Vikki Campion: Our money, their frolics for Canberra boffin class
When bureaucrats think tickets to festivals and fuel frolics that have never worked to a commercial scale is money well spent, it speaks to a mindset oblivious to the rest of us, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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There are two Australias: Public Service Canberra and the rest of us. No more was that exposed than this week’s senate estimates, where it was revealed Defence relied on a Virgin Airlines pilot to alert it to a Chinese flotilla live-fire exercise off the coast of Sydney, while the bureaucracy was more interested in frittering away taxes on smoking ceremonies and a week hyping up sexuality to a group who believe sexuality is overhyped in the APS halls.
After all that, they had the gall to congratulate themselves on “responsible fiscal discipline”.
As we face a scale of global challenges unseen since World War II, Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy congratulated the government on its pecuniary acumen. In the same committee rooms two days prior, his fellow secretaries were calling money well spent on fancies such as $52,070 on 10 Garma Festival tickets, and creating content for $17,500-a-year “digiscreens” to spruik, among other things, Asexual Awareness Week.
Take this exchange on how much taxpayers are forking out for someone to light a small smoky fire:
Senator Bridget McKenzie asked Department of Infrastructure Secretary Jim Betts: “It is nearly $50,000 for the 13 ceremonies. Secretary, does that represent value for money for you?”
Mr Betts: “Yes, it does.”
The same department which has not fixed roads that were ripped up in the floods from Eugowra to Lismore; which created a total fiasco in allowing the 3G shutdown to leave phones without signal; calling people’s reception they used to have “fortuitous”; which still hasn’t sealed the third road across Australia saving thousands of kilometres in transport costs when the inevitable diluvial event takes one of the other two out, is all apparently secondary to theextravagance of its internal operations.
But don’t worry, their well paid “diversity champions” are in Canberra and flying from welcome ceremony to welcome ceremony.
It’s incomprehensible that the Department paid more than $8000 in a single day last June on welcome to countries and stood by it as money well spent, without a little bell going off in the form of a live-fire exercise from a totalitarian regime battleship, perhaps on top of a nuclear submarine (our Defence chiefs don’t know) off the coast of Sydney and circumnavigating Australia.
History 101 says regimes are quite happy to take over land if it serves their populations.
Wait for the tears if we were to impose a welcome-to-country wage cut on senior public servants to cover the costs of the ceremonies.
We have agencies, like the ABC, who failed to license Bluey merchandise and make money on a homegrown success, but will spend $1.1m on external legal costs after they hired an activist without checking her social media to ensure she was a fit for the role.
We have the Australian Renewable Energy Agency responsible for $2bn of taxpayers’ money for green hydrogen experiments, whose failed projects remain unaccounted for.
When Senator Perin Davey asked ARENA chief executive Darren Miller about three hydrogen projects that had fallen over, he said the following: “If you would allow me, we’d prefer not to provide a commentary on the specific projects.”
We would prefer, since it’s our money, that you did.
The huge flaw of public service Canberra is that they think the taxpayers’ money is theirs.
We worked for it.
We earned it and shouldn’t work our lives for someone to light up leaves outside a government office.
Dr Kennedy, a highly respected Treasury official, seemed to have a wilful blindness to the sea of spendthrifts rising around him, but he probably thinks in terms of billions, not thousands.
When bureaucrats think tickets to festivals and fuel frolics that have never worked to a commercial scale is money well spent, it speaks to a mindset oblivious to the rest of us.
Payday is merely a gateway, when the money momentarily turns up to be immediately paid on bills, and the money that turns up is not enough to meet the bills that need to be paid.
The government just told us they need to spend $8.5bn on Medicare because people have no money to see a doctor, and then they turn up to defend wasted money on tokenism.
Every spare penny should be going to the threat that is right there off our coast, and if we fail, you won’t be spending anything on a welcome-to-the-countries because it will be in the realm of another nation.
SELLING SHEEP FARMER SUPPORT IN SYDNEY SIMPLY A BA-A-A-AD IDEA
The prospect of the Inner West’s light rail colliding with a woolly jumbuck has been greatly reduced by the meticulous efforts of the Department of Agriculture.
The sigh of relief could be heard as far as yoga studios in Newtown, that the risk of lambs frolicking on bike paths had been completely subdued.
That’s if you believe the Department of Agriculture’s advertising to this demographic, revealed under questioning at senate estimates this week, apparently targeting them about a support package for the end of the live sheep trade in Western Australia.
Either incompetently or mischievously, the support package for sheep farmers is instead being used as a Labor Party advertising campaign, trying to grasp for any straw why they should be re-elected to a constituency that is fading to the Greens.
The point of closing live sheep in WA was always to garner votes in Sydney and Melbourne, so who do they tell about it?
Instead of advertising an assistance package direct to sheep farmers and small businesses in those towns, which could have been done for the cost of hiring a few town halls in WA, our nation’s Department of Agriculture is advertising to prospective voters in Balmain and St Kilda – with $2.3m splashed on propaganda. Meta ad data reveals in 90 days, only $2346 worth of advertising was spent in WA, with the bulk going nearly 4000km away to Sydneysiders and Melburnians.
They were unable to explain how much had been spent in the epicentre of the problem they created.
Why are they advertising in states that former Agriculture Minister Murray Watt claimed would not be affected by the trade closure and to communities that, even if they were, are not eligible for help?
Surely this money would be better appropriated to small businesses in WA that the eastern state crusade has devastated?
LIFTER
Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro for acknowledging veterans instead of traditional custodians of the land at the anniversary of the bombing of Darwin after acknowledgement had already been done once.
LEANER
Foreign Minister Penny Wong, to whom totalitarian regimes shooting missiles off Sydney without warning is no big issue.
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