliaments, debate teams, UN model conferences etc etc. Many studious and ambitious young people find a lot of expression through this sort of civil society.
Once you have broken into the circuit, it is effortless to stay on it. Whenever applying for another conference, program, scholarship etc one need only refer to other conferences, programs, scholarships one has been granted. So generally such young people get to know each other quite well over time.
I am naturally wildly bitter because I never really broke into that circuit of free travel and the effusive praise from adults I so desperately desired to offset my trouble in fitting in with my peers.
I do recall sitting at more than one school assembly while some local worthy told us that we were The Future Of The Nation, thinking “really? Cripes, we’re fucked.”
But of course I too am now part of the new Establishment. I have political connections, know some academics, mixed with journos blah blah blah. So it all washes out in the end.
As to the book itself — while it would be nice to see fresh thinking, sometimes old ideas have stuck around because they are good ideas. Novelty is not always the best way to judge quality, especially when it comes to political policy. If nothing else, because there’s “nothing new under the sun”, as was pointed out some thousands of years ago in Ecclesiastes.
but also …
Wouldn’t you say there’s a bit of an inconsistency here, JC?
Please, Robert, for the sake of the lulz, give us a precis of what this Hugh Evans fellow has to say on military strategy.
As opposed to the oh-so-fresh and incredibly original attacks on strawman Gen Y stereotypes?
I read the book and the military strategy section appears to be co-authored so it is not simply one opinion there.
Insofar as I was trying not to be a total prick to CV circuit kids, yes.
I went to the launch of the book in Melbourne and spoke with the editors. In their chapter, Tom O’connor drafted the section on military strategy and Hugh Evans drafted to section on the Millennium Development Goals.
Watch out for that Simon Sheikh character. Formerly worked in Michael Costa’s office. Now with the politically “politically independent” labour advocacy group getup.
Some might have noticed that GetUp emails started being sent from “simonsheikh@getup.org” or somesuch, rather than getup@getup.org?
And from experience, he’s not particularly competent either. A prime candidate for NSW parliament?
With regards to Anna Rose, while she is indeed involved in the “grass-roots” enviro campaign (actually, there is “grass roots”, and then there is peak-body-controlled “grass roots”, so the term needs to be used with care), that doesn’t mean she has any coherent “alternatives”, nor that they are by any means the best alternatives coming form our “yoof”.
They aren’t. (This isn’t an attack on Anna, by the way. I think she’s done a pretty good job. It’s just the plain truth.)
Off the top of my head I can think of plenty of young people involved (actually more involved) in the enviro/ climate movement (“grassroots” or not) who have a better handle on the kind of economic, political, legal and technological changes needed to avoid runaway climate change. None of them have Anna’s free run with the establishment, however.
And that’s the problem here – the whole 2020 fandangle is only a symptom of the same problem: the exclusion of most genuine voices from the higher levels of political discourse in place of “representatives”, “leaders”, and other forms of pin-ups, all of whom are either already part of the machine, or are very quickly sucked into it.
I’ll bet the authors are going to make a much more positive impact on society than most of us. Sitting around at our middle-class computers and nitpicking and tall-poppy-cutting and bitching on about these people is painfully hypocritical. I wonder, does anyone on this forum have better ideas to offer? Let’s hear them. Can anyone claim to be having a more positive impact in the world? Let’s hear it.
I just grabbed this book off the library shelf and had a riffle through it. It looks to be a collection of sober, earnest essays on aspects of public policy. I also see a common implicit theme of using the state to establish social justice and otherwise right the wrongs of the world.
I’m an adherent of DeeCee’s type of futurism, more or less, which gets a lot of fascinated attention (the movies and the news media love academic extremists who talk about mind uploading and 1000-year lifespans) but not a lot of serious backing (if only people cared as much about Friendly AI and reversing the ageing process, as they do about climate change… then again, if society at large were that gung-ho about something like develoing nanotechnology, we might all be dead already). My concept of 2020 is that the world will be, at the very least, beginning to experience a technological upheaval which can only end in extinction, transhumanity, or a global luddite dictatorship. So from my perspective “The Future by Us” certainly seems like short-term stuff. (Ironically, the chapter which does have the longest perspective, namely Anna Rose’s, is, for that very reason, the one whose image of the future is most challenged by such considerations.) But someone has to plan for the possibility that the techno-apocalypse doesn’t happen.
I am prepared to judge a book by its cover and say that anything with the incredibly conceited and self-important title ‘The Future By Us’ is unlikely to be any good.
Chloe Adams sounds like a proper fascist.
BBB
One could hypothesise that there may be substantial administrative and measurement issues in a personal carbon market. In addition, individuals may have, in such a scheme, limited capacity to substitute their emission-intensive activities with less emissions-intensive activities.
“I wonder, does anyone on this forum have better ideas to offer? Let’s hear them.”
What, better than implementing a personal carbon trading scheme or instituting content regulations on Australian-based web video to “preserve Australian culture”? Ok, here’s my idea: not doing those blatantly stupid things.
But one should always offer positive alternatives. So I propose the following grab-bag of off-the-top-of-my-head ideas: (1) abolish payroll tax and replace it with increases to both the GST and the top personal income tax brackets, (2) amend the Constitution so that it provides for truly independent HoR Speakers and Senate Presidents drawn from the ranks of retired Federal Court justices, (3) take immediate steps to ensure the maintenance of quality journalism by setting up a series of very well funded completely-independent-of-government trusts to produce daily news, current affairs and investigative reporting material without advertising (a really difficult one to get up, with all sorts of issues to work through, but worth a shot I think).
I call this quick list “The Future by Me”.
BBB
In periods of major change, is the present a guide to the future?
Let’s look at some known generational gaps. I’ve written a very brief overview of the Industrial Rev late 1780s to 1815. My father could do the same for his life’s 1st 25 years (expanding electrical & telephone networks; “talkies” aeroplanes, wireless WW I etc). I can do it for 1944-69 (computers, space rockets, atomic power, polio & TB Vaccines, anti-biotics, transplant surgery; and after. You can do it for the gene therapy, communications revs etc for 1984-2009. These are trends are typical of periods of rapid change that the 2020 book should have projected.
Scenario: 1789-Second Fleet: A young country lad, having walked to London and fallen on hard times, picks a pocket or two – and earns himself 25 years in NSW. England is still “green & pleasant” full of “pleasant pastures”. Sure, a steam engine or two had slipped into England’s first cotton mills, Frenchman Jouffroy had made a working paddle steamer (1783) and was experimenting with torpedoes; England’s first steam boats & tugs were working (1788- Symington). Enclosure was putting pressure on crofters & yeoman farmers; but, steam pumps & crushers in Cornwall’s mines apart, that was about it. A fortnight after the French storm the Bastille (14 July 1789), our lad is on a ship ready to leave from Botany Bay. In 1805, so great were the political changes is Europe, British Prime Minister William Pitt said, “Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be needed for the next ten years.” Actually, that map would never be used again!
Our Lad’s sentence is up 1814, but what with waiting for a ship and the voyage home, Wellington has won the Battle of Waterloo before he reaches London – 11 years after William Blake has penned:
The late 1780s’ couple of steam-driven boats and mills, multiplied many times by the Napoleonic Wars, are so pervasive they’ve led to the unsuccessful Luddite Riots (1811-12). Steam engines have spread to foundries & minters (Matthew Boulton has invented the prototype assembly-line system to produce the famous “cartwheel pennies & 2d” coins) at his Soho Foundry. In 1800, Napoleon commissioned Robert Fulton to build the Nautilus the first submarine; in 1803, his steamboat ran on the Seine, by 1807 his first commercial steamboats were running. Treverthick’s high-pressure steam engine was powering a road locomotive “The Puffing Devil” (1801) and railway locomotive (1803.) Watt & Boulton’s worker, Walter Murdoch gas-lit Soho Foundry (1802) and another Soho employee Samuel Clegg set up Gas Lighting and Coke Company – the first commercial company. From Jan 28 1807, London streets (Pall Mall) began to install gas lighting. By 1812, Boulton’s engines powered The London Times’s printing presses.
Within a single generation, during the Napoleonic War, steam power had become pervasive and gas lighting was becoming so … and that’s only innovations in steam & gas!
Notice that, before the French Revolution began, all the features of the Industrial Revolution were in place: improved metal, esp iron & steel production; new spinning and weaving machines; Watt and Boulton’s new steam engines. The same is true of 1944 (V2 rocket; Colossus computer)-1969(Men on the moon) and so on – and before 1944, the features were in place. 12 years ago, an IT geek explained to me very accurately where computer-based communication “conversion” was going “By 2010″.
So what happened to those who can clearly extrapolate 2009’s trends to 2020?
and “The Chaser Boys” look a lot like the past.
I’m still waiting for my rocket pack that they promised would be an everyday item by the year 1999.
Where is my rocket pack.