Here’s one suggestion that will sharply improve the performance of the Australian Government and Opposition. It’s a small step to make a big change and it doesn’t need a plebiscite (postal or otherwise), or even a vote in the Senate. The government could enact this change overnight. It won’t of course because, well, our politicians and our public servants are addicted to the very brain-eating drug that I would have them ban.

Talking points, dear readers! Talking points are the fluff that fills the gap where policy used to be. If you’re interested in strategy or politics you’ll hear talking points deployed to blandify morning radio while you smash your avocados. Their muffled prose turns newspapers into slush ponds of guff. Evening television flees from talking points into the arms of glassy-eyed ranters, but that’s surely better than being drowned in tar pits of talking-point complacency, telling us in the third-person passive that all’s right with the world.

You can tell when a politician lapses into talking points. Suddenly they’re reading at you, not talking to you. There was one on Radio National yesterday morning, sounding like captive children sound at school when reading 1984 aloud in class. In a monotone voice, they shuffle to the end of the sentence, thinking ‘Just let me get through this agony and then Fran can play the track of the week. I don’t believe what I am saying. You don’t believe what I’m saying. But the bell will ring soon and then I’ll go back to my office to ask my department for more talking points. Better ones than these.’

During my time in Canberra, now approaching a geologic span, I have seen the explosive proliferation of demand for talking points briefs. Ministers stagger in to question time clutching bulging folders bejewelled with tabs and yellow sticky notes. At Senate Estimates, Defence public servants hide behind multiple binders of talking points so thick they could stop a bullet. The single-most preoccupying function of many, many officials is producing endless updates for hot issues briefs, holding briefs, question time briefs, estimates briefs, travel briefs.

Equally there’s the spiralling industry of ministerial staffers—packed into Parliament House like sardines minus the spines—doing no more than tasking their departments to produce this material. When Kevin Rudd was prime minister, the min wing was clocking on at 5 a.m. to feed Kevin’s insatiable appetite for briefings. Ministers’ staffers could be reduced to quivering heaps with a call from the PMO asking for a ‘round the world’ brief on any topic. In Defence, we would get calls like: ‘GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT ON AFGHANISTAN … NOW!’ (Rudd government staff spoke in upper case.) When Stephen Smith was Defence minister, a small division of the department was geared to provide a daily early morning talking points pack—often more than 50 pages—responding to even the most minor issue running in the media. Then there would be the question time briefing pack delivered (hopefully) around 12.30—and at any other moment on call.

It’s not just that there are too many people tasking too many others with doing this work. The pernicious effect of talking points is worse than that. The biggest problem is that the whole purpose of talking points is to defensively protect today’s policy orthodoxy. They are innovation killers. Say that ASPI publishes a report calling for reform of Defence’s pencil procurement system. The ministers’ offices (all of them) will demand a defensive talking points brief—just in case a journalist breaks through the outer perimeter. The brief will say that Defence’s pencil procurement strategy is world’s best practice and produces pencils optimised for Australian conditions. Made by Australians. In Australia. There is no possible requirement to rethink anything to do with pencils. Thus are all new ideas erased from possibility.

Another damaging effect of talking points briefs is that those who use them gradually come to believe they do real things. Watch and learn: North Korea launches a missile. We will say ‘Australia condemns North Korea’s latest … test in the strongest possible terms.’ We will declaim that ‘North Korea’s ongoing reckless and menacing behaviour is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions, is a threat to regional and global security and stability, and is in violation of the rules-based order we seek to promote and advance.’ Yea, verily, do I smite my foe in 12-point font.

The third damaging effect of talking points is that they suck all personality and believability out of the user. Public servants might aspire to reach this Zen-like state, but it’s death to politicians, who, above all else, must connect with their voters as human beings. Show me a politician who looks authentic and I’ll show you someone who has stopped hiding behind talking points.

The reality is that a talking points brief won’t save a politician or senior public servant if they aren’t already across their issues. Canberra could produce 98% fewer briefs and we would all be better off as a result, with more authentic policy discussions—and more open even to new thinking.

In a week where we’ve looked back at ASPI’s first 15 years it may be useful to contemplate what the next 15 years might look like for the Institute. Will ASPI survive to 2031? Will there be a need or, more fundamentally, a demand for its work? How different might ASPI be in 15 years, and what will the wider policy and think tank environment be like?

The honest answer, of course, is: who knows?! We’re talking about a future at least five federal elections away—an eternity to some Canberra institutions—at a time when the pace of change in Australian public and strategic life is dramatically increasing. But it’s not as though policy challenges will go away. That gives rise to the hope that Governments, Parliaments, officials, journalists and business people will still want contestable policy advice. No thinking think-tanker would want to pin their institution’s future on just such a hope. In a decade and a half perhaps policy contestability will emerge from artificial intelligences grown in strangely glowing gloopy miasma—think vats.

But I digress. Let’s turn instead to something as lasting as the stars, which is the robust intellectual framework known in business schools as the two-by-two. Here I contend that four broad future possibilities exist for Australian policy think tanks. These futures reflect the interaction of the two most fundamental drivers in the lives of such institutions: the degree to which there is a demand for their product—that is to say the influence they have on the policy world, and second, the competition that exists in the think tank field—how may institutes are out there, slugging away for influence? The combination of these factors is shown below.

An environment where there are multiple think tanks exerting a high level of influence on public policy—let’s call this place ‘Nerdvana’—does actually exist in Washington DC and to a lesser extent in London. With a Metro ticket and a pair of loafers one need never lunch alone in Washington DC. The city’s think tanks are full of serious people with serious ideas and a high expectation they’ll be listened to by officials, many of whom were and will be again, think tankers.

America’s political environment and sheer size encourages Nerdvana. Think tanks act as holding pens for talented people who support the major party not presently running the White House. American universities produce a stream of high quality graduates whose very definition of heaven is to cuddle up with the latest General Accounting Office report. They work for a pittance producing high quality analysis. The US system isn’t afraid of ideas and thrives on contest. Finally, deep pocketed Americans bequest think tanks with large endowments. For the right amount of money you too can have a chair named after you in lecture theatres all around K Street. For all those reasons Nerdvana by the Molonglo is unlikely. The political environment is simply too different.

Could there ever be a world where we see large numbers of think tanks operating in an environment where they have relatively low influence? This might be thought unlikely because low influence think tanks generally won’t attract money (and therefore survive) for long. However Washington DC might offer an example of this if Donald Trump wins the Presidency. Welcome to Trump Land. Large numbers of Republican-supporting strategists have already said they won’t serve in a Trump administration. DC’s think tanks could become homes for two establishment parties out of office. They’d aim to outlive Trump hoping he’d be a one term wonder. Beijing’s many think tanks also strike me as living in a low influence Trump Land. Whatever they’re there to do, it’s most certainly not about creating contestability in public policy. That said, Beijing’s thing tanks do quietly try to shape official policy, which they can do by being more open to foreign contacts and thinking. It’s a narrower crawl space than in Western capitals.

The left hand side of the diagram is where Canberra’s think tanks operate. Obviously they are fewer and smaller than their US counterparts. For most of Canberra’s history the town has operated as The Shire—a quiet place where the smallness of think tanks was matched only by their ineffectiveness. Today, people wouldn’t believe the privations of mid-1980s Canberra which greeted me as a Masters student at the ANU. Back then coffee was instant, Civic closed (all of it) at noon on Saturday and Iced VoVos were 5 cents each in the HC Coombs Building tea room. There was the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and it’s true to say it had a substantial impact on defence policy thinking in the lead up to the 1987 Defence White Paper. But that was it. The rest was heat haze and closed shops, mentally and physically.

Finally we come to The Future, the quadrant where we find some relatively influential think tanks, which is where a positive assessment of Australia’s think tank landscape might take us by 2031. Now, compared to the 1980s, there are already a number of established institutions, not only in Canberra but also Sydney and Perth, where strategic policy is seriously discussed. The media, Parliament, business community and many Government officials accept think tanks as a legitimate part of the policy landscape. There’s also a more widespread community expectation of being engaged on the content of policy. As senior politicians keep telling us, the public service struggles to meet those expectations and that’s where adroit think tanks can cultivate influence. It’s hard to see these factors reversing as we move towards ASPI’s 30th in 2031.

That said, no one owes any of us a living. All think tanks are only as good as their last report and it’s the contest of ideas that encourages new thinking. The price of relevance is to reach for excellence. That’s what makes a place like ASPI worth supporting for, I very much hope, another 15 years.