The 2011 to-do list: CPD's ideas for public policy on ABC's The Drum Unleashed

At the start of a new year, CPD thinkers and contributors to our recent publication, More Than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now ask how might we expect the shrill tone of the national conversation to change? What policy resolutions might our elected representatives make for 2011? This series in The Drum Unleashed presents ideas for citizens who want to see fundamental changes to how the country is run and a to-do-list for politicians who want to look beyond the polls or the next election cycle to tackle the future before it tackles us.

Over the next two weeks, you'll find ideas from Ian McAuley, Larissa Behrendt, Chris Bonnor, Ben-Spies Butcher and Jennifer Doggett on how Australia can do politics differently in 2011.

Read the first piece by Miriam Lyons and Mark Davis here.

"It's no great national secret that there's a dearth of genuine leadership in federal politics at the moment.

If genuine leadership had been on offer then voters wouldn't have elected a hung parliament. The pundits aren't impressed either, which is remarkable given that many consider the media to be part of the problem. As The Australian journalist George Megalogenis wrote in his recent Quarterly Essay , a long era of political reform since the 1980s has ceded into an era of low-risk politics and political gamesmanship - 'politics as usual' – with the result that 'the noughties was our least active decade for public policy in more than a generation'."

Continue reading here.