by PAUL COLLITS – I HAVE the misfortune to live in a local government area with an atrocious city council.
Despite huge rates, the uses of which no one in Lismore can readily identify, the place is down at heel, with uncleared drains – despite the lessons of the 2022 floods – unaddressed, ugly graffiti in tunnel-walkways that once had lovely art adorning them, the absence of public parks, the lack of adequate curbing and guttering and pot-holed streets.
- One can only wonder – what do all these public employees do?
- Apart from attending unconscious bias training and the like.
- They think they’re making public policy. Instead they are conspiracy against the public.
Despite a hot summer climate, we only have red bin collection per fortnight, reflecting the priorities of decades of hippy-greenie councils. Bring on the maggots!
For ages, the main street – lacking viable businesses – at least had the inevitable rainbow pedestrian crossing. Reflecting a pedestrian culture. Love wins!
INFAMOUS
Mercifully, that crossing now seems to have gone. At least for now.
The street in which I live has no drain, no curbing and no guttering. Despite a biggish hill, which generates flash flooding during Lismore’s infamous downpours.
So, I dug my own drain in the nature strip. It worked! It sorted runoff. Then, when we were away one time, and without letting us know or seeking our agreement, the council workers came out with a bobcat and dug their own drain, obliterating mine.
Guess what? Theirs didn’t work. The drain is now an overgrown mound, overcome with silt and soils washed down the hill.
Now, a year later, I am re-digging the drain. Discount on the rates bill? I suspect not.
AI explains: “Lismore City Council has 11 elected councillors, including the Mayor, but the specific number of staff or ‘council workers’ is not explicitly stated in the provided results, although one source indicates an ‘Equivalent Full Time Staff (EFT)’ of 555 for the Lismore Council, which is higher than the group average.”
Five hundred staff for a city of 44,000 people. One can only wonder – what do those staff all do?
Apart from attending unconscious bias training and the like – and ruining drains.
Against this backdrop of public sector failure, the news this week that Australia now has one million public servants is hardly uplifting.
Only a year ago we received the news that Australia had a one million dollar a year public servant. His name is Glynn Davis and he has the dubious honour of being Albo’s main guy in the public service.
Go back three years to find that Australians are “sickened” by bonuses paid to public servants.
The practice of paying our senior public servants private sector salaries emerged in the early 1990s via a bullshit theory called New Public Management (NPM).
We have to blame the then NSW Premier Nick Greiner and his (hugely paid) senior public servant, Gary Sturgess, for this unjustified, unargued, awful and retrograde move.
NPM was all the rage. We were meant to get “better” public servants because of the massive salaries. We didn’t. We just got more.
EMBRACED
Not to mention the outsourcing, another 1990s fad. That was embraced by John Howard, no less.
We-the-taxpayers lost control of aged care, social services, unemployment and disability benefits, the NDIS.
Control of policy implementation passed to a generation of chancers like Mrs Kevin Rudd, now worth in the tens of millions, thanks to outsourcing.
Outsourcing 2.0 has given us fact checkers who dob in lawful citizens to the public servants – who employ them – for wrong-think.
The annual bill for “consultants” runs to the billions.
And the million figure doesn’t include all the others on the public tit. The academics employed by our bloated, useless universities. The armed services who are endlessly pressed into foreign wars and who return home with every mental health issue under the sun, having achieved nothing. The aforementioned consultants. The third sector types who get funding from government – think community grants – to find new ways of wasting taxpayer funds.
The program manager-led recovery. Except there is no recovery. Only a Ponzi economy. If you count all the public-financed hangers-on, the one million figure is merely a drop in the ocean.
Just think of your favourite public servant. Oh, I don’t know. Say Brett Sutton, the Victorian Government’s COVID fascist who advised Daniel Andrews. Victorian of the year!
These days, Brett is a “scientist” at the CSIRO. Another publicly funded croc of an organisation. Brett now chairs something called the Coalition for Trust in Science.
You could not make this up.
Queensland’s Chief Health Officer was promoted to Governor.
The sinecures granted to faithful (to the State) servants of the public are a scandal. A revolving door of favours and rewards. Mates rates. As Paul Frijters and colleagues explain in their book, Game of Mates.
IMPORT
Or think of eKaren. Julie Inman-Grant, the eSafety Commissioner. An American import. Enforcing the cancel culture State:
Julie Inman Grant, as the eSafety Commissioner, received a base salary of $419,956 in the 2023-2024 reporting period, according to Transparency.gov.au.
Her salary was $410,489 in 2022-2023 and a total remuneration of $444,983 in 2021-2022.
These public servants enact government directives that are not wanted by voters and for which there is no mandate.
When looking for perspective, it is often wise to turn to Yes Prime Minister on the matter of senior civil servant pay rises.
These days, “civil” servants are not very civil. They are progressivist Gen Y hacks who believe in climate change, pandemics, woke values and the overweening State.
They may think they are making public policy. They are, rather, partaking in a great conspiracy against the public. Who turn up every three years at a polling booth and think they are making a difference.
Back in the day, public servants used to be called “fat cats” or (sometimes) “bloated felines”.
It isn’t just a matter of too many bureaucrats. Our current age and its citizens confront a whole new order of problems.
We are faced with big government, the deep State, who reach into our lives that the mandarins of the 1960s could never have remotely contemplated.
Now, public servants can order the firing of rubber bullets into protesting crowds on our streets, for objecting to COVID tyranny. Without blinking.
HATE SPEECH
They can police our social media posts. They can jail you for hate speech. Hate speech defined by them. Pandemics defined by them, or their global paymasters.
Whistleblowers are very thin on the ground. They all have to put food on the table, after all.
The rewards for compliance are huge. The punishments for blowing the lid are equally substantial.
The anticipated rewards for playing the game are considerable. For the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby, it was a knighthood.
Now it is the forthcoming sinecures. The post-public-life rewards.
Think Brett Sutton. Think Jane Halton. They slither effortlessly from one deep State gig to the next.
The gravy train offers not only big dollars but endless “relevance”. Public accolades. Career rewards. The moves are seamless. Effortless. And the voters never, ever notice these things.
When the global deep State is, well, so deep, all things are covered. The scam is complete. All encompassing.
Tony Blair is perhaps the perfect example of the high-level seamless mover, across the various nodes of the borderless, corporatist system. Julia Gillard is another.
Jacinda Adern? NZ Prime Minister one day, Harvard professorial fellow the next.
It isn’t just the number of public servants. Nor their outsized salaries. It is the power they have over us. Unelected busy-bodies now run our lives.
The reach of government is such that these people, who have never had real jobs, are actively participating in the destruction of civil society.
FRAGILE
They are rendering asunder the always fragile compact between the government and the governed. They are undermining the very foundations of political obligation and the social contract.
It is a corruption of democracy on a grand scale. It isn’t a “few bad apples” problem. To assume that would be to make a category error.
And because they are all on contracts now, they do not offer “fearless advice” to their ministers as their predecessors once did.
They do what they are told, or else they are moved on. And the governments they serve are now typically elected with no more than a third of the vote.
Welcome to our country. DOGE, anyone?
The patently incompetent buggering up our nature strip drains is the least of our worries, alas.PC
