Faced with the thronging multitude of the great and the good rolling up to map out Australia's future over canapés and bubbly, it is easy to be cynical - and, no worries there, plenty of people have already obliged.
Take, for instance a column in the Age newspaper in Melbourne: it compared Kevin Rudd's gathering with Bob Hawke's landmark 1983 economic summit.
"Both use the same organisational principle: bring the power elite to Canberra to attend the court of the new leader. Mix it up for a few days until one group becomes indistinguishable from the other, the elite becomes bolted on to the new government and its progressive agenda, and the Government gets the reflected glory of the comely and powerful.
"Yes, yes, it is about letting ideas bloom and seeking fresh input from outside Canberra, and about new politics, whatever that is, but its realpolitik is more simple, it's about polite co-option.''
And yet, for all that, there is also something refreshing and courageous about a grand national talking shop that would attempt to pull some constructive and achievable notions out of the chaotic morass of 1000 competing egos riding on the back of at least that many "big ideas''.
The 2020 Summit is a vote of confidence in Australian citizens, a kind of devolution of direction-setting and a new way of nation-building. In an age where hype and hope regularly trump results and reality, and where even proposals for such events are likely to be condemned as a waste of time and money, it was impressive.
And the list of framing discussion topics seemed to encompass the most important problems and challenges of our time.
These included a Productivity Agenda, the Economy, Sustainability and Climate Change, Rural Australia, Health, Communities and Families, Indigenous Australia, Creative Australia, Australian Governance and Australia Future in the World.
Some of the ideas that emerged from discussion, and will be considered over the next six months by Mr Rudd's government, include: making it compulsory to eat fruit at school, changes to the tax system, developing a bionic eye, streamlining the economy and fixing up the Federation.
The push for a republic got a look in, as did the suggestion of allowing students to pay off some of their debt through community service, and making sedentary workers walk up the office stairs. (Note to self: stop using the lift!)
"I don't want to wake up one day in the year 2020 with the regret of not having acted when I had the chance,'' said Mr Rudd closing the summit. "We can either take command of the future or we can sit back and allow the future to take command of us.''
Politically-instigated jamborees like this can only occur, of course, in the first flush of new governments, in the still-rosy honeymoon period, before they have worn out their welcome, and the tiresome routine of "making everything work'' has ursurped their energy and their "vision''.
And before the chorus becomes, as it ultimately does for most governments, enmeshed in the mundane: more jobs, higher wages, cheaper houses, better education and greater healthcare.
Remember "Cool Britannia'', the surge of hipness and hope - albeit more organic, less contrived than a formal summit - that accompanied the early Downing Street years of a young, guitar-playing Tony Blair?
It is election year here, and should Helen Clark and the Labour Party lead a fourth-term coalition government it could do worse than consider the Rudd model. It would provide an opportunity for a Government - scarred from various legislative battles, wounded by its inevitable casualties and condemned to a degree of contempt through the bain of familiarity - to reconnect with the broader public, and in particular with the coming generations.
While new faces are beginning to emerge as future leaders from Labour's ranks, perhaps its most pressing realpolitik is its need for a Rudd-style politics of renewal.
Renewal is something that National, first under Don Brash, and now with John Key, seems to have achieved. It is well ahead in the polls. But in the face of a distinct lack of direction or policy to distinguish it from the incumbent Government, its advantage appears to have been achieved as much by default as through its own strategic brilliance or inherent electoral attractiveness.
It could do worse than stage something similar, too. That way it might come up with some fresh ideas to which it could legitimately claim ownership.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
