Tasmania’s 92nd Local Government Annual Conference provided the forum for the State’s new Premier, Paul Lennon, to make his first official address to the sector. The Premier referred to a new optimism sweeping Tasmania.
“The environment you are operating in is far different from five years ago,” the Premier said. “The place is humming with unemployment down to six percent, the lowest in ten years. There is also unprecedented tourism and investment activity. We refused to listen to the pessimists predicting gloom and doom. We have concentrated on the positives to get the State heading in the right direction. People are optimistic, our challenge is to grab this optimism and run with it.”
The Premier said that alliances between Local Government, the State Government and the community are vital.
“Tasmania is leading the way with 25 of our 29 Councils having now signed a bilateral agreement with State Government,” the Premier said. “Today I give the message that my government is totally committed to these partnerships. Councils are seeing the real benefits. Following recent reviews a number are now preparing to sign new three year agreements.”
In his address, futurist and author, Mike McCallum, said that the future will always be an uncomfortable place because none of us has ever been there before.
“This century we will experience a rate of change equivalent to what has occurred over the last 20,000 years,” Mike McCallum said. “This new reality means there will be increasing uncertainty and turbulence and not much chance to go back. The speed of change is increasing, we are surfing an increasingly bigger wave and we can’t say we didn’t know.”
He said people will have three options in dealing with this, become isolators, stagnators or navigators. Only the wealthy are likely to be in a position to be isolators through gated communities and the like. Stagnators are those who are paralysed by the changes and will only move when they see a clear path ahead. The third group, navigators, may well fall flat on their face. They want to go forward but have no charts to follow. They realise they must keep moving and will make mistakes in order to learn. At the same time they will have no guarantees of success.
“There are many Generation Xers who are navigators but are being blocked by baby boomer stagnators,” Mike McCallum said. “However, the navigators will soon learn how to go round the stagnators. We cannot rely on yesterday’s success as our guide. We need to rewire our heads to think differently. The more successful you have been, the harder it is to do this.”
He suggested councils need to do the following.
- anticipate what the future might be
- define what future success might look like
- specialise and integrate.
“Work with your community to decide on what outcomes you want and then make plans to get there,” he said. “In emergencies it is amazing what people working together can create. This will be an investment for the future.”
