 |
| Using the "solar powered clothes dryer" - unknown and a novelty to two young Americans. |
Assuming it was some American “thing” I didn’t understand or
know about, I let them alone and waited until when talking with my sister,
their grandmother, later in the day.
She chuckled and said the two girls, both about 17, had
never seen grandmother and had no understanding of a clothes line for both of
them, although from different families, had never seen clothes hung on a line
before as everything went through the electric clothes dryer.
Using the sun to dry things, in this case their clothes was,
for them, something of a novelty, and a necessity.
That raised a few thoughts – practically every university student
today has never lived without a remote “something” in their lives – television
sets for arguments sake are controlled from the couch, never do you have to get
up, walk-over and manually change the channel, alter the volume or turn the set
on or off.
The call from our PM to be both innovative and agile is not
necessarily about making remotes redundant and so force us to be more active
and agile, rather it is about seeing Australia back with the frontrunners in
terms of doing and creating things that boost growth.
Malcolm Turnbull sees that emergence back at the top coming
through agility and innovation; that is in thinking that pushes at the edge of
traditional processes and ideas that combine unlikely concepts in hitherto
unimagined ways.
However, Mr Turnbull overlooks a few “headwinds” that might delay
the arrival as his imagined nirvana.
Those headwinds, discussed by author Robert J Gordon in his
new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living
since the Civil War” were rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging
population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government.
Although American, there is similar breeze blowing
throughout Australia; a breeze many feel as a headwind, such as those discussed
recently by the executive officer of the Greater Shepparton Lighthouse Project,
Lisa McKenzie.
Lisa, in arguing the “People should be the change they want
to see”, talked about the challenges faced by Greater Shepparton’s children,
which in many ways echoed the headwinds alluded to by Robert Gordon.
Through its “1000 Conversations” and its efforts to
“introduce” our community to its children, Lisa and her team at the Lighthouse
Project have created entry points; places through which individuals, groups and
organizations can volunteer as mentors, share their wisdom and help the city’s
children become adults with a rich civic sense; a richness that makes them better
citizens and better people; better in that they come understand the value of “slow
time” and within that grasp ancestral knowledge and wisdom
And hopefully, in helping them understand simple things like
a clothes-line, the complexity of citizenship will unravel and their civic
responsibilities will become obvious.
