The 2020 Summit, like the Olympic Games, has turned out to be a mixture of showbiz and serious performances by elite participants. The Prime Minister was very aware of the former and some of the displays, including the opening session, were very well done indeed. All half dozen performers at the opening, including Matilda House, Sania Nakata, Michael Jeffery, Michael Wesley and the co-chairs Kevin Rudd and Glyn Davis, did well. But later plenary sessions sometimes became self-indulgent and wasteful of the limited time available if intellectual work was the only aim.
It was effectively a one-day summit. This makes the successes remarkable and any failures more explicable. Trying to judge its success is difficult because any evaluation has to take into account its different levels and its different sections. Not only are there different indicators of success but some of the ten sub-sections probably turned out better than others.
The Summit certainly has to be considered as a total experience. The extras were integral to the successes. These included the more than 8000 nominations, the more than 3600 individuals who made submissions, the many local summits, the more than 500 school summits, the Jewish and African summits, the national youth summit and much more. This whole package was an impressive achievement in democratic engagement.
The Summit proper was subject to some of the limitations of venue and process noted in the weeks leading up to the event. The meeting spaces looked as crowded and as ill-fitted for their purpose as those found in many a university. Even the Great Hall was not quite big enough for the plenary sessions. The 40 small groups seemed as variable in their composition and achievement as any group of tutorials in a large first year university class.
However the government did successfully shape the process in the final weeks. The riding instructions from Rudd helped. He asked each section for one big idea, and three policy ideas, including one that came at no cost. Furthermore the work of the facilitators seems to have been of the highest calibre under the circumstances.
But, as demonstrated in the events leading up to the Summit, many participants as well as many observers still struggled with understanding the difference between ideas, policies, visions, aspirations and general directions. The outcomes were a mixture of all of these. This has meant that the strictly hard-headed were probably disappointed just as others were delighted