A BIONIC EYE CAN’T GIVE 2020 VISION

KEVIN Rudd has sent another article denouncing me for mocking his 2020 Summit of our “best and brightest” 10 years ago last Thursday.

But the former prime minister is right. I shouldn’t laugh at that farce where 1000 people handpicked by Rudd purported to decide our future.

I should be furious instead, and so should you, given what his latest response claims.

In his first response, Rudd was enraged by my assertion that his summit was a giant exercise in windbaggery: “As for big, new and good ideas, there was not one which Rudd ever enacted nor which anyone remembers.”

Not so, he cried, naming four things he claimed met my test of being big, new and good.

I’ve since explained why they didn’t. His National Disability Insurance Scheme, for instance, was indeed monstrously big at an estimated $22 billion a year, but neither new nor good, being in grave danger of blowouts and rorting. As for the ABC for Kids and a register of volunteers to help tackle foreign disasters, I rest my case.

In his latest response, Rudd lies that I have “no interest” in Aboriginal children with trachoma. What a cheap smear, made on zero evidence.

But more importantly, he now claims a fifth success — that his summit created “breakthroughs in the development of an Australian ‘bionic eye’.”

The truth, unfortunately, seems to be the opposite, thanks to Rudd’s meddling. Just before Rudd’s summit, Australia already had a prototype bionic eye. All that Minas Coroneo and his small team at the Prince of Wales Hospital needed was $300,000 to test it on volunteers.

Unfortunately for them, Rudd seized on the bionic eye as a big idea for his summit, but Coroneo’s prototype seemed just not big enough for the PR job required. Result: Coroneo didn’t get a cent, and has now dropped his project.

Rudd’s government instead spent $60 million on two grander bionic eye projects, with most going to one at Melbourne University — a uni run by Rudd’s friend and summit co-chairman, Professor Glyn Davis.

True, this Melbourne MGV project promised better vision than Coroneo’s, but 10 years on it still hasn’t started clinical trials.

Meanwhile, a California company, Second Sight, has beaten us to it with its own invention, and has treated more than 200 patients.

Thanks, Kevin. Doing less might have got us there sooner.