In this article I will tentatively seek to identify some of the ways in which the 20/20 Summit was both a good thing and a devastating event for participants. I came away from it feeling privileged and depressed at the same time – a paradoxical mix of emotions reflecting the significant but under-explored spiritual dimension to the summit.

I never expected to be selected for the conference and indeed it was only at the last minute that somebody nominated me. I have a variety of claims to minor fame associated with some of the boards I sit on, my positions as Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Tasmania and even as Canon Theologian at St David’s Cathedral, Hobart.

But I know that I was nominated most specifically because of my daily experience of being reliant upon health care.

We came together to talk about ten major policy challenges facing the country including productivity;education,skills,training;science and innovation; the future of the Australian economy; population; sustainability; climate change; water; the future of our cities; future directions for rural industries and rural communities; a long-term national health strategy; strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion; options for the future of Indigenous Australia; the future of the arts, film and design; the future of Australian governance—renewed democracy, a more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the federation, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens;Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world.

Inevitably my experience is influenced by the particular stream that I participated in – fostering a long-term national health strategy.Yet it was also informed by my daily experience of being a person with a disability, who uses a wheelchair, oxygen therapy, and high dose painkillers to keep going. It was those realities that I brought to the summit.

Here is how I introduced myself to participants on the 2020 website:
“I grew up in Queensland as a person with multiple and life-threatening disabilities, failed at school and had the formative experience of working in a sheltered workshop. I have spent years of my life, from childhood onwards, in a variety of institutional settings. I was dealing with my own mortality from a very young age. Having moved with my family to Tasmania I still remember being refused entrance to a degree program at the University of Tasmania – the same institution at which I am now Associate Professor of Medical Ethics.”

Sunday is no longer a day to plan religious observance

Very real questions that I faced were: how do I participate in such an event and live out my theology? How can I identify and nourish the sacred? Where is the spiritual dimension? Evelyn Crotty talks of spirituality in terms of “What it means to live, feel, see, experience and touch more authentically the sacred around me”.

It was clear to me that the spiritual dimension was deeply there at the conference – but unremarked, even shunned with the exception of token indigenous participation.

The nature of a secular Australia, where it is a disadvantage in public life to be a religious type, asserted itself in the planning of the weekend. Sunday is no longer a day where we are allowed to plan religious observance – or not if we want to participate in the polis.

page 2

Not just in the opening event, but in the way that we went about doing our work? Deep listening is so important in indigenous wisdom and also in great western spiritual traditions, but where was it allowed during the summit?

Such questions became even more urgent to me at the summit plenaries in the Great Hall of Parliament House – filled with noise and flashing images, rather than silence and the opportunity to reflect.The summit organisers used music to create a sense of occasion and as we assembled we were assailed with noise and images on the screen. It left me deeply desiring time for silence.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an Aboriginal Elder from Daly River, expresses spirituality this way:“What I want to talk about is a special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called Dadirri.

“Dadirri is an inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’. A big part of Dadirri is listening.

“In our Aboriginal way, we learned to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good or useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting. Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years. My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home with it.

“They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness. My people today recognise and experience in this quietness the great Life-giving Spirit, the Father of us all. We all have to try to listen to the God within us, to our own country and to one another. Our culture is different.We are asking our fellow Australians to take time to know us; to be still and to listen to us.”

In the spirituality of Indigenous people we can see startling similarities with the emphasis upon silence and relationship with others found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, as I understand our Indigenous spirituality, and its emphasis upon the importance of the land, we can find some similarities with the Hebrew Bible. Land as sacred space and as an integral part of spirituality, is perhaps one of the most underrealised aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

My conclusion is that only with deep listening and space can we really do public policy and only with listening and space can real dreaming of the future be done. The hurried focus on outcomes when we had not built relationship was devastating.

How can I dream with someone I do not know well and with whom I have not yet developed trust? In particular someone I have not broken bread with? How can I dream when so much of our shared time was full of blaring music rather than the wisdom found in shared quiet and reflection? How can I feel valued when so much of our imagining together was built upon a cult of celebrity and a desire for fame? The front-page photos of the beautiful Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett (with baby) reflected the central role given to celebrity.

Many welcomed such an involvement of celebrities. I wondered why we could not place the emphasis on ordinary Australians – and of course realised it would not have got the media attention. Indeed the desire for celebrity is so important in Australia that it was clearly used in the narration of the 2020 Summit.

We are focussed on hi‑tech solutions yet these do not address my underlying fears and concerns

 

The tacit values associated with the summit were fascinating – a mix of the virtues and consequentialism. The focus on outcomes and its acceptance by all was fascinating.As I sat with my groups I was deeply aware of how I needed to spend so much time listening to stories and talking with my colleagues. But we distilled people’s wisdom into a few words on a whiteboard, which then translated to larger groups.

What could theology offer to such a process I wondered? Perhaps rather than focusing on a consequentialist ethos, could we not have spent more time listening to stories? But that would mean less time to focus on a document of outcomes for the Prime Minister. There were too many times when something that I said was translated into a few words for the whiteboard as “You mean …” when I did not mean that at all.

My suggestion is that the stories were more important than the outcomes that were recorded. At one stage I imagined a country where in 2020 each person knows they are loved and have a valued place in society, yet this was dismissed as not fitting into the focus on generating a few important but ultimately jingoistic words.

No better example is to be found than in the focus of some delegates and the media on the idea of a Bionic Eye by 2020. (As it subsequently emerged this will be a reality well before 2020.)

The 2020 Summit was an important and devastating experience. Its importance lay in the bringing together of a thousand people of good will to imagine the future. It was a vital opportunity for citizens to seek to engage in the activities of the polis – reminiscent of its early Greek origins. Its inspiration clearly drew upon the activities and ideals of New Labour in the UK in the Blair years.

Perhaps the most important aspect is that the famous, powerful and ordinary rubbed shoulders in imagining the future. A real highlight was when indigenous voices spoke of important steps in healing our nation. My quiet times – few and far between – will always be treasured as I listened to the stories associated with why people were selected. Such moments are nourishing and build connection.

Yet there was also a sense of devastation where I felt as if my life experience and reality were so different from the norm narrated at the summit. In particular I struggled to translate into words my life experiences of daily being dependent upon the health system into a future scenario, to which others without that experience could relate.

I struggled to translate my life experiences of daily dependence upon the health system

As I sat there in my wheelchair with my nasal prongs inserted in the requisite “days of our lives” manner I did not feel very important.Yet I was increasingly aware of how such life experience is needed in the areas of health and welfare – and how such powerlessness may paradoxically be so valuable.
One of the real challenges for the organisers of the 2020 Summit was to bring people together and create community in such small space of time. Telling experiences of whether or not I belonged and what was important about the 2020 Summit occurred well before our arrival – in particular, the realisation that we were in the hands of an organising machine oriented towards the media.

I was called by a friend who told me she had opened the newspaper to find I had been included – yet I only had the formal letter of invitation a week later. So many knew about it before I did – a very strange and somewhat alienating experience.A few other delegates told me of a similar experience.

On my way to the summit I was privileged to travel from Sydney in the pointy end of the aircraft – travelling with several NSW Labor political power figures.There is a certain attitude and approach exuded by those who know the reality of power and privilege. It was fascinating to hear them talk as they prepared for the summit and discussed it amongst themselves.They knew what they wanted.The comments made about a republic (and their opinion of the public for not passing the referendum) will forever remain with me as a testimony to the importance of ordinary citizens over against power elites.

As a wheelchair-user I was soon reminded of how unimportant I was – a normal experience in my life. When I arrived I found that rather than joining all the other delegates who were quickly processed and placed on buses, I had to wait for the inevitable wheelchair taxi that took an hour to come. Rather than having wheelchair accessible buses the three of us who needed wheelchair-access were given separate arrangements. It was the start of an important lesson with regard to the weekend – of course everyone is equal, it is just that some are more equal than others.
The hour that I had sitting in the cold waiting for the wheelchair taxi was a great experience as I observed the delegates arriving from their planes. Some had determined looks on their faces, folders in their hands. They knew exactly why they were here. The famous and ordinary were all headed for the parliament – and eventually I made it there as well.

The opening ceremony of the summit was by far the highlight and a spiritual event in itself. I have little doubt all of us were touched by the deep ceremonial aspect of indigenous people opening the summit and using their wisdom. Yet this profound sense of the sacred also left me with a disturbing question – for all that we were honouring indigenous people and their wisdom, where was the wisdom of indigenous people and how was it to be enacted in the whole of the summit?

page 2

It struck me that this was an expression of the underlying desires and power relations in society – the focus on a technical fix for what troubles us without tackling why it is that we are so disturbed in the first place.

I sat there recalling that a few years ago blind theologian John Hull wrote a book entitled In the Beginning there was Darkness, exploring the contributions to theology and an understanding of the world found in being blind. We are so focused on hi-tech solutions yet my experience is that these do not address my underlying fears and concerns.

These deeper issues are found in the Bible but our social-religious disconnect is such I could not start talking theology -yet the discourse of medicine, professionalism and charity was acceptable. Likewise I have found many valuable insights in the Bible through my experience of living with my mortality and frailty found in my disability.Yet this wisdom is not welcomed in a society that fears the very things about our human condition that Jesus Christ addressed in his ministry.

So many of our human frailties were present
– even celebrated – at the summit. Fame and position was ‘in’, as journalists jockeyed for the right shot and power interview. None seemed interested in the mum who over a boxed breakfast told me of her beautiful son with multiple disabilities who had died in her arms recently.We shed a tear quietly together as around us others told stories to each other, also unrecorded in the media and official outcomes. Such wisdom, such beauty!

There were important lessons and, I would suggest, missed opportunities for us as Church. Special consultation was held prior to the event with the Jewish community because of the Passover, yet on Sunday morning we as Christians needed to witness together and pray collectively.

On Sunday very early I said the Morning Office alone and reflected on where God could be in all this? Is God so unimportant we could not find time in our busy schedule to stop and be nurtured? It would have been so powerful for the Christians at the summit to have recognised and proclaimed God in our midst. What about some inter-faith service that celebrated the spiritual dimension?

Perhaps part of the reason that there was no time for the messages of Christianity in the summit is the way in which the Church lives out its theology.We are seen as contradictory.

Movers and shakers of the church were largely not present

If we are honest,some of the best powerbrokers are deeply ambitious church politicians.The sad reality is we promote these people to leadership and not those who live out the virtues. For all that, it was noticeable that purple shirts were not represented in the delegates who attended 2020. Sadly I suspect this will mean that there will be little engagement by the Church with the lessons of 2020.

Theology teaches us of the importance Jesus Christ placed on the poor and dispossessed.We needed more of those voices, silence, and then corporate action.
My suggestion is the Church still has a significant opportunity to listen to the spiritual yearning found in each suggestion recorded (and the many that did not make it to the official record) and to engage with these cries. All of us yearn for valued place, to know we are loved and to be all that we can be. It is not just the religious, but the spiritual dimension of the summit that needs to be made explicit.

There is no doubt that the missed spiritual and religious dimensions of the 2020 Summit are important. For me this raises the challenge of how we as a Church live out our theology.To be thinkers full of love, embracing all of the Christian virtues, requires us to listen and then act.

Theological perspective helps us to understand that while ‘God talk’ may not have occurred at the 2020 Summit, there was a significant sacred dimension.The chief focus of our policy discussions was the importance of people and how we as a nation should interact and grow together.

Even the opportunity to come together as members of the populace and to move beyond party politics was a very significant opportunity.
Perhaps most important insight that theology can offer to such an event is to help to focus on the poor and the oppressed as a vital question for the churches and our society.

There was so much important about the 2020 Summit. It was a privilege to be present even though the failure explicitly to address the spiritual dimensions of our humanity was a sad omission. There is no doubt that important suggestions were made regarding Australia’s public policy towards 2020.

Robert Mann (academic and public intellectual) is right in his assessment, on balance despite the failings, the summit was “A Good Thing”. The Church needs to engage with such a process and the aspirations present in it.Will we be prepared to do so although the movers and shakers of the church were largely not present?

The Revd Canon Dr Christopher Newell AM
died on June 24.