Somebody had to say it...and this one is not a little boy

The Emperor's New Clothes

Picture from here

Do you remember in the long ago - way back early in 2008 - there was Australia 2020. Kevin Rudd wanted our "best and brightest" to come forward with their bright and good ideas for the nation. Well, doesn't language get misconstrued.

It's like the phrase "the lucky country" that is much overused to describe Australia. People toss it around in the manner of - oh, we are so lucky to live here. This may be quite true - but it is not what Donald Horne intended. He was thinking of all the mistakes we had made; all the things that had been done wrongly and yet we had come through it in such a way that it could only be attributable to luck. Irony - much misunderstood.

So, it seems, is the term "best and brightest" which, as Frank Rich in the New York times tells us, is actually attributable to David Halberstam and his book "The Best and Brightest".

IN 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”

Are there goes that trickster "irony" once more. Pop over here to get the definition clear in your mind. A word of warning, though, be careful when you wish to indulge in irony - it is frequently misunderstood and comes back to bite you in the you-know-where.

But isn't irony just crying out to be used so often and how often do we allow ourselves to be hoodwinked one way or another - just as in the Hans Christian Andersen story of The Emperor's New Clothes. This is what Frank Rich points out in regard to some of Barack Obama's appointments. Is what should, with all common sense, disqualify them more than the "attributes" which qualify them?

Which brings us back to Kevin Rudd's Australia 2020. As we all now know, a lot of good ideas did not make the cut and languished out in some dimly lit room somewhere.

While so many people were happy to apply and happy to attend, in our heart of hearts did we not know that this was really window dressing? Did we not know that this is the sort of thing a government does when first elected? Did we not know that, later on in government, when the inflow of bright ideas becomes a descriptor of the law of diminishing returns no Prime Minister has ever been known to call for an all-and-sundry summit of the best and the brightest?

What is the status of the Australia 2020 ideas now - the ones who got a guernsey and the ones that remained on the bench?

We are experiencing the greatest crisis of governance in a very long time and - if the term "the best and the brightest" is too ironic and value-laden to use - where are the genuine, intelligent, practical, common-sense minds who can bring wisdom without vested interest to our deliberations in this critical period?