GAP in 2019 – a year in review

As 2019 draws to a close, we reflect on those events and achievements that made it meaningful. I’d like to thank you all for your valuable contributions and unwavering support during a year that was both challenging personally and uplifting professionally. Here are a few highlights from the year that was.

Our Vision for Australia Summit celebrated its 10th anniversary in September, and our passion for all things education focused our collective GAP member attention on lifelong learning. The Summit considered issues in early childhood learning, school and tertiary and vocational studies, all the way to upskilling and reskilling in later life. Just a few years ago, this agenda might have seemed too broad, but it makes perfect sense now that the concept of lifelong learning has become more mainstream, careers are more fluid, educators are more willing to work across sectors, and Australians appreciate the need to develop skills throughout their lives.

The Summit’s opening dinner saw the launch of the ‘Bridges to the Future’ report by the 2018/19 Youth Transitions taskforce, our formal contribution to the NSW Curriculum Review. The report was also presented to the federal Minster for Education, the Hon. Dan Tehan MP. We identified career advice in schools as a key area for development, and will start a taskforce onCareer Education in early 2020.

We continued to promote the importance of early learning to improve the outcomes of children in disadvantaged families, and will be launching the next phase of our Early Childhood Education initiative in the new year with support from the Victorian Department of Education and Training and other partners.

Our Pacific networks continue to grow, and we are proud to be part of Pacific Connect and to contribute to Australia’s Pacific Step-up policy. We continued to support the International Centre for Democratic Partnerships (ICDP) in building interpersonal links with our closest neighbours through dialogues in Brisbane, Suva and Honiara, and co-hosted the Pacific Connect Ideas Exchange in Sydney in September. I am delighted to announce that the government has extended funding for Pacific Connect for another three years!

We are promoting the value and effectiveness of our Second Track process as a tool to tackle complex problems through our new Journal of Behavioural Economics and Social Systems(BESS). The Journal will explore the theory underpinning the practice of the Second Track and broaden recognition of the methodology to encourage its wider adoption. We would welcome your contributions to the next edition, due in May 2020!

We published a new book on innovation co-authored by Peter Fritz AM and Brad Howarth. Innovation is for Everyone has been three years in the making, and is a culmination of conversations with leading thinkers from the realms of politics, academia, business and government. As the authors say, no one group can shoulder the burden of lifting Australia’s innovation performance alone – if it’s in everyone’s interest for our country to become more innovative, then everyone has a part to play.

The final report of our Health 2040 group hit the media in August, outlining 19 reforms which would ensure a more sustainable health system in twenty years’ time. This taskforce showed the ability of the Second Track to foster positive discussions between groups with different interests on sensitive issues, and pursue reform both in public policy and within their own organisations. A second phase of the Health 2040 project will work on implementing their proposals in 2020.

We maintained the momentum on productive ageing for a fifth consecutive year, and co-hosted a roundtable on mature-age employment for SMEs in June. The discussion focused on best-practice policies in large employers, with presentations from Bunnings and Australia Post. We are proud of our ongoing partnership with the NSW Department of Communities and Justice and appreciate their commitment to tackling the challenges posed by an ageing population. Our next roundtable in 2020 will develop actions to progress age diversity in the workforce.

Given rising public concern over media misinformation, we launched our Media Taskforce in October to bring together a coalition of journalists, policy makers, educators, technology experts and philanthropists willing to fight for the quality of public discourse.

After more than a decade of relentless efforts by our National Standing Committee on Energy and the Environment members to promote biological sequestration of carbon, we celebrated the release of Australia’s first carbon credit units to a soil carbon project in March. These credits were the first to count towards our national targets under the Paris Agreement on mitigating climate change.

The year will also be remembered for the passing of our friend and colleague Warwick Watkins after a long battle with cancer. Warwick made invaluable contributions to GAP over two decades as chair, founding partner, facilitator and co-author of projects in knowledge capital, cybersecurity, digital trade and energy reform. He will be deeply missed by us all.

Our programme for 2020 includes new projects in artificial intelligence, national security and human progress, and we look forward to our ongoing initiatives growing and evolving in positive and unpredictable ways.

We also continue our quest for new ideas and projects, and would welcome your suggestions.

The GAP team looks forward to working with you to turn your ideas into reality.

Warm wishes for the holiday season and a Happy New Year.