Should Malcolm Turnbull be sequestering the country's most thoughtful movers and shakers for a week - maybe a month - in order to come up with Australia's inaugural five-year plan?
The veneration and excitement with which China's 13th such plan is being greeted in Australia - even at its draft stage - is extraordinary, though probably fitting given the impact on us of China's economy.
Are we turning by default in that general direction ourselves? By definition, liberal economies like ours have tended to move with markets, rather than responding to planners' instructions. 
Kevin Rudd's ambitious attempt, soon after becoming prime minister, to shape "a long-term strategy for the nation's future" via the Australia 2020 Summit, is not often these days referred to as an effective blueprint, or even as a "vision".
A plan that extends beyond an electoral cycle can only be indicative - though Treasury of course presents inside the budget papers a bunch of projections that plunge into a future that, demography excepted, cannot be assured.
So it is with China, a vast land whose individualistic population is quite capable of confounding its own communist party rulers, and which becomes harder to order and plan as its economy becomes more complex and more enmeshed with global drivers that may push it in different directions.
Nevertheless, it is important to take the plan seriously since it is a comprehensive indicator of the policy intentions of those at the guiding heights of the party, meaning President Xi Jinping, whom Australian sinologist Geremie Barme describes as China's CoE, "Chairman of Everything." The drafts being circulated are not final. They are being published in order to help gain some feedback before the authoritative text is presented for approval by the annual National People's Congress session - China's parliament - next   March.
The focus in Australia is usually fixated on a single, flawed and decreasingly important indicator - the projected annual rise in China's gross domestic product.
The experts at reading the Chinese runes are divided over whether Xi wants to loosen up the straitjackets of the past, and provide an indicative range, or to retain a single target figure.
Most economists are urging him towards the loosening-up side. But he does seem to be locked into a floor at least, since his predecessor Hu Jintao, in his final week as party leader, on   November 8, 2012, set a target of doubling the country's 2010 GDP by 2020.
Xi has reinforced that target by linking it as a "centenary goal" with the 100th anniversary of the party's founding, in 2021.
The target requires China to maintain average growth of 6.5 per cent per year - though there can be wriggle-room if one year it's a bit higher, another a bit lower.
So Xi might end up fixing a 6.5 per cent growth target for the whole 13th plan, or he might, as reformers urge, publish a range.
Other elements of the plan that are being pre-announced to prevent them getting lost in the scramble for GDP-obsessed headlines next   March - include the broadening of the two-child policy to include all married couples.
The ANZ China economists Liu Li-gang and Louis Lam point out that if China reaches its GDP target by the end of the 13th plan, it will comprise about 75 per cent of the US economy compared with 61 per cent last year, but less than 20 per cent of the economic output of the average American.
They expect "important financial reforms" and possibly the completion of capital account liberalisation, the latter at last opening the path for full yuan convertibility.
Financial reforms are indeed crucial. The state-owned "pillar banks" are losing relevancy, apparently unprofitable and are being circumvented in the retail market by privately owned online alternatives. But private business still lacks ready access to credit.
Marie Diron, senior vice-president at Moody's, rightly says the plan will "mark a continuation rather than a break with the policies of the last few years", with an emphasis on economic rebalancing towards services and consumption, from investment.
But until such reforms bear fruit, "more policy support" will be needed to ensure that growth reaches the required range.
Will this mean returning to the bad old ways of feeding in wads of government investment cash?
While Xi is decisive in some areas, in others it's hard to discern which of seemingly contradictory directions he wishes to take China - towards the market, or supporting national champions.
His New Silk Road suite of programs for regional development - branded in China as "One Belt, One Road", a singularly leaden phrase in English - appears inspired, but still lacks detail.
Tom Miller of Gavekal Dragonomics says "it may prove a useful long-term stimulus in underdeveloped markets that badly need infrastructure. But the sums involved are probably neither sufficient to save Chinese industries from overcapacity nor large enough to pull commodity prices out of the gutter." Previous plans have often failed to meet ambitious targets, and Miller's colleague Andrew Batson says that unless the 13th is more successful, "it will only make China's plans and policies less credible". Better, he suggests, to link the bottom line to household welfare rather than to GDP.He's right. That would also, one humbly adds, make better domestic politics.