Crikey

It’s official. The 2020 Summit did produce a plethora of marvellous ideas — it’s just that they disappeared as they progressed from the fertile minds of the Summiteers to the heavy hands of the Facilitators.

In an EXCLUSIVE column in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Summiteer #672 (M. Devine) lifts the lid on what really happened amid the frenetic energy at Parliament House last weekend:

The mushy quality of the Big Ideas that came out of the summit — the cliches, vague motherhood  statements and the bleeding obvious — was not the fault of the summiteers but these management consultants.

Of the 10 facilitators, seven were professional management consultants, at least three formerly with McKinsey & Company. It is their business to turn concrete ideas into gobbledygook, and they did not disappoint.

Ah, the Summit was hijacked by “professional management consultants”. The beautiful ideas that could have changed Australia were diced, minced and mangled by heartless automatons who wring the life out of intellectual goodness and turn it into banal bureaucratese. Now we know.

As tomorrow is ANZAC Day, Crikey will not be publishing an edition. We will return on Monday, 28 April.