Most of the mega innovations have, not surprisingly, come from men who went to university, even if some of them dropped out. So they gave us Windows, Google, the Internet and email. But mega is not predictable or quick enough to excite investors, and so the Branson Effect rules. The government tries to fill the gap. But another paradox is that rich countries manage to seem poor (the headline on the front page of my paper today proclaims ‘Our Maths Teaching Below India’s’). Thus I was leaked some preliminary figures by one of our state’s chief scientists. It showed Victoria and Queensland state governments investing ‘heavily’ in innovation ($620 million and $306 million respectively over nine or ten years) while the figure for New South Wales-the biggest, richest, flashiest state-was $10 million. Third World?

I am not suggesting old-fashioned socialism with top-down funding using your taxes for governments to pick winners but, frankly, if innovation is not receiving sufficient private funding where is the money going to come from? Ali Baba? This question applies to most of the activities partially vacated by government since the 1970s: science, education, museums, public broadcasting, infrastructure. This is what John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe as private wealth and public squalor.

What of the future? This is a tricky one because the historical perspective looks forbidding. There are two great instigators of innovation: disaster and war. I have mentioned in the Introduction how plague in the fourteenth century and thereafter preceded the Renaissance, Gutenberg (printing) and other revolutions in living. Innovation during war is obvious. The Second World War practically invented they way we live now, from space exploration to nuclear technology and materials. It is stunning to realise how quickly both nuclear weapons and penicillin were realised as products: barely four years from go to whoa! Compare the embarrassments of the International Space Station (decades), Wembley Stadium (years) and a cure for malaria (we keep waiting).

War and disaster focus the effort. In times of greater calm, or when leaders insist on short-term achievement (early China and present-day Australia, for example), bright ideas are not fostered. Australia has seen a doubling of students in business courses since 2000, while we rank 29th in the world in maths and science studies according to the World Economic Forum. This places us very well to sell things in the future, but with nothing much of our own, apart from rocks and crops, to offer. As the WEF observes: ‘Today’s globalising economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers able to adapt to their changing environment.’ Our performance looks better among fifteen-year-olds, mainly in problem solving, but academically we remain on the B list. Think we’ll make it?

What would the third way be, other than war or disaster, to focus our minds on innovation for the future? Two answers. The first is the very act of imagining how we might live in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time. This is an exercise any primary school child could (and has) tried. Schools, businesses, councils, governments, unions can all have a go. I well remember, when the miners went on their tragic strike in the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s UK, getting in touch with the miners’ union (my father had been an official in the 1940s and ‘50s) to ask whether they had any in-house information on the future of coal. Their answer was no; they responded on wages and conditions only. They were reactive. The print unions in Britain had a similar antediluvian attitude to newspapers and in many ways deserved what Rupert Murdoch did to them.

Picture the kind of future you would choose. Do it in simple, everyday scenarios, like what your house should look like, your road, your shopping centre or gym. Apply possible improvements, based on every science program you’ve ever seen or any science fiction book you’ve enjoyed, and create your dream. Enough dreamers and it could be realised!

The second answer is to understand the environmental crunch we are now facing. It is not yet a disaster, but close. All the innovations we need, including your personal prudence and parsimony, are mostly ready. What we need is to get them in place. We have about ten years.

It could be exciting. I am sure David Bodanis would agree.

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Richard Branson launches new line of mobile phone covers which colour-shift automatically to match your frock.

2209 Macquarie Bank buys top five Australian universities.

2010 Graeme Clark develops bionic prostate.

2011 Solar-driven water purification plant established in Adelaide. Serves 26.

2012 Macquarie Bank buys CSIRO.

2013 Spam causes 47 mobile phones to explode. Nokia announces filter.

2014 Nabisco launches diet crisp (more you eat, more you lose). Makes $US2.5 billion…

2015 Macquarie Bank sells CSIRO to Chicago syndicate, which on-sells it to China.

2016 Nine Australian universities close. Seven become branches of Chinese campuses.

2017 All light bulbs banned. Everything now illuminated by piped daylight.

2018 Plug-in electric cars dominate world market. Branson launches Green Garages.

2019 Self-cleaning suits offered to men worldwide. Most say they thought they did that anyway.

2020 Implanted brain chip fixes Alzheimer’s.

When I was growing up we looked to a future in which machines did chores, robots maintained the household and people were free to sit around like ancient Greeks contemplating the meaning of life. Only the togas were missing.

All this free time could also be spent playing in string quartets, making pottery or composing quatrains. Lots of sport also featured, naturally.

When ‘leisure’ did turn up in the 1980s it was called unemployment. There were few pots and fewer poems. Since then work has grown like technology: it is messy, changeable, uncertain, fragmented and ruled by new kinds of bureaucrats: technocrats and human-resources people, the dreaded HRs.

My own employment record is simple. I have had only one constant employer: the ABC. But I have had substantial contact with other organisations, many of which I’ve chaired (Australian Museum, Commission for the Future, NSW Peace Trust, National Council for Environmental Education).

On only three occasions in 35 years has the ABC’s HR department contacted me. Once it was about a colleague’s RSI, once to read me the legalistic restrictions on business-class overseas travel (we qualified, but no one was going to pay) and once to attend a course on bullying. Straight after spending the compulsory three hours at the latter, a straightforward recitation of rights and (again) legal responsibilities, I attended a function at which I met a well-known TV reporter who told me that she had left the ABC in distress when it closed ranks around a bullying boss instead of fighting her cause. The most puzzling thing for me about HR people is that, in all the decades I have been in the building, none of them have thought to enquire how I am getting on. Are they like God, benignly watching from afar, not wishing to trouble my busy day but willing to step in should something flare, and leap to the rescue? I don’t believe in God.

David Williamson has produced several disturbing plays about HR fascism and the psychopathology of many modern bosses. He has noticed the way the modern corporation has relinquished its ambition of the 1970s to go from the hierarchy of an army to the pluralism of an orchestra. The ranking would remain there but it would be devolved, honouring specialisation. The theory was that essential decisions should be centralised but all the rest handled at the coalface, among staff. Now we are back in the army. This is partly to do with the abolition of executive careers. No longer do you ‘come up’ through the Post Office, or David Jones, or the ABC, where girls and boys could once start delivering mail and end up running the joint. Nowadays executives are guns for hire and do not expect to stay more than five years in a company (running airports, national broadcasters or bean factories is taken to be much the same), and they become used to a five-stage assault on the status quo.