BEATING THE FUNK OF REGIONAL AUSTRALIA

In the next era of innovation companies seeking to disrupt entrenched industries like agriculture, energy, transportation or health care will head to those places where those sectors and industries exist in a grab it and run economy like Australia.

In reality we need to encourage and create national innovation and to keep it here.

One way to do this is to throw out the baby and the bathwater and rebuild a more vibrant, creative , innovative education system and not the learn by rote method we have utilized for the last 100 years. Teachers need not do any more than encourage experimentation, the skepticism to query all that we see for ourselves and turn a blind eye to some risks, let loose the power of the child’s brain and supervise the learning chaos that will erupt.

If you look at many of the successful and innovative people around the world you will find an incredible number who never finished school. They had the energy and creativity to leave formal education and use the skills that they already had.

Linton needs desperately to embrace the new world and encourage to our hamlet those families who make their living through the Internet or skillful artisans. Employment will never grow very much here unless we have a vibrant community that invites innovation.

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A CLASS FIVER

For me, as a Baby Boomer, the answer is No. The reason I say that is down to the fact that appear anywhere on a street in Ballarat or even in sleepy Linton you will see young people, nay children, heads down like a Bingo participant with their iThis and iThat, their Android or their Hemorrhoid. 
The wireless electronic world is sailing ahead full speed leaving us old folk floundering in their wake.
In the 70s it always pleased me to have to constantly alert my parents to the use of video recorders and cameras and even though the size of a bessa-brick they could not match todays stuff smaller than a matchbox. Now the foot is in the other shoe and I'm the one patiently being tutored in the latest mobile phone/camera/message system and/or pub quiz spoiler.

In the 70's it was 'see this lever here that says record and leave it alone until the end of the show'. Now you don't need to press a button you just tell it to and it does. Todays voice activation systems are different to mine – my old voice activation system consisted of my crying out 'Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam' very loudly.