Australia 2020 Summit

The Australia 2020 Summit was a convention, referred to in Australian media as a summit, which was held on 19–20 April 2008 in Canberra, Australia, aiming to "help shape a long term strategy for the nation's future". Announced by the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the summit drew limited bipartisan support from Brendan Nelson and the opposition Coalition parties, and ran as 10 working groups of 100 participants.

1002 delegates attended the summit to discuss ten "critical areas". Ideas and proposals were invited from all members of the community, and an official web site was set up to accept submissions.

The 10 critical policy areas were:

The summit was led by an 11-member steering committee, whose initial membership was announced on 26 February 2008. The committee played a key role in selecting the other participants, and each member led one of the working groups together with a government co-chair. Since the initial announcement, Dr Kelvin Kong (Indigenous Australia) withdrew due to family health reasons, and Dr Jackie Huggins was appointed to replace him. On 14 April 2008, an additional co-chair, Dr Julianne Schultz, was announced for the Creative Australia stream.

There were two additional late participants who had been granted special entry as winners of competitions and their names did not show in the original lists of participants. They both attended the Productivity Stream Agenda. Their names were Susan Roberts, TAFE Head Teacher of Child & Family Services from Taree who had won a national competition by Channel Nine and Ernie Peralta, a university lecturer whose "Golden Guru" concept of business mentoring was later adopted in Queensland.

The members of the steering committee were as follows:

Eleven young people were also selected by their peers at the 2020 Youth Summit, running from 11 to 13 April 2008, to represent Australian youth at the Australia 2020 Summit:

Several events were held in the lead up to the Australia 2020 Summit:

The summit was initially criticised for the near-absence of women on the 11-member steering committee who would pick the 1,000 delegates—only actress Cate Blanchett had been named. The Government responded by saying six of the co-chairs would be female politicians. By the time of the summit, there were three women on a 12-member committee. Additionally, other commentators such as the Institute of Public Affairs, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and Australian Monarchist League criticised what they saw as the unrepresentative nature of the delegates, which in their view biased the final report towards republicanism and ideas such as constitutional reform and a bill of rights.

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