Let’s face it, these are nonsense jobs

But the states are still spending up big to create them during our worst economic downturn in a ­century.

As government sucks intelligent workers into pointless work, it hobbles the private sector’s scope to generate jobs.

As if the coronavirus hasn’t foisted enough change on us, NSW and Victoria are about to unleash more. Last week alone, during the ­biggest economic downturn in a ­century, the two states were advertising 20 high-paid jobs variously requiring skills in “change, culture, transformation and strategy”, with total salaries above $3.5m.

Pick of the bunch was the $249,000 director of intersectionality and inclusion role at the Victoria Department of Justice, who must, naturally, “provide authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality”.

Also appealing was the $327,000 director of people and culture role at the NSW Department of Education, who should “provide expert strategic advice across a range of strategic priorities”. Familiarity with Sun Tzu’s Art of War is presumably a given.

But it was vocational training giant TAFE NSW that’s at the vanguard of a change revolution, advertising separately for a “change lead”, “change manager”, “change analyst”, “change co-ordinator”, “change specialist” and, the lowest-paid of the group, an “organisational change officer”, making do on $88,000.

The change lead ($194,000), manager ($173,000) and co-ordinator ($119,000) will at least have lots of time for blue-sky thinking with only a change analyst, specialist and officer to oversee.

The NSW Ombudsman, which handles complaints about government, isn’t immune to the change revolution either, seeking (albeit more frugally) its own “change lead” on $164,000 to “develop and embed a strategic approach to change across the Ombudsman”. Perhaps, like obscenity, you know a strategic approach to change when you see it. “The Change Lead will own the single view of change,” the advertisement explained. Talk about ­pressure.

Change is afoot south of the border, too. Victoria’s Environmental Protection Agency and State Revenue Office were luring change experts with $161,000 and $141,000 salaries, respectively. The former would need to “achieve organisation-wide support, enthusiasm, and participation in the changes … including delivery of change solutions (such as) change facilitation, change champions and change leadership”.

One feels for the successful applicant in a #WFH world, having to psyche up colleagues on Zoom call and nurture change champ­ions who may well have the camera option turned off.

Perhaps the SRO change role should be greater paid given the challenge at hand: state taxes have barely changed in 20 years.

Our two biggest state governments would appear to have provided an answer to anthropologist David Graeber’s 2019 book Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It. Answer: not much.

“Economies around the world have become vast engines for producing nonsense,” Graeber writes in a book that delineates five classes of bullshit jobs, of which change roles fit best into “flunkie” and “box ticker” categories. The former “exist to make someone else feel or look important”, the latter “allow organisations to claim they are doing something that in fact it is not doing”.

You might think the tier of government most directly responsible for destroying livelihoods on an unprecedented scale in this country might have the modesty to rein in such profligacy. This is the biggest economic contraction since the national accounts were developed more than 50 years ago. Private sector wages are shrinking for the first time in a generation.

Jobs that are necessary, which arise from real demand from households and businesses, such as accommodation, retail, many professional services, have been wiped out, while those existing purely by fiat, for which no one would pay a cent, flourish.

It’s government arrogance and amorality that justifies such “jobs” — and the extraordinary salaries — in a major recession. It’s not the job creation we need.

Naturally, these advertised roles are just the latest recruits to the massively unproductive standing change, diversity and inclusion army entrenched in the public sector across the country.

In May the NSW Department of Planning hired a “manager, diversity & inclusion strategy” on a salary of $148,134, who would “lead a small, diverse team which is responsible for developing and implementing strategic plans to embed diversity and inclusion” across the department.

Perhaps this crack team is musing over whether brownfield developments are racist.

Meanwhile, as government sucks intelligent workers into the pointless work Graeber identifies, it hobbles the private sector’s scope to generate jobs.

For example, four years after it started negotiations, the Fair Work Commission knocked back an enterprise agreement sought by Swissport for its thousands of ground support staff.

That leaves intact the Airline Operations — Ground Staff Award 2020, which specifies, among other absurdities, that workers be paid $3.19 a week more for every coffin they handle and $5.18 a week if they handle money between $200 and $1000. You might think an industry facing an existential crisis required more flexibility.

Then there’s the Building and Construction On-Site Award, whose mind-blowing complexity makes it a wonder much is built at all. The construction sector is facing the loss of 150,000 jobs by early next year, yet it specifies loadings for working at different heights, in different types of weather.

And, a personal favourite, employees “who are regularly required to compute or estimate quantities of materials in respect of the work performed by other employees must be paid an additional 23.3 per cent of the hourly standard rate per day or part thereof”.

At least they are being paid more for something that need to be done, unlike the “change” army.