Public Servant "Snouts In The Trough"

Copyright The Bulletin April 16 1977

If you haven't already, you'll shortly identify my political leaning here, but just try to suspend your political prejudices for a short while and see whether the below makes any sense.

Have a think about those times when the government PR machine has amped up the Dire Economic Circumstances dial to 11.

The most recent in my consciousness was the Queensland Public Service Reform. This initiative commenced pretty promptly on the new state government taking power after the March 2012 election. The new government promptly (as one would expect) determined, that Queensland's finances were in a dire state and that the government had to take drastic measures to reel in recurrent spending (though interestingly there was less focus at that time in press releases and in the media around raising additional revenue). 

We can safely argue that ANY government would be likely to take significant - and potentially unpopular - steps if they determined that state finances were dire, and the incoming government had the benefit of a previous opposing government to blame, (again, as would any political party) and a full election term to run in order to improve opinion polls after making some unpopular moves.

Moves such as axing 14,000 jobs and partial or full de-funding of programs in both public and publicly funded NGO circles. There is a really good run down of program cuts April 2013-Nov2012 here [PDF warning] - the highlights being the likes of Queensland Health services (such as taxi vouchers for patients), Family Planning Queensland (who through education can influence teen pregnancy and sexual and relationship health) with a number of other cuts since November 2011 such as QAHC clinic, abortion services, proposal to close up to 40 TAFE campuses, and with millions taken out of the QLD Arts budget. 

Unfortunately for Queensland though, it looks like the Dire Economic Circumstances carnie that trotted out, may have had a few front teeth missing. The 'fiscal balance' measure used by former federal treasurer Costello in his audit report, which had the effect of jingling the financial red-alert bells, is a measure that this is largely ignored by other state governments (See also the "Net Operating Balance" first paragraph here) and that conveniently (politically) this dusty state fiscal measure paints the caretakers of the state's finances for the last couple of decades in a much worse light, and justifies Drastic Measures right now. 

There was an excellent opinion piece, again on Brisbane Times, in June 2012, which gave a delicious how-to for a government which wants to improve its financial outlook, but which has unfortunately for people who want jobs, concluded that cutting jobs is the best way to achieve it. 

Essentially;
1. paint our state as being in Dire Economic Circumstances
1(b). If the option is available, blame it on the previous administration,
2. point out how bloated the public service is, and
3. take pains to distinguish that front-line staff are the only ones that affect average joe's experiences when interacting with government, and that they're not losing their jobs, just the fat cat desk jockeys
4. point to some of these 'fat cats', preferably highly paid ones, as examples of those losing their jobs (and hope that these examples are interpreted as representative of the other 13,999 job cuts)
5. talk about the purchase and construction of large dedicated government work precincts but don't talk about how cost efficient they are compared with disparate and probably overpriced CBD leases (for example, ensure the cost of their construction is included as a negative contributor to the stated budget position).

Most particularly, avoid discussion around those 'surplus positions' potentially having been responsible for;
- saving government bucket-loads of cash for better technology through new IT&T contract negotiations and new IT&T builds
- ensuring for example that front-line staff aren't using painfully inadequate dumb terminals from the 70s to try and help their customers,
- developing and implementing a replacement for such things as punch card bus tickets (and implementing bus WiFi for that matter)...

Diminish their worth, not solely by referring to them as positions rather than people or families etc. but by ignoring their contribution to quality of life improvements.

Once done, it's a simple leap to be scrambling for the salt which must be applied to these leeches at the teat of Your Tax Dollars. Make sure all along that every message about job cuts is accompanied by the motto that these changes are For The Good Of The Taxpayer.

You should note that I've taken some significant liberties. The article linked above is far better put.

So, with some illustration around how the game is played to a) increase fear for our future without major change, and b) reduce widespread concern around fellow middle class families losing their lively-hoods, the government is then able to advance on removing job protections for public servants, the last real hurdle before the collective axe may fall.

There is a really good video entitled Deficitbots by a Pulitzer winning journalist from the USA, Mark Fiore, which satirises the demonisation of public servants as a justification for job cuts to address budget deficit (with an undercurrent of 'hey, privatisation is gooood! *thumbs up*' thrown in).

It is probably important to also ensure that the final count of job losses is held back from the public for as long as possible, with the knowledge that it will thereby spend the least amount of time in the media cycle. Turns out there were 14,000 positions lost, with 10,600 redundancies. The distinction is important because the government can comfortably say they didn't sack 3,000+ people, they largely just didn't renew contracts for temporary staff. Though this does ignore that 'temporary' in Government can still mean over a decade's service to the department.

So where does this take us?

In 2013, we will have a federal election and I would lay any bet, that a very close facsimile of these hoary old methods will beset the national consciousness in the event of a LNP government being formed.

You may well ask what makes me so certain?

There are a couple of reasons actually, with probably the most prominent being that the LNP Premier for Queensland - Campbell Newman - having written a metaphorical social network profile for himself, replete with a rather callous approach to social issues. A public profile where the avatar could just as easily sport Tony Abbot's face.

The second is that we've seen a huge media focus upon big government in previous times of hardship. One such time is well represented by an April 1977 issue of the Bulletin where the cover proclaims "What our big govt costs you: wife, two kids and three bureaucrats to support" with appropriate art.

In the 1977 context, the circumstances precipitating this kind of criticism of public servants revolved more around an incredibly tough employment market under the Fraser government, with unemployment pushing toward 10% for the first time since World War II.

On the back of this wave of concern about expenditure, Fraser undertook a "Review of Commonwealth Functions" more commonly known as his "razor gang", which successfully (though arguably) took a heavy hand to the public service, while he created an environment so supportive of public servant criticism, that one of his ministers allegedly referred to public servants as pigs with their snouts in the trough.

Moving back to the present, we can already see signs of the "lets axe federal gov jobs" wagon rolling into town, in the shape of state government job cuts being so widespread as discussed here. With such uniform job cuts across the country it is hard not to conclude that unemployment or more likely underemployment (because somehow it doesn't look as bad) will increase markedly, threatening families livelihoods.

We do have a well known way of tackling unemployment figures in the wider economy while reducing government expenditure, as alluded to above. Create part time jobs, because concerning ourselves with under-employment whether in private or public sector, compared with un-employment, is somehow too tricky for the most part to try and push into the public consciousness. While you will be able to find articles written on underemployment, this is rarely the statistic that readers identify with (or are presented with... chicken, meet egg). Note: if the above news.com.au link fails, here is a web archive version.

According to the ABS as of September 2012, over 7% of employed part time people needed more hours than they were currently given, with well over half of these needing full time work. It would be very interesting to see these figures for Queensland (as the state with the highest level of public sector job cuts), and also once the September 2013 figures are compiled and released, compared with 2012.

I suppose I am gently angling toward a conclusion. We need public servants. They are our teachers and teacher aides. They are our nurses. They are our Centrelink officers. But very importantly - and incredibly easily ignored - they are the family men and women who help the government to research roads funding priorities, who help the government to stay merely 5 years behind the private sector with respect to technology (ignoring the 12 year old Windows XP still in use by the majority of departments), and they're the uniformed firefighters allocated to train the country's huge force of fire and rescue service volunteers.

I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to assume that members of the public can't conceptualise the benefits that are provided to them by the non-front-line public servants, just that the government tends to go to a lot of effort to create that distinction before cutting non-front-line positions.

It thereby becomes easy through popular media to get nothing but that "false dichotomy" (per the Canberra Times article linked above under 'Moving back to the present') and for the idea of public sector job cuts to start to become really comfortable for people who would otherwise be overly concerned with the impact to the quality of their day to day experiences, and who with a backdrop of deteriorated services, might also be overly concerned about the really broad impact that these cuts would have on the families of their countrymen and women.

Standing on the Outside

(standing on the outside)

This is England

I watched the 2006 film This Is England the other day (actually, around Sep 2013) for the first time. My partner made a succinct and insightful comment toward the end of that film - something like “Isn't it sad – maddening even - that Britain needed (and still needs) to prove how Great it was. That British identity, its pride or its image, mattered so much...”

It was the simplest revelation to me of an overlooked protagonist in that film: one's 'in-group' identity. One's image.

Sure there are many other themes in the film; under-education, boredom, social disadvantage, white supremacy and intolerance. These - one and all - appeared to be some important features of Thatcher's England, hence some of the political commentary in the film and the TV series, and while some features are more timeless than a Tory government and than this single era, the quietly exposed theme was indeed that of maintaining English Pride and Identity.

Without claiming it as the only motivation, I don't think it's crass to suggest that Pride and the (colonial?) national image were motivators for England only a handful of years later, to brutalise themselves and the Argentines in the Falklands. This was not about resources as many later conflicts have been. It was the idea that these islands were part of the empire, and it would be a slight on the empire's image and reputation to relinquish the territory.

In This is England the idea of English image or identity didn't immediately expose itself as an issue and I think that was quite deliberate. The film seemed to articulate non-conformity and a working-man's take on 'mod' culture as the major part of the 60's skinhead sub-culture. We know from the history books that at its outset Skinhead identity was one which largely embraced 'others' taking in influences from far afield (Jamaica), and with no bigotry or xenophobia at its heart, in fact quite the opposite with black nationalism and social justice among many themes in skinhead reggae.

Moving on to mid-70's and to Thatcher's England in the 80's, where the prosperous times of the 50s and 60s were in decline with few jobs and un-affordable housing emerging as challenges for middle England. Against this backdrop, the English public was primed to adopt narrow-minded immigration positions in the face of increased immigration. The resultant nationalism - a protectionist approach to fewer opportunities for 'locals' - easily spilled over to overt racism against Indians and other Asian immigrants and their offspring, while easily lending itself to other intolerance such as homophobia.

To be more succinct, the back-drop of social disadvantage – the bored and poor youth - laid the ground for a peaceful and accepting sub-culture to be influenced and co-opted by a violent and intolerant preoccupation with English Identity (the working class native English 'in group'). It is reasonably easy to understand the means of evolution from Skinhead Reggae, to Skinhead Bigot against such a backdrop.

Not forgivable, but easy to understand.

As ever, such bigotry and some degree of xenophobia - thinly veiled by national pride - set me to think on how the English Identity, as embodied by the Union Jack & St George's cross, might be rather analogous to our own burning torch of pride and nationalism – the southern cross.

This is Australia

The southern cross is a pretty strong national identifier for Australians. If you were attending a music festival in Europe or the USA, rocking a Southern Cross would make you stand out clearly as an Aussie - at least to fellow Aussies.

Unfortunately, if you look at one of Australia's rather ashamed moments of mass nationalism and bigotry - the Cronulla Riots [1][2]in Southern Sydney in late 2005 - those signs of national pride, the southern cross, the national anthem, and Australian sporting chants, were trotted out in support of intolerance. Australians wearing their national pride tattoos, beating on Australians sporting an appearance of middle-eastern descent and vice versa...

It led me to ponder then whether a perception of both diminishing opportunity and a national image's dilution by 'others' were motivators for such intolerance, as seemed to be so for Britain in the late 70's, and as has been the case in many other instances both contemporary (Pym Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and others in the Netherlands during the 2000's) and historically (Nazi Germany).

In Cronulla, an affluent southern-beaches suburb of Sydney, there was generally little financial hardship to contend with compared with Sydney's Western suburbs. The mid-2000's saw the lowest unemployment rates in Australia in two decades. It was a prosperous time and a prosperous place, with no general sense of misfortune or short supply of resources (jobs, money, housing) to blame for civil unrest. It seems therefore unlikely that diminishing opportunity is the reason in this instance for white middle Australia to be externally motivated toward intolerance and violence.

It has left me to conclude that this issue of Hunter S Thompson's “flag sucking” nationalist is akin to the societal in-group and out-group labels defined by the likes of religion, sexuality, disability skin colour, language, football team and so on ("The God Delusion" p293).

So this leaves me in my (somewhat) maturity, feeling ashamed by my fellow countrymen and women, who deign to adorn their cars with messages along the lines of “fuck off we're full” and “love it or leave”.

It leaves me with a significant wariness around those who would wear the Australian flag as clothes, who would fly a flag in their front yard, who would tattoo themselves with the southern cross, or who feel the need to scream their Aussie identity (and anarchist's dissent of societal norms) by adorning their bodies and cars with “such is life” or with full portraits of the 19^th century Aussie (criminal) icon Ned Kelly.

There is a place for national symbols, and they are ceremonial. Wave a hand-held souvenir flag on January 26^th to celebrate the anniversary of our federation, and by all means adorn public buildings and press galleries with state, national and cultural flags. If you identify with Ned Kelly's larrikin attitude and not-quite Robin Hood rob-from-the-rich-and-give-to-yourself approach to his short life, then memorialise his death on November 11^th and perhaps refrain from using him to proclaim how proudly Australian you are. Aside from encouraging social division, you may also be more likely to die violently[1][2]).

I'm not saying that you shouldn't believe that Australia is a good place to live – it is – but i'm pleading with people who will never read this, to take down the opinionated bumper stickers, and stop wearing the symbols of national identity, because even if your intentions are purely 'I fucking love this place', you are unfortunately going to come across to many as siding with those in society who are not down with our multicultural nature. You're going to appear as being unwilling to take on our moral obligation as a well-off nation to have massive foreign aid and refugee programs. You're going to appear as one concerned about 'queue jumpers' rather than one who is concerned with helping those less fortunate and with augmenting our society with a great many people from around the world who have a lot to contribute if we'll let them.

We must quell uncritical off-hand sentiments that paint Australia – as I've said, a wealthy and prosperous nation – as unable to take on refugees. We must avoid being tolerant of messages which deliberately foster Richard Dawkins' “out-groups” and which divide our multicultural population along arbitrary lines of appearance or personal identity.

While straying from my initial suggestion that we be critical of flag sucking, I'd even go so far as to say that we need to be more accepting of people's individuality generally instead of supporting in and out group structures.

Is it right as a manager to accommodate a customer or a workplace's complaint that tattoos be covered, or that body piercing be removed or covered. Is it okay for a fictional old lady to take offence at the presence of a tattooed picture or word on someone's hand, if that picture isn't communicating unacceptable messages such as gender or cultural discrimination.

Ignoring food safety and workplace health and safety demands, is it otherwise reasonable to be bogged down in 'dress code' discussions? If a person is exhibiting the right behaviour as an employee, and if their appearance isn't communicating unacceptable messages, why would we bow to matters of taste (such as wearing shorts in a corporate setting) and set up conformance and removal of individuality, purely – if it isnt reaching too far - to prop up our in-group.

In-group and out-group matters are a pretty familiar mindset summarised by the sentiment that if you're not with us you're against us. In fact it was almost those exact words used by George W Bush on 20 September 2001 - “...every nation in every religion now has a decision to make: either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists...”[1] and it's clearly absurd.

But this absurdity is no different to many other in and out groups including religious belief. A study from Kent University in 2007 found that 36 percent of 16-24 year old British Muslims agreed that an apostate – someone who leaves the Muslim in-group - should be put to death. Of course one study from a single community (British) and a single age group can't be said to represent all Muslim opinion on the matter, but this study illustrates the fact that violence (I mean 'violence' in the very broad sense posed by Slavoj Žižek in his book of that name) arises out of in and out group identity, no differently than - to be admittedly simplistic about it - the Unionist/Protestant & Nationalist/Catholic in and out groups which created the violent separation within the northern Irish conflicts. No differently in fact than the Catholic crusades of the middle ages slaughtering the non-Catholic people across Europe and the middle-east.

So this in-group mentality may have motivated white, southern cross toting, loud and proud Australians, to 'march' as a reclamation of their southern Sydney beach from 'violent minorities', with media and community attention escalating this march to tension and on to physical violence.

And this in-group mentality certainly motivates many to don their southern cross tattoos and their 'fuck off we're full' bumper stickers.

Unfortunately the existence of these social elements taints other's choice to genuinely and with truly no prejudice or social division in their heart - proclaim with flags and clothes their affection for their country. Such affection becomes an unhealthy affection. It has become tainted.

In one sense, it would be nice if this symbol were so demonised by it's users that it became completely unacceptable due to its 'out-group' connotations, as happened to the swastika and - less-fortunately in my opinion - the demonisation of the Hitler mo').

There are critical people out there - I recently saw a black Hilux utility on the highway with a small white swastika on the rear window, and after my initial reeling disbelief in what I had seen, I was overjoyed to see that this nice new $50,000 automobile had a gigantic key scratch down the entire side as a pretty clear message that the owner's intolerance was not appreciated. A 'just' intolerance to another's bigoted intolerance. 

Whether this critical eye which clearly exists for stark examples like neo-Nazism, extends to the less obvious issues posed by symbols that don't necessarily equate to hate-speech, is another thing entirely.

I'd hope to contribute to - though wouldn't presume to achieving - awareness-raising in this space.