No room at Summit's peak

IT is easy to criticise next weekend's 2020 Vision Summit gabfest - one doesn't have to be a cynic to do so.

As summiteer Bernard Salt, a KPMG partner, chided, the first thing the composition of the attendees tells us is that "we are a people preoccupied with political correctness". "Women represent 50.6 per cent of the delegates. This compares with the female proportion of the national population at 50.3 per cent," he wrote in The Australian. "The number of women on this list has been engineered to an accuracy of 0.3 of a single percentage point. Or at least that's the way it appears after the kerfuffle over women's poor representation among session chairs. "If I was a woman at the summit, I would now wonder whether I was selected on merit or whether I was selected on gender." Quite. John Hartigan, chairman and chief executive of News Limited and co-chair of the governance group, wrote in The Daily Telegraph last week that the time was "right for smart, passionate, creative thinkers to get together to consider some bold changes for Australia". Does that mean those who applied and didn't make the cut or who are not invited are dumb, passionless, uncreative and uninterested in the future of the nation? I don't think so. Among the 100 selected for the governance discussion are the following media commentators: Kerry Stokes, David Marr, Gerard Henderson, Julian Burnside, George Brandis, Robert Manne, Miranda Devine, Alan Fels, Greg Craven and Harry Evans - which would suggest the organisers worked from an agenda. The composition of the attendees is more indicative that their views will be in accord with the summit co-chairs, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Professor Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, than that they are actually the best and the brightest in the nation. That the summiteers appear to have been selected more for their compliant opinions was reflected in the self-congratulatory email sent to members of the left-wing activist organisation GetUp last week, which noted breathlessly: "Only 1000 people will be deliberating Australia's future at next week's 2020 Summit - but that's not to say your voice won't be heard. Incredibly, 118 of the chosen delegates are GetUp members, including our Executive Director Brett Solomon." That's more than 10 per cent of the delegates. Is that representative of GetUp's presence in Australia or its influence in Rudd's office, remembering Rudd's media spokesman Lachlan Harris came straight from GetUp? Another who has been tapped for the weekend is Kevin Wei-Cher Yeoh, one of the secretive group of Chinese-Australians who worked in the so-called MSG group to promote former ABC star and governance committee co-chair Maxine McKew's ALP campaign in Bennelong. Yeoh worked with influential Chinese community figure Robert Ho, whose wife Helen Sham-Ho is a former NSW Liberal MLC who fell out with the party. Sham-Ho, whose contribution to NSW politics was negligible, is also a summiteer. Yeoh will participate in the talks on future security and prosperity, a discussion group that will also include Gary Sigley, the director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Western Australia. While his inclusion may be a nod to Rudd's preoccupation with China, it is worth noting the warning Jocelyn Chey, a former China specialist in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, issued about the Confucius Institute's role in China's foreign affairs during an interview with The Age last year. Universities, she said, needed to understand the political and strategic motives behind the institute and that any move by the institute to promote academic research was "fundamentally flawed" because of their close association with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Is it a case of the Rudd Government cleverly inviting the Confucius Institute into the tent so it can be kept under closer scrutiny or is it yet another pay-off to the Chinese Government in return for all those ALP MPs' travel? Then there are those with an academic interest in terrorism, including Waleed Aly, a politics lecturer from Monash University who last year spoke at a conference in Malaysia organised by the Muslim Professionals Forum, a group which has also sponsored the terrorist organisation Hamas. Another is Dr Mohamed Abdalla of the Griffith Islamic Research Unit, who has claimed Dr Mohamed Haneef was only targeted by police after the London plot because he was a Muslim. The spotlight was put on the Griffith Islamic Research Unit last year when its decision to accept a gift of $1 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was criticised by local Muslim groups fearful the Saudis would use their influence to improve the perception of Wahabism - a hardline interpretation of Islam. According to a report in The Australian, Saudi Arabia has injected more than $120 million into Australia's Islamic community since the 1970s for mosques, schools, scholarships and clerical salaries which prominent Muslim figure Mustapha Kara-Ali believes is transforming the landscape of Australia's Islamic community and silencing criticism of Wahabism and its link to global terrorism. At least Elena Jeffreys, president of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian sex workers' association, will be on the panel to offer her doubtless diverting views. Sure, the summit is easy to criticise, but anyone who thinks this gabfest of unelected elites upon whom representative powers are conferred is not abhorrent to everything our democratic system and our Constitution stand for has blinkers on.