It was about this time last year that the majority of our elected members were finally being sworn in after one of the most challenging voting periods in local government election history, thanks to the emerging threat that was the COVID-19 pandemic.
The March 28 2020 quadrennial elections will go down in the record books for the enormous numbers of postal and prepoll votes cast, as well as the conditions under which the ballot was held with social distancing, BYO pens and pencils and hand sanitiser at 10 paces.
It was a challenging time for all involved but, two to three weeks after polling day, the bulk of our Mayors and Councillors were eventually sworn in.
For some of you, this will mark your first year in office. For others, this could mark five, nine, 13 or even 30 years in the job as is the case with Richmond Mayor John Wharton.
And what a year it has been, with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to dominate and creating not just a health challenge but an economic one as well, with significant parts of the economy suffering their biggest meltdown since the Great Depression.
As councils, you played your part, providing relief to ratepayers, sustaining your local workforces while also rolling out economic stimulus projects to help your local communities in partnership with the State and the Commonwealth.
Not unsurprisingly the world used this period to make huge leaps ahead in drug research, medicine, telemedicine, quantum computing, working remotely, online human interaction, and the list goes on.
It cannot be left unsaid that mankind outdid itself in developing and distributing a vaccine to fight COVID in just one year. Impossible, they said, and yet it happened.
A few weeks back I was fortunate to be one of 100 invited guests at the Australian Leadership Retreat, an alternative to the annual Davos discussion in Switzerland. It was purposefully low key, and we were bound by Chatham House Rules.
However, I can say there were former Prime Ministers, Treasurers and Foreign Affairs Ministers from both sides of politics, Foreign Ambassadors from various countries, generals, the best academics from Australia and around the world, global hedge fund managers, technology gurus, entrepreneurs and captains of industry.
It was a truly stellar line-up. I did not say a word; I just sat and listened for 14 hours over two days.
Whilst we all committed to keeping specific discussions private, I can say the fight against COVID has led to an at least 10-year leap forward globally in medicine, across the board, especially personalised medicine and health monitoring. Personalised medicine will revolutionise the public and private health sectors in a few short years.
The use of quantum computing – which basically allows us to get to somewhere approaching mathematical infinity – will solve a lot of the world’s great unmet challenges, including the environment, but it will also create dilemmas of its own like the ability to crack unbreakable codes and make stealthy military assets highly visible, etc.
Carbon sequestration in the seas and soils as an antidote to manmade climate impacts is fast approaching, while jet propulsion will go hypersonic (scram jets) way sooner than any of us imagined – under eight hours to London or two hours for a trans-Atlantic crossing.
That and there will new jobs for space satellite controllers as there will be literally thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEOs) in the stratosphere, some as close as 160 kilometres from Earth.
Finally, mild to moderate inflation in the 2-3 per cent band will be purposefully engineered by the world’s largest central banks to pay down debt (devaluing it).
The pandemic has also led to an extraordinary pick-up in the speed of research, commercialisation of intellectual property (IP) and public and private sector decision making – think National Cabinet and the Chief Health Officers’ directions; that is the new normal.
There will be no turning back to the slow lane. Coping with the speed and rapidity of decision-making – and ensuring we are in the driver’s seat alongside the State and the Commonwealth – will be one of the local government sector’s biggest challenges
Agility, sprints and execution will be the key new words and paradigms in our sector of government.
Buckle up partners. You would not be dead for quids.