The newmatilda.com crew continue to have fun with the 2020 Summit. This time, Ben Pobjie takes a (rather witty) stab at it:

What kind of country do we want to live in by the year 2020? That is the question that confronts us ahead of the looming 2020 Summit, possibly the most significant event in the history of our great nation since the last Deniliquin Utemuster.

The answer to the question is not simple, but rather a complex web of issues that require discussion and mulling over, lengthy meetings and submissions to committees, and a never-ending succession of earnest speeches going on and on and on, until we all go and hurl ourselves off lighthouses. So I suppose one possible answer is: we want to live in a country with easy access to lighthouses.

Now, I should stress I am not, technically, a member of the 2020 Summit — the Government’s persnickety fixation on “accomplishment” and “relevance” saw to that — but I am, purely out of a sense of civic duty, going to here provide my ideas on how the country should move forward. No, Summiteers, you don’t need to thank me; I ask only for money.

It seems to me that the greatest problem in Australia today is our tendency to over-complicate things. A case in point: many people have called on the PM’s wife to consult stylists in order to correct her frankly disgusting appearance. What a laborious and time-consuming solution, which completely ignores the advances made in tranquillising technology in recent years.

And so it is with broader issues. Take rural affairs, which at 2020 will be presided over by former deputy prime minister and fully qualified hat wearer Tim Fischer. The greatest challenge facing the bush is the drought, and myriad expensive and convoluted solutions have been offered, from desalination to cloud seeding to large pipes to voodoo. Yet it would seem the problem is actually absurdly simple: we don’t have enough rivers. The solution is equally simple: build some more.

See how easy things can be when you don’t over-complicate?

Read more here.