That the Bureau of Meteorology could fake and corrupt weather temperature data, as so egregiously revealed recently in a forensic report in the Australian, was no surprise to those of us who followed the Climategate saga of 2009, where ‘hide the decline’ entered the lexicon as a statistical trick. Distrust of US legacy media is now widespread, with Gallup reporting two-thirds of Americans have little or no trust in media reporting. Other institutions elsewhere are equally in ill repute, with minor political parties proliferating in the UK and Australia due to dissatisfaction with the existing players. Then there’s two-tier policing, widely condemned in the UK and also in Victoria, where the force’s reputation has still not recovered from the heavy-handed Covid-era repression. Our universities are hotbeds not of academic excellence and rigour, but of anti-intellectual initiatives such as gender fluidity and DEI. All around us our institutions are bleeding credibility and authority, and even the least political among us is asking why things seem to be falling apart.
Why, indeed? Occasionally one stumbles across an insight that illuminates an entire landscape of human endeavour, which occurred to me recently with the discovery of the work of US scientist, management specialist, Reagan advisor and award-winning sci-fi writer, Jeremy Pournelle. If you know all about him please turn the page now; his work was news to me, and seems extraordinarily relevant.
Democrat-turned-‘paleoconservative’ Pournelle penned what he called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which asserts that all employees fall into two camps, the mission-driven and the institution-driven. The mission-driven care about the actual work – teaching children, reporting weather data accurately, media accuracy, improving health, etc. The institution-driven, however, ‘care about the survival, rules, budget and expansion of the organisation itself, eg educational administrators, union officials’. Pournelle held that inevitably, over time, the institution-driven win out over the mission-driven and increasingly control and run the organisation for its and their own benefit, as opposed to its declared aims.
Here is how that happens – and everyone who has lived and worked in a bureaucracy will see echoes of their own experience here. The institutional group manages to seize control over time because they are writing the rules, running the meetings, controlling promotions and budgets, and setting priorities. Meanwhile, the mission-driven are out performing the actual work itself. The result over time inevitably becomes an organisation that gradually moves away from its primary purpose to justifying and perpetuating its own existence.
The staff collective of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation springs to mind here; think of Four Corners’ recent scandal over ‘bikie’ reporter Mahmood Fazal who was discovered fabricating anonymous sources and eluding editorial oversight; resignations followed, as five pieces had to be altered or scrubbed. Nearly a century old, the ABC has resisted occasional board efforts at reform over decades, and accusations of bias, such as the lack of conservative commentators or programs, fall on permanently deaf ears.
The Liberal party is arguably another organisation that has suffered capture by seat warmers; its recent history evidences a failure to uphold traditional strengths such as freedom of speech (why do we still have 18C?), good economic governance (yes the Liberals too ran immigration too high for too long, and net zero is an economic cancer) and indeed a failure to fight for its traditional values at all. Labor-lite ‘progressives’ have over time trashed the Liberal party’s record, to the point that the conservative high ground has now been ceded to One Nation. Similarly in the UK, the Tories failed to carry out election pledges on issues such as cutting illegal immigration, and are also now being bypassed by a disgusted public.
Examples of Pournelle’s Law are everywhere. The United Nations has been so ineffective in maintaining international peace and security that one forgets that was even its original aim. Yet look at the controlling tentacles it has spread into the environment, international treaties, foreign aid and any field in which it has been involved; latterly sustainable development is its grandstanding raison d’être.
It took the Australian military until 2024 to get serious about buying some drones, the cheap, effective option on such dramatic display in the Ukraine-Russia war that had somehow escaped the attention of the Defence equipment nabobs, who were much more wedded to complex, big-ticket US purchases. We have welfare that spends without relieving poverty, educators who don’t teach reading, writing and ’rithmetic, an Aboriginal industry that fails to improve indigenous living standards and, in WA, fails to keep children safe, and an NDIS expanded so far beyond its original purpose that one in six boys aged six now uses it for autism assistance.
Of course, no single explanation suffices for all of the West’s institutional failures, despite the temptation of simplistic answers. Yet an explanation for what seems, from the outside, self-evident failures to get the job done in field after field may well have a common theme. Conceivably the older a bureaucracy is, the stronger its institutional control will be. The Catholic Church at least has an absolute moral code to which its officers can be held. Not so the long-established CIA and FBI, which may explain why Hollywood feeds so fulsomely on the corruption and evil agendas of US spies.
Pournelle unfortunately posited few solutions to this automatic rot of long-running institutions, although he pointed out that it was a direct consequence of size. Keeping systems decentralised and small helps. Sunset clauses written into legislation have obvious efficacy. But he argued that bloated, large, end-stage bureaucracies could not be reformed and had to be bypassed altogether. He would have applauded Trump dissolving the politically activist USAID and Milei taking a chainsaw to Argentina’s bureaucracies.
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