The Sunday Mail yesterday published an article title Ageing old problem – Rudd unveils solution to ‘greying population’, in which the Prime Minister says “We need to grow the economy faster by boosting the productivity of our economy.  That is the only solution forward for Australia.  In other words, producing more by making our workforce more productive.”

While it is heartening to see that our Prime Minister has such a solid understanding of economics, and commonsense, it was more encouraging to see him say that we need to invest rapidly in infrastructure, in skills and education and training and to take as much regulation out of the road of business…”

The rest of the article focuses mostly on the infrastructure efforts the government is now making, and reminds us of the very real challenge of the ageing population.  Unfortunately it does little else, and even fails to explain how better infrastructure will be our saviour.

There is no question that excellent infrastructure is vital, whether it be upgrading the now hopelessly inadequate highway system we were driving on over the New Year break, or the much touted Broadband upgrade, but is this enough?  The answer is ‘of course not’ and even the leaders of our country acknowledge education and training is one of the major keys to success.

There is little value in having super fast internet access to simply update Face Book and Farmville, or even to hunt down the last research on sustainability.  What is needed is a population of people who know how to think, learn and create, and unfortunately this seems to be the missing link for most.

When people are reading in the same way as people read 100 years ago, writing on qwerty keyboards, and are unable to break away from long-held perceptions (and biases), all the new and fancy infrastructure in world will do us no good.

Creativity is needed in learning, in thinking, in collaborating, in inventing, in building businesses, in classrooms – in every facet of Australian life.  Unfortunately, this looks to be far too hard a subject for our leaders – in government, business and education, to grasp, and even our universities seem to be taking creativity and innovation off their subject lists in favour of legal studies.

There are many principles, methods and techniques available to revitalise the way people learn, the way they think, the way they collaborate – and the beauty of this is that when Gen X and Baby Boomers learn these methods they sustain their creativity, energy and enthusiasm for contributing to everything around them for years longer.  After all 70 is the new 50, but only for those with active brains.

That is the way to deal with tomorrow’s economic challenges – with people, not just highways and faster access to downloadable movies.