"A stand may be made against the invasion of an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea” - Victor Hugo
THE national capital has been invaded. In a frenzy of alliteration Kevin has called a thousand thinkers to Canberra to create critical mass in collective cogitation - to conjure a cornucopia of creativity, concepts and conclusions. Were his name Bruce, it’d be a bountiful bonanza of the brainy to bolster the bureaucracy.Ideas are what I do for a crust. Sadly, I don’t have any of my own these days – since the male menopause I’ve found excreting ideas as painful as passing kidney stones. But I am to the ideas of others what the pig is to the truffle. I snout them out, distinguishing the fresh ideas from the stale, separating the trifles from the truffles. Then I try to pass them on.
For 20 years I’ve been talking to the best and brightest about their ideas in physics, cosmology, history, philosophy, theology, psychology, economics, you name it. My little wireless program, Late Night Live, has mustered 12 times the mere thousand that Kev has corralled for Canberra. A plethora of professors from just about every campus in creation and the dynamite brainpower of dozens of Nobel Laureates. We’re talking 10 hours of programming every week of every year – an assembly line of ideas.
In the same spirit I helped establish Adelaide’s Festival of Ideas, and then took the idea to Queensland where it inspired Brisbane’s Ideas Festival. Both events employ a similar formula to my program – a blend of overseas guests with Australia’s most influential scholars and intellectuals. Countless billions of neurons ticking over. All those synapses sparking like … well, like sparkplugs.
There are times, dear reader, when mental magic occurs, when Adelaide or Brisbane are more miraculous than the busiest day at Lourdes. There, people leap from their wheelchairs or toss their crutches into the air. Whereas at an ideas festival, the intellectually blind see for the first time and those suffering from terminally stultified thinking are freed from the oppression of the dots. I’ve seen IQs double and redouble over one overstimulating weekend. Once a timid young bloke called Tim something (Flummery? Flannery?) arrived reading a Batman comic and left with the first draft of a PhD which later became both a prize-winning book and a TV series.
This column is equally committed to the communication of ideas. Though denied an education, I’ve devoted over 40 years of punditry to this noble purpose. To educate you, the reader. Shunning the base appeals of humour, satire or parody and avoiding the distractions of politics (that sound and fury that signifies so very little), for week after week, year after year, I’ve stuffed you like a Strasbourg goose with intellectual and academic nourishment.
And my efforts are recognised by the educational authorities. Just one year’s loyal reading gives you a PA, much more use than a BA, and three years an MBA – which means Mentality By Adams. At that point The Weekend Australian Magazine gives you a galah-coloured academic gown and one of those funny mortar boards. Thus, the modest price of The Weekend Australian turns into an investment in your education which becomes fully deductible on your tax return. Kev tells me that a sizeable majority of his thousand thinkers are PAs or MBAs. I am so proud of you all.
Now’s the time to show your gratitude. I want you to send me your ideas for the 20/20 Summit. No, not for Kev’s but this magazine’s. What ideas do you have for Australia’s future – or the future of your kids? Drop me a line or email me at [email protected] and in a few weeks’ time I’ll put together a column based on your thoughts, suggestions, passions, obsessions. The most interesting will receive a prize, Adams Versus God: the Rematch (MUP), for reading or for burning. But first, your most burning issues.
Ideas are easy. It’s just a matter of mixing improbable ingredients. For example, imagine wanting some fresh ideas in chair design. You shouldn’t sit on a chair or look at a chair. That’d make you think in a chairy sort of way. To think outside the dots, sit on the floor of an entirely empty room and look at, for example, a light globe. This might help you think of an illuminated chair or a heated chair. Or an electric chair.
And let that same light globe be the symbol of Kev’s cognitive convention in Canberra.
The lightbulb above the head has always been the cartoonists’ symbol of a bright idea. Given the climate change crisis – one of the issues on the agenda – Rudd and Peter Garrett will change the globes signifying ideas from incandescent to fluorescent. Thus every new idea in Canberra will reduce greenhouse gases.
