When in doubt, the pettifogging commentariat columnist will invariably swim to a couple of safe waves for a little body surfing fun. And what provides a safer ride than bureaucrats and academics?
Here's Miranda the Devine trying to land a couple of blows in Pettyfogging bureaucracy is just creeping totalitarianism.
First a pedantic note. We prefer the correct spelling of pettifogger, though you might call that a petty or trival matter. But it's one of our favorite words, and if you want a little background on it, go here.
Meantime, let's not get too pettifogging or pedantic about the notion that bureaucracy is creeping totalitarianism. Sure it's a mindlessly stupid notion, but when have we ever expected anything else from the Devine in her ceaseless search for black and white simplifications and trollumnist provocations.
Perhaps you might worry about the implications for those legendary mandarins of Britain who devised the best form of bureaucracy in the world - even better than the Chinese - and a sitcom to match, Yes Minister (and sequel) - and exported their love of the queue to India and China, so that even today the fetish for the rubber stamp beats deep in the heart of the post-colonial world.
Next thing you know you'll turn into Che Guevara and deliver a rant about how the British introduced the world to totalitarianism via their bowler hatted bureaucracy.
Silly you. The Devine needs logic like a fish needs a bicycle or Kafka needs more paranoia.
On to business. Here's one of the fish she has to fry:
The great shining symbol of bureaucratism's triumph over freedom is, of course, the carbon pollution reduction scheme, and its elaborate bureaucratic apparatus, which brooks no dissent.
The CSIRO economist Clive Spash, for instance, reportedly has claimed CSIRO management suppressed his research criticising emission trading schemes. Spash said he was not allowed to publish his paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, because it commented on "policies", as if no CSIRO scientist had ever done such a thing.
The totalitarian threat of bureaucratism is nowhere as clear as in the climate change industry's creeping assaults on liberty.
The CSIRO economist Clive Spash, for instance, reportedly has claimed CSIRO management suppressed his research criticising emission trading schemes. Spash said he was not allowed to publish his paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, because it commented on "policies", as if no CSIRO scientist had ever done such a thing.
The totalitarian threat of bureaucratism is nowhere as clear as in the climate change industry's creeping assaults on liberty.
On another day of course the Devine would have been railing about Spash and his heretical support of the notion of climate change, no doubt calling him a pettifogging academic with a carbon bee in his bonnet.
Well thanks to the intertubes, if you're interested in what Spash thinks and has to say, you can race off here to his personal website, where indeed you might decide that he is part of the climate change industry, and therefore part of the creeping assault on our liberty, provided you can adopt the Devine's paranoid posturing. And if you want the story that started the ball rolling, you can go here.
Either way you'll emerge more reliably informed on the issue than a mindless assertion about creeping totalitarianism.
But what provoked the Devine? Here you'll pardon me if I indulge in a little Freudian detective work.
If we start at the beginning, it's immediately clear that there are no clues in the opening pars, which reference a number of recent aircraft 'events' involving pilot error, and are designed to provide the gloss of some contemporary relevance to the column.
Such incidents may become commonplace as aircraft become more complex and the once-very busy pilot brain becomes underutilised. Put highly trained, intelligent humans in jobs where they have to stare at computers for hours and act only if something goes wrong, and the brain will find something else to do - sleep, daydream or plunge into a fugue. Cash-strapped airlines are solving this problem by employing pilots who are less skilled and cheaper.
The effects of excessive automatism on pilots are a example of what happens to human ingenuity, resourcefulness and independent thought when it is rendered surplus to requirement in a bureaucracy.
Such incidents may become commonplace as aircraft become more complex and the once-very busy pilot brain becomes underutilised. Put highly trained, intelligent humans in jobs where they have to stare at computers for hours and act only if something goes wrong, and the brain will find something else to do - sleep, daydream or plunge into a fugue. Cash-strapped airlines are solving this problem by employing pilots who are less skilled and cheaper.
The effects of excessive automatism on pilots are a example of what happens to human ingenuity, resourcefulness and independent thought when it is rendered surplus to requirement in a bureaucracy.
Say what? Well just as Saddam Hussein called on the mother of all wars, surely that has to rate as the mother of all illogical segues. Pilots in the private sector as an indicator of government bureaucracy's dead hand? But wait, you get a set of steak knives segue with that:
The spread of brain-dead supplicants to the state has grown with the rise of the bureaucratic class, which reached its zenith when the former Queensland bureaucrat and chief jargon generator Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister.
He may be a perfectly fine human being but he believes in one thing - that systems and processes can solve any problem, that if you have enough meetings, summits, talkfests, reviews, studies, probes, resolutions and facilitations, preferably with some connection to a United Nations body, solutions will miraculously occur without hard decisions being made.
Oh yes, it's Robo Rudd, and instead of his dullard jargon talk fest stuff, how much simpler to blow things and people up in the wonderful new world of robot wars and clinical drone strikes. Direct action, not paperwork!
He may be a perfectly fine human being but he believes in one thing - that systems and processes can solve any problem, that if you have enough meetings, summits, talkfests, reviews, studies, probes, resolutions and facilitations, preferably with some connection to a United Nations body, solutions will miraculously occur without hard decisions being made.
Oh yes, it's Robo Rudd, and instead of his dullard jargon talk fest stuff, how much simpler to blow things and people up in the wonderful new world of robot wars and clinical drone strikes. Direct action, not paperwork!
But the Devine is not yet done with head blarney speaking barnstorming pilot of the country, Chairman Air Commodore Rudd, doing his damnedest to ruin Biggles' reputation (no, we're not talking dogs here, we're talking the fighter pilot air ace):
As Rudd's disintegrating policy on asylum seekers demonstrates, this approach rarely works.
His 2020 Summit, stacked with whiteboards and McKinseyite facilitators, was a prime example of bureaucracy syndrome, with much talking and nothing happening.
Bureaucratism obfuscates with jargon that is impossible to understand, making your mind behave like a skittish colt. You finally give up and turn away with a sense of failure, suspecting that if you had tried harder you might have reached the golden truth. Only there is no golden truth. It is all dense verbiage, with no reason to exist except itself.
His 2020 Summit, stacked with whiteboards and McKinseyite facilitators, was a prime example of bureaucracy syndrome, with much talking and nothing happening.
Bureaucratism obfuscates with jargon that is impossible to understand, making your mind behave like a skittish colt. You finally give up and turn away with a sense of failure, suspecting that if you had tried harder you might have reached the golden truth. Only there is no golden truth. It is all dense verbiage, with no reason to exist except itself.
Now you might have forgotten that we're on a Freudian detective hunt, but the cunning private dick will begin to sense that the mother of all ranters is heading towards a serious issue here. Talk of golden truth is getting us closer to the heart of darkness and despair, even if we've had to wade through a thicket or two of dense verbiage with no reason to exist except itself and the column that must be written:
Bureaucratism operates by adding layers of complexity to a problem so that much time and effort can be spent on assembling the architecture of that complexity and then solving the problems created by that architecture. You become so caught up in solving the human resources issues or occupational health and safety concerns or constructing risk analysis that the original problem is rendered meaningless.
Take the consultant called in recently to define the "strategy and objectives" of a big metropolitan rail network project. He told me he was stuck with senior management who thought safety was their first priority, "ahead of moving an ever-increasing number of people across the network". He told them the only safe train network is one that has no trains.
Oh indeed, and the only safe plane in which to fly is one that has no pilots. And won't it be great - thanks to this consultant - that train travel in NSW will become ever more problematic as safety is downgraded as we look towards bulk sardine shipping of human cargo. That should work a treat - right up until the next Granville or Waterfall train disaster.
Unless of course you think of being stuck on a train without air conditioning and unopenable windows on a 36 degree centigrade day for a half hour is a tad burdensome (Rees apologises for train breakdowns).
Okay, but we understand that the Devine and her pet consultant most likely don't catch trains or any other form of public transport, and therefore haven't experienced the joys of loonatic bus drivers hurling their vehicles around like former Renault F1 driver Nelson Piquet Jr. looking for the best wall available.
So where are we really heading? Well we start to get tantalizingly close about now:
The Institute of Public Affairs showed recently that state bureaucracies were growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year, as expressed by the cost of state public sector workers. The number of state public servants nationwide has grown from 972,000 in 2000 to 1.2 million last year. They all need something to do, and the results can be seen in the dozens of small ways our lives are burdened with bureaucratism every day.
And then out it comes, the real reason for the inchoate linking of random events in a rant against encroaching bureaucrats, which lacks the charm of the Devine's rant against bicyclists but still has a sense of personal passion about it:
Try getting a passport renewed at Neutral Bay post office. They will have you back and forward retaking photographs to eliminate a shadow or the hint of teeth. Any deviation and your application can be spiked. You cannot collect the application form from the post office. You must download it from the internet and print it out. But woe betide you if the margins are a millimetre too wide. You will be running back and forward to the printer for days. It is like being lost in a Kafka play. There must be people who enjoy such useless activity.
Yes, the Devine has been involved in an incident in the Neutral Bay post office, of extravagant proportions, and as a result of those wretched recalcitrant bureaucrats, we have to suffer her inanity. Because it's payback time:
The main problem with pettyfogging bureaucracy is that it puts immense power in the hands of people who are constitutionally unfit for it. It is evident from early years in the school playground that some people are destined to be paper shufflers. But give them power and they become drunk with it, wielding it not only unwisely but unjustly.
Well you know the main problem with pettifogging journalists and fading mainstream media is that it puts immense power in the hands of people who are constitutionally unfit for it, and consequently deliver an endless stream of tosh, verbiage and blather. This tendency is notable from the earliest years at school where the retards and nerds always run the school magazine, and then when given the power of a newspaper column, they become drunk with it, wielding it not only unwisely and unjustly, but with pernicious personal pleasure, especially when paying back whoever offended them in the Neutral Bay post office.
Wouldn't it have been easier just to make a formal complaint in quadruplicate?
No, no, you simpletons, getting stuck on a train isn't a safety issue, not compared with the problem of getting a passport at a post office, which presages the end of western civilization as we know it:
It may be tempting to think of over-bureaucratisation as a benign, though annoying, malaise that will pass quickly. But one of its strongest early opponents, the US president Ronald Reagan, argued it was as much a threat to liberty as communism. As his biographer Steven Hayward recently told ABC radio's Counterpoint, Reagan believed bureaucratic government, ''undermines self-rule and consent of the governed''.
Governments in Australia, the US and Europe "don't have secret police or concentration camps but they do behave arbitrarily and sometimes … even lawlessly, and are not very accountable to voters. So even in our two-party systems in Western democracies we are governed in some important respects like a one-party state."
You see what you've done, hapless employee(s) of Neutral Bay post office. You've undermined the very foundations of democracy, and taken us deep into the heart of British-inspired totalitarianism. Can the secret police or concentration camps be far away?
What's that you say? Under the Howard government ASIO has expanded relentlessly from a 1000 in 2005 to 1800 employees and growing (ASIO can't be bothered: less accountable, less productive), and razor wire around camps proliferated?
No, they're not stories to be covered, not when there's the Neutral Bay post office to be taken to task in a rambling rant which manages at the end to drag climate change into the mix.
Bizarre, and perhaps this is the conclusive proof there's an urgent need for therapy.
Now if Ms Devine would fill out this form in triplicate, we'd consider allowing her to join the queue for emergency treatment in a public hospital ... once they manage to deal with the train passengers crowding in with heat exhaustion ...
Meantime, just give her the bloody passport renewal. Before the world collapses!
(Below: and a couple more cartoons, and while the Brazilian Wax caper has diddly-squat to do with pettifogging, what the hell Archie, tojours gai).
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.