Pssst! Did you hear the news?

Well, we can knock out Gillard, Roxon, Wong and Macklin because they are a wrong gender fit for that rather strange rumour which mentions cabinet minister and inappropriate behaviour in the same sentence and very little else.
That leaves Swan, Rudd, Evans, Crean, Smith, Albanese, Conroy, Carr, Garrett, McClelland, Ludwig, Burke, Ferguson, Bowen, Emerson and Combet.
Now that’s so wide a field for speculation that it’s a wonder any journalist bothered to spend time at the keyboard, even if you throw in a hint of leadership ambitions.
But then at least one anonymous journo is aware of the flimsy nature of his piece because he justifies it by saying that the news is not what the minister did or didn’t do but that the supposed internal party response (to what can only be called phantom actions) represents instability within the Gillard Government and his newspaper’s rendition of the gossip is in the public interest.
I kid you not. These days an article containing no name, no action, no time or place is relevant news in the public interest.
G’arn!

Rudd's 11th Community Cabinet meeting coming up in WA

The Rudd Government will be holding its 11th Community Cabinet meeting at Ballajura Community College, Illawarra Crescent, Ballajura, Western Australia on Wednesday 22 April 2009.

If you want to have a 10 minute chin wag with a minister or listen to Rudders address the forum you need to get your moniker on the list before 4pm on April Fool's Day.

Mate, if you are going to this meeting perhaps you might ask the PM a question for me:
When is the federal government going to hold one of these cabinet meetings in the NSW Northern Rivers?

Finally Miranda Devine almost hits a nail squarely on the head

In The Sydney Morning Herald this week.

 

"In that way it was, as Rudd said, a uniquely Australian exercise in egalitarian conviviality, with captains of industry, media moguls, politicians, generals, film stars, doctors, teachers, journalists, prostitutes, public servants, scientists and lawyers (lots) munching chicken wraps from recycled cardboard boxes - and being bullied equally by the McKinsey-esque "facilitators" who ran the meetings, pro bono.

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.

Amid a flurry of paper, whiteboards, marker pens and Blu-Tack, clear ideas were churned up in the management jargon-generator and spewed out as empty slogans, "priority themes" and concepts worthy of little more than a PowerPoint presentation. It took until mid-afternoon on Saturday for a woman in our group, the media "substream" of the governance "stream", to cry: "I'm sorry but I don't get the difference between a concept and a theme."

This prompted a storm of pent-up fury from exasperated summiteers.

As The Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in their book on the lucrative management guru industry, The Witch Doctors, such facilitators have infiltrated corporate life, and are the "new, unacknowledged legislators of mankind".

Their language is "remarkably flatulent … If you buy the argument that the lingo of management theory is the language by which … people run companies and governments run countries, then it's no small thing when that language doesn't make sense."

In Canberra, it was the journalists, creatives and doctors who were most peeved their good ideas had been "lost in translation". The business streams didn't seem to notice.

Exasperated with his recalcitrant mob on Sunday, the governance group facilitator, Tim Orton, a Rhodes Scholar, former McKinseyite and founder of The Nous Group management consulting firm, told them their Big Ideas needed to be reduced to a "slogan on a T-shirt by 4pm". It was close to the truth."

Oi, Rudders! About that 2020 summit - told you so

In February this year I posted I just know that the 2020 Summit will bomb - Rudd's invited Tim Costello!

It's not considered good form to say I told you so.

But if anyone deserved to have it said to him today it's our own PM.

The Australian has just published the inevitable this morning.

 

"THE unity and goodwill that radiated from Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit last weekend have evaporated, with some participants saying they cannot recognise the "big ideas" attributed to them while others claim they were "systematically silenced".---

Special fury has been reserved for World Vision Australia chief Tim Costello, who co-chaired the Strengthening Communities stream with federal Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek.

Several delegates claim Mr Costello smuggled his personal agenda into the final document, which claims participants discussed "the damage inflicted on communities by problem gambling and binge drinking" and supported "reducing the number of poker machines or tighter regulation of alcohol".

"I didn't hear the words 'gambling' or 'poker machine' at any stage of my time there," Chris Riley, from the community organisation Youth Off the Streets, said yesterday.

"I don't know how that got in. I'm really concerned about leadership in this field. Tim Costello's got his own agenda, and it's just not appropriate." ----

A spokesman for Mr Rudd said last night the final text of the summit's initial report was "finalised by agreement between the co-chairs of the individual streams". "The co-chairs agreed on the text based on all of the discussions and submissions made in and to the 2020 Summit," he said."

Australia 2020 - thinking glib

The Australia 2020 summit logo - something else Rudders asserts he owns.