Losing the ideas game

Let's invent a hypothetical hack called Graham King, who writes for a fictitious publication called the Notional Indigenous Times in the non-existent city of Topend.

Assume for a minute - and this may be stretching things a bit - that our hero Kingy has a Good Idea.

Bear in mind the aphorism which says that if enough monkeys spend enough time with enough typewriters one of them will write a Shakespearian sonnet. If this is true, then it's at least theoretically possible for Kingy to have a Good Idea, so just run with it for a bit.

Kingy will probably float his - OK “allegedly” - Good Idea in his sad little column in the Notional Indigenous Times. Then he'll pester editors of on-line opinion websites around the country to pick it up in an effort to further nourish his distressingly fragile ego.

When the piece is published, the two people who actually read his column will want to have their opinions about what he has said. This is as it should be.

Happily, his mum agrees with most of his offerings, but the guy from WA who writes those strange letters to the editor in the orange crayon is a bit harder to please.

And that's fine too. But things start to go wrong when the crayon-wielding correspondent's critique is based around his observations that (i) Kingy is a decidedly unappealing middle-aged, bald man with glasses (ii) Kingy is reputedly seen far too often around some of Topend's less salubrious entertainment establishments, and (iii) Kingy's column about Dancing with the Stars was unmitigated crap, so his views about global warming must be rubbish too.

It would be rather better if the savage sandgroper could say why he thought the idea itself wasn't a goer, rather than persecuting its promoter. It would be a shame if Kingy's only ever Good Idea disappeared down the gurgler, simply because all of his other views were ignorant and stupid.

Here endeth the laboured lesson - but you get the point. Kingy is a small fish and the world will survive happily without his Good Idea. But there are a great many people among the ranks of leaders, policy makers, politicians, and commentators who have rather more to offer. And we need to examine their views a bit more rigorously …

Because we are losing the ideas game.

Indigenous politics is the province of the passionate and that's a good thing. There are a great many desperate problems to be addressed, and people feel very strongly about their often divergent views. Robust discussion ensues. All good so far.

But the policy issues are incredibly complex and a good deal of effort is required to stay on the track. It's much easier to attack the personality, political party, publication, or previous offences of the protagonist. I know coz I've done it. Constructing reasoned argument is tough work.

It strikes me that some of the commentary on Indigenous Affairs in this country has become so poisonous - not just among the media, but among sections of the Indigenous leadership itself - that the very object of the game has been forgotten.

I'm assuming that we all want all Australians - blackfellas, whitefellas, believers, atheists, even Carlton supporters - to lead happy, healthy, productive lives of their own choosing.

Perhaps this is over-simplifying things a bit, but I reckon the jumping-off point must be somewhere around there. The verbal stoushes should be a means to an end - not an end in themselves.

So I'm going to suggest that, starting tomorrow, we all go anonymous. We'll ban by-lines, and damn dinkuses. We'll make politicians and presenters wear bags over their heads, and have their voices faffed-around by those weird machines when they go on the telly. Ditto for people in positions of leadership.

Then we'll introduce a register of ideas. You will simply send a note describing your idea to the Federal Ideas Registry and they'll issue a serial number which would subsequently be used to identify your idea. No names need ever be mentioned.

For example, I firmly believe that blowflies should be issued with sterile socks to minimise the spread of disease. I'd register the plan and it would become, say “idea number 666”. When people wanted to discuss it they could just refer to “idea 666” or “the socks on blowflies plan”, without even mentioning the name of the genius who came up with it.

Because if it was introduced as “that cretin Ringy's idea about ...” then that's where the problems begin. Not because the assessment of my mental acuity is so terribly far off the mark, but because it predisposes listeners to conclude that the “socks for blowflies” idea is not a winner.

The “no names - no pack-drill” approach would mean we'd have to confine discussion to the idea itself, and that would be a Very Good Thing. We'd have to ignore irrelevancies like the height, football affiliation and dress sense of the individual who proposed it, and simply assess the idea on its merits.

They'd have to be pretty small socks but.