Lets all sit around and wait – for something

I wonder how many times the reality of South Australia’s prospects need to be raised before Mr Rann and his colleagues start to pay attention, listen, understand and actually do something?

Last night at a conference in Adelaide, Mr Phil Ruthven – the IBISworld executive chairman - said South Australia is in danger of developing a “cargo cult mentality” by waiting on the much hyped mining boom to arrive.

Of course this is the very same mining boom that Mr Rann and his colleagues and the Murdoch press have been talking up for years now and which still seems as far away as ever.

The reality is that mining does not employ many people – the Australian average is around 1% of the workforce – in the South Australian context that is about 5500 people. And the latest Bureau of Statistics data shows that since 2002 the mining workforce has actually been reducing in South Australia! The South Australian Government’s own economic forecasters show that employment will peak in 2011-12 at around 8900 jobs! The truth is that mining alone won’t create the necessary jobs to support the place.

Clearly mining is not something that our state government should be “betting the future of the state on”.

The two questions that spring to mind are – “Why are they?” and “What’s the alternative?”

The answer to “Why are they?” is that unfortunately - in South Australia - we have a history of government and political leadership that is incapable of marshalling the intellectual resources needed to develop a big-picture long-term plan - to sell it to the people and to then execute against it.

There has also been a historical failure of many previous South Australian politicians and their bureaucrats – we all saw the debacle of the Liberal's Brown and Olsen attempt to recreate Silicon Village in Adelaide.

While that’s the subject of another article, it is a good example of leadership failure – and we should try to learn from it. It seems to me that the people who want to become state politicians are not the same people we need to build and develop the place.

Do we need a smarter political selection process? Absolutely.

As to “What’s the alternative?” that’s also not easy – and I don’t have immediate answers – but there is a well understood process that the state should be going through to understand and develop its options.

This is called Strategic Planning – and is a rigorous and robust process that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the place and attempts to find the best mix of opportunities that the state should be investing in and encouraging. This is more of a process than an outcome - because it's the activity of the process that creates the learning and knowledge.

But when I talk to people about Strategic Planning – in most cases their eyes glaze over and they want to move the conversation to football. That’s the real problem.