Public servant’s cryptic ‘enemies’ post after election result criticised
A planning bureaucrat sacked from his $644K-a-year job by Dominic Perrottet has criticised after making a cryptic post on LinkedIn seeming to cheer the outgoing premier’s defeat at the election.
NSW
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A politically correct planning bureaucrat who was dumped from his $644,850-a-year job by Dominic Perrottet has been accusedof “bad taste” after making a cryptic online post which seemed to cheer the outgoing premier’s defeat at Saturday’s election.
On Sunday Jim Betts, who is secretary of the federal Department of Infrastructure, posted to LinkedIn a quote by the ancientChinese military strategist Sun Tzu: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
Sources in the government and planning industries slammed the comment, with one saying, “assuming that this was about DomPerrottet, it’s in pretty bad taste and not even appropriate.”
“It’s a slight on a person who even Chris Minns considered a good premier,” the source said.
This source noted the post was ironic given that “the biggest issue that drove the voting on the weekend was Millennials who had been locked out of the housing market … (yet) the person who ran down housing approvals was Jim Betts.”
Mr Betts is no stranger to controversy. In 2005 he moved from London to Melbourne to head Victoria’s public transport system and was referred to as “Melbourne’s wackiest public servant”.
In 2015, The Daily Telegraph reported that taxpayers spent $70,000 moving Mr Betts from Victoria when he came to Sydney to take over Infrastructure NSW in 2013, something which then-Opposition leader Luke Foley branded a “scandal”.
In 2021, Mr Betts came under heavy criticism when it was revealed that as head of the Department of Planning, Mr Betts told a summit on housing supply that the idea there was a housing crisis was “a slogan as much as anything.”
Those comments put Mr Betts in the firing line of NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham, who called him “a frustrated politicianmasquerading as a bureaucrat (who is) full on identity politics.”
“There isn’t an LGBTIQ staff committee, harmony council, reconciliation talkfest, de-gendered language guide, Bruce Pascoebook club or Indigenous urban design fantasy that Betts hasn’t embraced,” Mr Latham said at the time.
Mr Betts was later slated to become the state’s most powerful bureaucrat as head of the Department of Premier and Cabinetby then-premier Gladys Berejiklian. However she left office before he took the post and Mr Perrottet sacked him before hisfirst day on the job.
The Daily Telegraph has sought comment from Mr Betts via the Department of Infrastructure.
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Originally published as Public servant’s cryptic ‘enemies’ post after election result criticised
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