Frustrated by endless trench warfare in Canberra, the country's peak business, union, welfare and seniors' organisations have signed up to a "national reform summit" next month to seek consensus among themselves on policy roadblocks which they say are putting the nation's living standards at risk.
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Unlikely bedfellows at the summit include the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Business Council of Australia, the Council on the Ageing (representing some half a million seniors) and the Australian Industry Group, as well as the welfare sector.
BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott minced few words on Sunday, when she lashed the major political players in Canberra for failing to act on the "burning" need for reform in areas such as tax, retirement incomes, budget sustainability, and workplace productivity.
"For too long, our politicians have been engaged in bitter personal conflicts, across different parties and within them," she said. "They have been forgetting that what the people of Australia want and expect is to see our country being well run."
She said the summit would remind the nation's political leaders of the value of "people with different histories and viewpoints ...[agreeing] on where we want to be as a country."
The head of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox said there was a need to "restore flagging confidence in political processes" while the Council on the Ageing's Ian Yates said he had rarely seen such a "highly conflicted" political landscape at the national level.
"There is a very real sense at the moment that if one side says something, the other side will say the opposite; if one says black, the other says white," an exasperated Mr Yates said.
"What we see is a selective plucking of policies that have no coherence, a recent example being the superannuation non-debate. Everybody knows we have to change the arrangements to get sustainability. Instead what we get is a couple of policies plucked here by Labor, then a promise by the PM that he will never change anything - none of which is sustainable."
The summit originated in informal talks in March between former Labor minister Craig Emerson and the head of the conservative Menzies Research Centre, Nick Cater, together with the editor-in-chief of the Australian Chris Mitchell and Fairfax Media's Australian Financial Review. The rival newspapers agreed to support the summit "to encourage a more bipartisan approach to fixing Australia's problems," they said in a statement on Sunday.
Dr Emerson, a former Hawke government adviser, said the idea was inspired by then incoming Prime Minister Bob Hawke's decision in April 1983 to hold a National Economic Summit to forge consensus on reform at a time when inflation and unemployment were in double digits.
With the end of the China boom now imperilling Australia's quarter century of growth, the summit was better than waiting for another economic crisis before acting, he said.
"We have got to a stage where there is so little discussion about the national interest and so much discussion about vested interests."
ACTU secretary Dave Oliver said unions wanted to "walk the high road" with business to grow the industries of the future, not the "low road" of cutting penalty rates and the minimum wage.
