Lead Story
Issue No. 30 - August/September 2006
The trouble with people
by Professor Richard Blandy
In July, South Australia’s Strategic Plan Community Congress met at the Adelaide Convention Centre to consider how to update South Australia’s Strategic Plan.
SASP contains six strategic objectives and 84 specific targets for the State. The SASP Audit Committee — of which I was a member, representing the Premier’s Science and Research Council — rated progress in each target area as follows:
- 19 have already been achieved
- 24 are on track to meet the target in the timeframe
- 11 are unlikely to be met in the timeframe
- 11 show little/no/negative progress towards the target
- 19 are unclear in terms of progress towards their being met, because measurement is problematic.
So SA’s progress towards achieving its SASP targets is a mixed bag, as might be expected.
While commendable progress has been made in most areas, a major focus is — and should be — on targets that are unlikely to be met in the time frame, or which show little/no/negative progress.
These targets include youth unemployment, interstate migration, exports, tourism, crime rates, the River Murray, commercialisation of research, political participation, State and local government strategic alignment, income inequality, industrial relations, smoking, overweight, road safety, government energy consumption, public transport, women in leadership, aboriginal employment in the public sector and completion of Year 12.
A reasonable question to ask is: what are we as a State going to do about correcting this situation or at least improving our performance? Or should we abandon or change these targets?
A major target whose achievement was assessed by the SASP Audit Committee as being unclear, on the other hand, is
Target T1.7 – Total population: Increase South Australia’s population to 2 million by 2050, rather than the projected population decline.
I diss...
