FALLEN GOVERNMENTS SUBJECT themselves to a panoply of rituals.
After the sackcloth and rending of garments comes the obligatory documentary featuring former big beasts recounting great deeds, tales of ritual blood-letting (visited upon colleagues) and gilded phrases from their forthcoming memoirs.
Then comes the moment of truth: where did this political Titan go wrong, what struck them low, how could they have avoided the calamity and humiliation of their electoral sacking?
As the camera closes in for a tight shot to capture a molecule of celluloid honesty, our hero always utters the same response:
- “I should have consulted more widely.”
- “I could have listened more closely to people in the real world rather than public servants and the hot house of policy advisors.”
- “I think we lost touch … blah, blah, bah”
It would be easy to condemn our pollies. And yet, they are overwhelmingly honest, diligent and hardworking.
OK, in rare cases they are venal, power hungry bullies – such as when asked why he raised property taxes, one state treasurer replied “because I can”. Another told us he would squeeze the property sector until the “pips squeaked”.
More often, they don’t want to risk looking weak as they’re locked into a course of action, or are simply overwhelmed by the sort of advice that would furrow the brow of your average taxi driver. Other times, pollies simply panic in the face of an unrelenting media cycle.
It’s common these days to complain about ‘career politicians’ with little feel for real world issues and circumstances. There’s some truth to this insight. However, the bigger problem is bureaucratic advisors who despise and distrust the private sector.
The policy world would be a better, more rounded place if every senior bureaucrat enjoyed a secondment to the private sector, or even a non-government community organisation, for at least 12 months before they entered the senior executive service.
The Property Council’s approach is always to provide solutions to problems, present the evidence, avoid overreaching or gilding the lily, and seek to resolve issues away from the glare of the media.
Nevertheless, in more than 20 years of advocacy, this lobbyist has rarely won the industry’s case on the back of a rational argument.
A telling anecdote is generally as powerful as a truckload of econometric analysis.
For instance, after years of submissions and inquiries, the liberalisation of trading hours in Queensland was secured when we presented the Premier with a map of greater Brisbane revealing the absurd patchwork of extended and restricted hours by suburb.
The truth is that politicians need both a good reason (the evidence) and a real reason (an emotional, political Gordion knot slicer) to bunk their advisors.
The most enduring feature of policy mismanagement is faux consultation.
Overwhelmingly, bureaucrats hate consultation. It exposes their dogmas to testing questions.
Not for them the rigors of the reporting season to which major companies are subjected each six months. At least politicians go to the people every few years.
Consultation exposes the weakest link of modern policymaking - staggeringly amateurish project management by bureaucrats.
Just last week, a government figure told the Property Council that we should acknowledge his department’s expertise on a matter, given they’d been working on it for years.
He didn’t twig to the reality that they’d made a meal of every aspect of the legislation.
Indeed, the fact that they’d ignored industry’s advice at every turn while aping mini-me legislative Frankensteins should have sounded alarm bells that rang louder than your typical AC/DC concert.
The recent extension of the NABERS rating system from five to six stars is another example of Clayton’s consultation.
This process was a textbook example of the fait accompli school of consultation that effectively crippled the logic and integrity of an industry-endorsed system for the sake of a quick ‘announceable’.
As we observed to the media, “six stars for intentions, no stars for collaboration”.
The latest example of Dr Suess policymaking is the so called ‘lighting tool’ that will accompany the NABERS base building rating required to comply with the mandatory disclosure regime for the leasing or sale of office buildings.
For starters, no sane person believes that a potential lessee or purchaser of buildings will be influenced by the lighting tool’s Nominal Lighting Power Density metric. Hello … ??
However, in the parallel universe of consultation that was established to test industry views, the relevant government department won’t even allow the members of its consultation panel to vote on whether the tool will meet the goals of the mandatory disclosure legislation – which we support!
To make matters worse, the department took 10 months to cobble together the rules for the tool, leaving industry only 10 weeks to comply.
The Government is also nonchalantly unconcerned that there are only a handful of approved assessors to rate hundreds of buildings before the 1 November start date for this wonky tool.
Ministers need to insist their bureaucrats professionalise policymaking and legislative efforts by moving to a new era of world class project management, or start rehearsing their lines for the inevitable documentary, which should be called “(insert name of government) – deja vu all over again”.
Peter Verwer |
Thursday, 1 September 2011 9:32 AM |
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