My friend, Stil­gher­rian, has posted a scathing analy­sis of the final report of the 2020 Sum­mit. He’s par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­pointed with the Summit’s fail­ure to address and take advan­tage of the power of the Inter­net to build con­nec­tions between dis­parate com­mu­ni­ties and between the gov­ern­ment and its constituency.

I couldn’t agree more.

My views on the ongo­ing fail­ure of gov­ern­ment at all lev­els in Aus­tralia to really engage online are pub­lic and pub­lished here. That said, the 2020 Sum­mit was a real oppor­tu­nity for the Rudd gov­ern­ment to take pos­i­tive steps in the way it con­nects peo­ple with ser­vice providers, policy-​​linked activ­ity and each other. But, yet again, it looks like fail­ure on a grand and blink­ered scale.

I am deeply dis­ap­pointed, but really not at all sur­prised. Once again the no idea, safe option has been taken with­out a gutsy leap forward.

Aus­tralian politi­cians and policy-​​makers really have no idea about how to use the Inter­net. Largely, they are stuck in 1995 and inter­ested only in broad­cast mes­sages and pol­icy brochureware.

They are cer­tainly nowhere near what the Kiwis and Brits (amongst a lot of other online constituent-​​linked activ­ity, No 10 has a Twit­ter account and uses it to talk with peo­ple!) are doing and light years from where some­one like Texas Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, John Cul­ber­son is, using Twit­ter, pod­cast­ing, blog­ging and more to, as he says, put “We the Peo­ple in every room in Washington”.

That’s not to say that things couldn’t be dif­fer­ent here. They could. I per­son­ally know a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of smart peo­ple, work­ing on the ground in Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment depart­ments who get the power of the Inter­net and could facil­i­tate pow­er­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­nec­tion efforts between their organ­i­sa­tions and their con­stituen­cies if only they were allowed to…