Priorities as always inside Treasury, a department that’s continuing its obsession with cultural realignments.
A year ago, we wrote of the 26-page guidelines that Treasury bosses issued to staff encouraging their use of gender-neutral language in ordinary conversations around the office.
Best practice, the Treasury bosses argued, would be to start those conversations with “they” or “them” when meeting a colleague for the first time, or at least until the preferred pronouns had been established. Words like “mother” or “father”, the guidelines said, were better replaced with “parent”. Yeesh.
Consistent with this piss-taking, Treasury leaders on Thursday unveiled yet another series of modules and edicts for their hapless staff.
We’re talking about nearly 16 hours of video and online learning clickables being force-fed to Treasury bureaucrats, to the people trying to soften up underlying inflation – currently at an unpleasantly high 3.5 per cent – so the RBA might chip a few bips off the official interest rate one day.
And this latest KPI? An Indigenous re-education course of exhausting length and breadth with a discernible Z-axis of wokeness.
Announced by Acting Secretary Victoria Anderson, this “learning journey” is a “key deliverable under the Enterprise Agreement and Reconciliation Action Plan”.
There’s a TED Talk from Bruce Pascoe on Aboriginal people as the first agriculturalists, even though his thesis – that Aboriginal people were sophisticated farmers – has been thoroughly taken apart by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Dr Keryn Walshe.
There are “mob talks” and lists of words that are allowed (and not allowed) to be used anymore. The term “Aboriginal” is out because it’s not inclusive enough, unless it’s paired with the word “people” or “peoples”. Saying Indigenous “can be offensive”, so watch out there, too.
There are anti-racist videos on “unconscious bias” and “stereotypes”, others on “keeping languages alive”, and reading material on “bias hot spots” and “building inclusion through the power of words”. There’s a section devoted to Mabo Day, the Mabo decision and instructions for how to commemorate Mabo Day, for those interested.
Is this really what Treasury officials want to hang around their necks while the country continues its economic decline, staggering as it is into its 13-straight month of interest rates at 13-year highs of 4.35 per cent, with productivity growing at a whimpering 0.5 per cent annually?
When Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy endorsed the absurdity of pronoun-checking around the office, it seemed fair to ask if that fixation had veered too far off course from the core business of reviving the post-pandemic economy. Clearly not for Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who wouldn’t speak a word against it whenever we asked. You can only wonder how much Judith Butler is sitting on his bedside table.
The First Nations Cultural Learning Journey Map, as it’s been dubbed by Treasury, begs a similar question of priority within the department. The cardigans are already performing Acknowledgements of Country at nearly every meeting they attend.
But who knows? Maybe there’s no better time for Treasury’s people to be kicking back and watching TEDxYouth Talks about the “great history of Australian Aboriginal Astronomy”, as they’ve been prescribed.
If only star navigation could lead us out of the economic palaver.
Can’t buy me love
What kind of CEO – or future CEO – would think of ripping up a cheque?
The answer can be found in a radio segment put to air by Fifi Box, Brendan Fevola and Nick Cody on their Fox FM show this week.
A listener called into the station hinting at a very well-recognised corporate figure as she spoke of a torrid story about her “meddling mother” interfering in one of her relationships dating back almost 40 years.
This caller said she was 17 when she started dating a guy — the future executive — who “played footy and stuff”. Her mother – overbearing, intrusive – took to rifling through the fellow’s bags in search of any “evidence” of infidelity, which she never found.
Undeterred, the mother tried another tactic, the caller said. “She wrote him a cheque for $5000 to break up with me.”
And break up they did, although the bloke never banked the cheque and he actually tore it up into pieces, according to the account provided live on air. Who said chivalry is dead?
When they later reconciled and moved in together, the mother once again tried to derail their romance, even hiring a PI to “get evidence” on this poor chap. For what purpose? Who knows.
Anyway, the couple broke up for the last time when the meddling finally “got too much”. But you must be wondering: who was this high-profile dude of noble countenance?
According to the caller, he ended up leading one of the nation’s biggest airlines. And no, it wasn’t Alan Joyce. Come on, do we really need to say why?
“The shame of it all is he was the CEO of Virgin Australia right up until Covid hit,” the caller lamented, effectively outing Paul Scurrah as the ex-boyfriend who was hounded away.
In the narrow field of recent Virgin CEOs, Scurrah is identifiable for leaving the company just after Covid-19 sent the country on a frenzy of sourdough-making.
Incidentally, he was featured in the Fin Review this week talking about his adoration of the AFL and confirmed that he used to play for the Richmond U19s.
“So I could have ended up married to this great, wealthy man – and she ruined it,” the caller said of her mother.
The Scurrah postscript is that Virgin collapsed into administration during the pandemic when the airline was sold to Bain Capital. Its leader, Mike Murphy, backed Scurrah to remain in the role but then unexpectedly appointed Jayne Hrdlicka as CEO.
And she remains spectre-like in the position despite resigning in February, the airline’s succession plans dragging out as tortuously as that of Gillon McLachlan’s tooth-pulling abdication from the AFL.
But the cheque torn asunder, the private detective, the three-and-a-half years together … is any of this actually true?
Scurrah wouldn’t comment, but we’re led to believe recollections may vary widely.
The perils of live radio, eh? And we mean that in more ways than one.
More wrongs than rights at the AHRC?
A case of curious priorities over at the Australian Human Rights Commission where hand-picked appointee Giridharan Sivaraman seems to prefer playing politics over action on anti-Semitism.
Freehills partner given notice over synagogue tweet
Herbert Smith Freehills leaders have voted to remove one of its longstanding partners, Damien Hazard, over a ‘deeply offensive’ tweet targeting Jeremy Leibler.