Finally Public Administration in NSW Under the Gun

Finally there is some mainstream media discussion of the public administration policies of the NSW Government! An excerpt from Beverley Kingston's essay in Sydney Ideas Quarterly has been published in today's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Kingston refers to the problem as the "rotting core". She quite rightly points out that once upon a time the management of departments involved people who stood up to ministers and who could plan long term regardless of who was running Macquarie Street. Now the senior bureaucrats are mere puppets and political animals who do their masters' bidding. They fulfil stupid contracts and write up reports of their performance indicators and claim that they "led" the department in doing x, y, and z.

Usually the executive bureaucrat does nothing at all in working out the details of x, y and z because the schemes are delegated to employees who do the grunt work. Employees are rarely thanked but are expected to deliver results irrespective of whether scheme was feasible in the first place.

When a scheme goes belly up the senior executive bureaucrat reacts like a pit-bull attacking employees. Executive bureaucrats like to take credit but never the responsibility for orchestrating things that may be plain stupid, unworkable or even implausible. These days there seems to be no regard for deep intelligence, skill, and acquired knowledge needed to run departments.

Kingston says:
"The instructions coming from the top are not necessarily informed or relevant, but frequently overwhelm the ability of individuals with expert on-the-spot knowledge to take an initiative or defy a direction."

How true! I've seen senior bureaucrats react with sandpit temper tantrums when someone with intelligence tells the boss the facts of life run contrary to the proposed policy or scheme.

That's why a colonic irrigation clean-out is needed: Directors-General of departments and their deputy subordinate sycophants must go from the NSW public service. The places to start the clean-up are the departments of Health, Attorney General, and Transport.