Thinking of the future
One
year into a collaboration between UniSA’s Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial
Centre and the Adelaide Thinkers in Residence program, the Hawke Centre
reflects on what has been achieved.
The serious thinking got underway when the Hawke Centre co-presented the inaugural Adelaide Thinkers in Residence public lecture in mid-2003 with Herbert Girardet reflecting on Making Adelaide a Green City. He was followed by creative urbanite Charles Landry who had the chance to garner the bouquets and brickbats, giving Adelaide a constructive report card during the second in the lecture series, at the end of his term as a thinker in residence.
An initiative of Premier Mike Rann, the ATIR program receives $0.5m in annual government funding until mid-2007, with other partners being asked to contribute a further $1-2m. The Thinkers – all internationally acclaimed experts in their fields – are here to help the state move forward in areas like urban reinvention and environmental sustainability. They also promote SA when they return home.
“The concept is the antithesis of a consultancy,“ says the Property Council’s SA executive director, Bryan Moulds. “What we do too often is fly in someone who’s an expert, put them in a car and drive them around Adelaide and then get them to tell us what we should do,“ he said.
“Instead, what Charles Landry did was he brought us together to start to think of Adelaide in a different way. The ideas came out of our thinking, not just his thinking.“
Next cab off the rank was the exciting multimedia performance group Blast Theory – ably represented by Matt Adams at the third, and packed lecture, explaining how new media communications are affecting youth, arts and leisure. Blast Theory also met more than 240 people through master classes, seminars and tours.
A year on from the first Thinker, the Hawke Centre has just co-presented the latest ATIR public lecture with natural resource management expert Professor Peter Cullen, who spoke on Water Challenges for Adelaide in the 21st Century, offering a 10 point survival plan to the crowd of 1,000 who attended his lecture at the Adelaide Town Hall.
Director of the Hawke Centre, Elizabeth Ho said she was pleased with the program’s popularity in the local community.
“We promote widely and effectively, but full houses of more than 1,000 per lecture prove that locals are more than keen to hear the Thinkers directly, not through a media filter. We can see from the post-lecture enquiries that people are actively responding to their challenges. The Hawke Centre through UniSA also supports public access to ATIR findings, and e-links enquirers directly into the Thinkers’ reports and emerging results.“
Ho says some of the key results of the program so far include: Adelaide company Darling Graphics winning a project to deliver animation to the Museum of London; state government plans to make plumbed rainwater tanks mandatory in new homes from July 2006, as well as a move to ensure new houses built from that time are designed with a five-star energy rating; expanding the One Million Trees program to three million trees by 2014; and funding of the Green City project to make Adelaide a leading green city centre by 2010.