Submission to Australia 2020 Summit

By Dr Mark Bagshaw

Social Inclusion has emerged at the top of Australia's political agenda. Driven partly by the economic imperative of the skills crisis and partly as a genuine response to the notion that we all want to live in a decent society, one that offers opportunities for everybody to participate and to benefit from the participation. The challenge now is not, as many believe, to work out what needs to be done: we've known what needs to be done for decades. Our challenge is the same that any complex enterprises places when it addresses complex problems - making it all happen. This is where the business sector in "making complex things happen" has much to offer.

After such a long, dark period in Australia's social development history, it feels so good to feel the warmth of the social inclusion agenda. Michael Chaney, until recently the President of the Business Council of Australia, couldn't have said it better in his final address at the BCA Annual Dinner last year when he said that, after a significant period of change that had delivered enormous benefits for the business sector and those who benefit most from its success personally, it is now time that our wealthy nation applied its capacity to make things happen to sorting out some of the nation's most pressing social challenges. And to me it doesn't matter what the driving force for this shift in thinking is-the economic imperative of the skills shortage, pressure from those who have been excluded, or a genuine recognition across the community there are real solutions to even our most pressing social problems-the fact is that for the first time in a long time our nation is poised for a new and exciting period of genuine social reform.

In addressing those challenges, particularly for those who have suffered most from our nation's almost single-minded focus on generating economic wealth and the inequities that so often result from a capitalist, market-driven approach to doing so-indigenous people, people with disabilities, the many other people whose disadvantage has resulted from lack of access to the opportunities afforded to the majority of Australians-we may well be able to to make rapid progress by applying the same principles, methods and structures that the business sector has used so successfully to deliver the benefits about which Michael Chaney spoke.

For most of my adult life I have worn two hats: the first, a hat of privilege, has come from a long and rewarding career in the business sector; the second, a hat of a "second-class citizen" has resulted from spending most of my adult life with a significant disability (quadriplegia). Early in my adult life I realised that when we combine smart thinking, money and process we can achieve amazing things. Solve the most challenging problems. Fly to the moon-literally. And in our modern society it is, without doubt, the business sector that controls the vast majority of those resources.

Early in my career I had the opportunity to test a simple premise: can we, and is there any value in applying the same techniques that the business sector uses so successfully to achieve its goals to finding solutions to complex social problems?

Perhaps not surprisingly the answer was "yes". In the end the business sector is no different to any other part of our society. It is a group of people working together to achieve common goals. There is one big difference though between, say, Toyota producing cars and Australia "producing" opportunities for all of its citizens to contribute and to benefit from that contribution. Toyota controls and manages its entire business-from the research and development and the arrival of raw materials at the factory door through to the delivery of the finished vehicle to the customer at the other end.

That's not the way we deliver social reform. We do it in bits-disconnected bits. Take people with disabilities for example. They receive initial treatment for their disability, often in the health system. If they need a carer at home they need to seek that from a separate government or private service. If they need accessible housing that comes from yet another separate government or private source. Their transport-if it is available at all-is delivered separately again by the Department of Transport or a private bus or taxi operator. The education system has been working hard to provide educational opportunities for people with disabilities but it doesn't link to the transport system, the housing system, the carer system, the health system-or the employment system at the other end.

The average person in Australia travels on the "highway" of life. Life is (mostly) a smooth journey. Not only can they access all the things they need to lead a rewarding, productive life-housing, transport, education, work, play-they can move from one to the other on their life journey quickly and smoothly.

People who are excluded from full participation in our society travel on the " backroads" of life. Life is not a smooth journey. Even those who overcome the barriers to participation don't do so easily. And for many there are just too many potholes, broken bridges and brick walls. For those people who have been largely left out as we have built the robust society we now live in, the aspirations they share with every other citizen-to lead a decent, rewarding life-are often elusive.

But this is where the business sector's incredible capacity to produce incredible things and to sort out incredibly complex problems has so much to offer. Toyota doesn't run its business as Australia runs the "business" of social inclusion-as a largely disconnected set of silos. It's left hand knows what its right hand is doing. Its research and development team talk to its production team, to its finance team, to its human resources team, to its marketing team. And they, in turn, talk to each other. They treat the process of transforming the inputs to the business-raw materials, money, people and intellectual property-into outputs (cars) as a continuum. As a pathway. If they ran their business the way the world runs social inclusion they'd be out of business.

It's not the only solution to building stronger communities, to achieving our social inclusion goals. But borrowing the knowledge of how to get things done-the systems, structures and processes that make up all successful enterprises-has, in my view, a great deal to offer in creating pathways for the millions of our fellow Australian citizens who can and want to make a contribution to building the society that I'm sure we all want to be proud of.