However, although some aspects were distracting and others simply wrong, one aspect of my involvement was both satisfying and rewarding.
The 200-strong panel was pulled together by a public relations firm for Infrastructure Victoria to consider and recommend what the Victorian state government should do about electric cars - how it would ingratiate them with the public and make them a viable option to the traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.
All that seemed pretty straight forward except this was to be a 30-year plan - if the recommendations were accepted and adopted right now, I mean this year, I would be 103 when the plan reached its conclusion.
Much of the discussion, which left me sad and disillusioned, was little more than a linear-like projection of what existed, with the difference being that we were simply talking about electric cars rather than the ICE versions.
That, I felt, was simply wrong and seriously misguided and progressed seemingly unaware, or in some sort of ignorance of that fact, that 30 years is a long time. A damn long time.
Yes, it was in 1995 that this newspaper stepped gingerly and uncertainly into the digital world and today, just 26 years later, its business, and that of most other operations, simply wouldn’t or couldn’t function without being integrated into the wonders of the electronic world.
In fact it was the digital aspect of modern life that kept our communities intact, socially, commercially and in every other sense during the COVID-19 crisis.
The first smartphone, something about the size of small suitcase, was introduced in 1992, less than 30 years ago, and the iPhone, which revolutionised the idea of the phone, entered the market less than 15 years ago.
That simply illustrates that most aspects of our lives, particularly with respect to technology, are moving quickly. So fast in fact that many of us are unable to keep up, and so seek comfort in what was a world they knew and understood.
Signing up for the panel, I imagined, quite wrongly as it turned out, that it would be exploring the advantages of sophisticated public transport coupled with solar-powered electric pods that would respond to smartphone requests to take an individual from A to B and then return to its charging station.
No, it was about keeping one foot firmly planted in the 20th century and then trying to figure out how we could take what worked then and adapt it to a different, quite different 21st century while ignoring that everything is changing, or has changed.
All that was discouraging and dispiriting, but it all began quite differently, as one of the first email messages I received was one of welcome from the Executive Director Communications and Engagement at Infrastructure Victoria, Mandy Frostick.
Mandy worked with me as a young reporter at this newspaper and I was both thrilled and delighted to see where her early training had led and that she was still in the media business, somewhere.
Mandy has also held senior leadership positions with some of Victoria’s best-known organisations including WorkSafe, City of Melbourne, the Royal Women’s Hospital and BHP.
She is still a non-executive director of Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital.
Yes, I was thrilled to learn where reporting had taken Mandy, but I was saddened that her organisation had been saddled with such stringent limitations to an idea that needs to be approached with unlimited imagination.
Rob McLean is a former editor of The News.
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