NATIONAL REFORM SUMMIT The National Reform Summit produced many wonderful ideas, but it did not discuss the two major forces that are blocking meaningful change in Australia.
Unless some way can be found to overcome these forces, nothing major will happen until Australia sinks into deep economic crisis.
The first force is close to my home. Modern media today is an enormous challenge for politicians. It seems that to stay in office you have to "create" media events for TV news on most days. That might be manageable, but almost every week, carefully prepared time schedules will be busted open by a crisis that comes out of conventional and social media. In the new media industry, there is a huge rise in outlets that seek eyeballs. A political crisis is a proven way to attract eyeballs. 
Accordingly, the politicians and the public servants around them are being constantly diverted. It makes it very tempting to take the advice handed out that panders to vested interests simply to manage the time pressure. Perhaps that's why the Coalition government caved into vested interests and deliberately broke its promise to help small business.
If anything, the second force is much more powerful in blocking the implementation of any meaningful cost reduction plan to adjust Australian government spending to the changed environment. We simply do not have the talent in the public service to do things differently.
The Australian public service has become a mirror image of Australian corporations 10 or 20 years ago. Big corporations at that time had many layers of bureaucracy and costs were high.
But we are seeing a transformation of Australian public companies that is almost unbelievable. From miners to banks to retailers and so on, costs are evaporating as productivity is increasing. For the most part, corporate executives had no choice because if they did not act, they would have been savaged by newcomers, been taken over or, in some cases, collapsed.
But we are undertaking the transformation in a most spectacular way. The public service has become a museum of how corporate Australia once looked. Unfortunately, there is simply not the talent in the public service to execute massive change, so they use "yes minister" techniques to "snow" the politicians who are under pressure from force one.
The Coalition came to government with detailed policies to rationalise state and federal governments and take billions out of costs while improving services. The ministers were "snowed". One minister privately confessed to me that in Canberra there is an enormous industry set up to bag and second-guess the states. That industry was too powerful for inexperienced Coalition ministers.
At some point a future government is going to have to bring in expertise from the new corporate Australia to show the public servants how to reduce costs. Our banks are forecasting a 50 per cent reduction in costs over about 10 years. In Canberra, if the same techniques were introduced, I think the percentage reduction could be much higher over the next decade. The same applies to the states. When money was pouring in from the mining boom, it did not matter. Now it's different and we are going to be forced to cut benefits, raise taxes or just borrow to cover the bloated costs.
Unless Australia realises that these two forces simply block meaningful change, we are going to find the going tough. The only time we have really seen major structural cost reduction change was when Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale came to power in Victoria after the Cain-Kirner years. There was then a very deep financial crisis and they were elected on a mandate for change.Kennett and Stockdale did the job spectacularly well. They took the media pressure on the chin and their actions gave Victoria the base of its current prosperity.   Maybe Australia needs a crisis and, if there is one, hopefully the right people will emerge.