Theodore Dalrymple nails it again

This is a great commentary on how governments blow our money. Do read the whole things, but this for me is the money quote:

It is now quite beyond the mental resources of the British government and its administration to distinguish between the worthwhile and the worthless, the important and the trivial, investment and frittering, even should it wish to do so. (We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous.) Capital expenditure is not the same as investment, as many communist countries, with high levels of such expenditure, found to their cost: or should I say, to their people's cost. This is not a new observation.

Let us take the question of school buildings, upon which some small part of extra expenditure will be spent. (I leave aside the interesting but irrelevant question whether British architects are by now capable of designing and building anything other than gimcrack eyesores.)

It is, or should be, obvious that school walls do not an education make. The reasons for our low standards are no doubt complex, though they include the radically unsocialised nature of many children when they enter school, thanks in part, but not exclusively, to the government policy of encouraging and subsidising family disintegration; the idiotic pedagogic theories long peddled in teacher training colleges and put into practice by educational bureaucrats; and government bullying of the teaching profession, by means of the imposition of meaningless, absurd and easily corruptible procedural outcomes. Bad school buildings would have to be very bad indeed - a straw hut in Antarctica, say – before children could not be taught to read in them.

Funnily enough, from the other side of the political divide, comes this commentary from Maralyn Parker in the Daily Telegraph:

There is almost a Gilbert and Sullivan farce-type edge to what is unfolding. Today or tomorrow NSW public schools will get a memo telling them the old departmental ways have been ditched. Gone are lengthy applications, endless site meetings, confinement to certain contractors or tradespeople _ the notorious procurement policy.

Schools will be encouraged to make local decisions _ the quicker the better. And that wish list is now a to do list.

The Commonwealth will take back any money that is not spent on time _ even if a job is half done.

And pigs might fly. The chances of a bureaucracy like the state education bureaucracy rolling back onerous procurement policies are somewhere between nil and non-existant. The same goes for all the "community consultations", environmental impact statements (how much CO2 will be involved in putting up this school hall?), inclusiveness impact statements, social justice impact statements and so on.

The same goes for decentralising decision making to the schools. The only way to get the head office bureaucrats off the backs of the schools is the reduce the size of head office by 90%. That is, sack a lot of people.

Not an assault landing

Many years ago, when I was a wee tacker, my parents took the family to the UK so that we could discover why our ancestors emigrated - the visit was timed for winter, since it is easier and cheaper to get around, and that suited my folks down to the ground.

I was having a look at the photos at 1.618 tonight and noticed one that reminded me a lot of St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. The fortress is linked to the mainland by a causeway that is only accesible at low tide.

The reason I remember this place so well is that Dad had somehow organised a private visit with the owner (although the place is now owned by the National Trust, the St Aubyn family still lives there), and the head of the St Aubyn clan picked us up in his DUKW (scroll right down to see a great photo of a pack of DUKWs).

It was very cool to make the crossing in a DUKW - especially since it was December, and the wind there howls straight in off the Atlantic. I think the owner loved showing off his favourite toy, and it was a blast to cross the swells and land on the rocky shore of the Mount. That was nearly 30 years ago, and I still remember viewing the fantastic collection of arms and instruments of torture that the family had collected.

I'm not sure if it is very PC these days to display instruments of torture, but when people rave on about the evils of Guantanamo, I think back to the thumb screws and iron maidens and other nasty bits of kit that they had on display.

I wonder if that old duck and his old DUKW are still running, whether his kids have the same interest in it that he did, and whether my kids will ever get the opportunity to do something like that.

"Action for public transport" - what a bunch of dopes

The SMH runs two lovely stories today - one linking the disastrous fires in Victoria to global warming, and another on class warfare, entitled "Wealthy commuters shun public transport".

Apparently, I am one of those evil wealthy commuters that chooses to drive to work rather than catch a bus.

COMMUTERS in some of Sydney's inner and middle-ring suburbs are choosing to drive to work in almost the same numbers as their outer-suburban counterparts despite having easy access to the CBD by public transport.

Easy access? You call a meandering bus service that usually takes an hour, and sometimes an hour and a half to travel 8km, as "easy access"? Fuck you, you clowns.

Figures released yesterday by the NSW Transport Data Centre shows that about 50 per cent of workers in the Hunters Hill, Canada Bay, Lane Cove, Randwick and Mosman local government areas were electing to drive to work at the time of the 2006 census.

Well, golly gee. Maybe these people, like those in outer areas, don't work in places served by public transport. Maybe, just maybe, they don't work in the city, which is where all the bus routes go. I am working in Frenchs Forest at present - to get there by public transport would require at least 2 hours and 3 buses and a train trip. These people have all the common sense of a blow up doll.

Despite living a relatively short bus ride from the heart of the city, 54 per cent of Hunters Hill residents elected to drive to work, the figures show, while only 10 per cent caught the bus.

Dickheads. It is not a "short bus ride". It is not direct. It goes all over the place like a drunken spastic. I can walk to town in 80 minutes - a time that often beats the bus. I can cycle the long way in 40 minutes - a time that always beats the bus. Why should I catch a bus when I can often get there faster by walking? By car, it is usually 20 minutes or less.

Among the other inner and middle-ring regions, people drove to work in large numbers from the City of Canada Bay (54 per cent), Ku-ring-gai (51), Rockdale (50) Randwick (44), Lane Cove (44), and Mosman (43). The average for all of Sydney was 53 per cent.

In other words, we're just like everyone else, with difuse travel patterns. How surprising! Maybe we have a similar proportion of tradesmen, salesmen and the self employed who need to drive between various jobs each day, carrying tools or supplies or samples. Idiots.

"I think they drive to work because they can afford to," the convener of Action for Public Transport, Kevin Eadie, said.

No fuckface, they drive because the buses are already 110% full. We can't fit anymore fucking people on them. What a fucking tool.

"They've got high disposable incomes and there is a perception that public transport is below them, even if catching a train or a bus is the quicker, cheaper option."

Catching a bus from here is not cheap, and it is not quicker. As much as I dislike being squeezed into a bus with fat, sweaty, stinky blimps, I do not see it as beneath me. It's not pleasant, but I have been through much worse in my life. I can't stand the way many bus drivers throw their buses around like Fangio, making it impossible for me to read. I hate the way they slam on the brakes, which makes it impossible to nap without risking losing your teeth on the seat in front. I hate the way they sometimes never stop for you, even if the bus is almost empty.

Me, I'd rather be riding to work, and I can't stand the fact that I can't ride to my current place of employment. Us rich people are riding bikes, fucko, because it is the best option by far.

Sources of road rage

Don't you just hate knobheads like the driver of this red car on the right, who has shot down the left hand turn lane, only to try and push into the next lane just before the traffic lights?


This twit was screwed by the traffic light phasing - just as they tried to pull in here, the left turn arrow went green. About half a mile of traffic honked at this tool for a good minute. It would be so nice to be allowed to just use the 4WD to push them halfway across the intersection - preferably in front of a fast moving bus.

Sex God

Don't take my word for it - read what's down the bottom of the back of this truck (you might have to blow the photo right up to see what I mean).


I love how the number plate starts with "DAG" though. That's poetic justice.

Riding high above the madness

Photographed on the way to work, in the midst of an enormous traffic jam. I'd much prefer to be up there than stuck down here.

Not burning our money, part III

Bugger, bugger, bugger, poo bum. I spent at least half an hour extending my last post, only to have blogger eat my words. So instead of trying to add to that post again, I'll start with a clean slate.

In the last episodes of my exciting adventures in the public sector, I introduced the amazing characters of Fuckwit, Bozo and Bumbling. They were the troika from hell. The three horse-idiots of the apocalypse.

In this episode, I will try to describe how they turned a rather simple process - that of hiring contract or temporary staff - into a living hell for all concerned.

When I started, the process was pretty simple. We'd hire a contractor for the usual reasons - to cover someone taking a long period of leave, to provide skills we didn't have, or to work on projects when we were too flat out to do them ourselves. My boss would ask a simple set of questions:

1. do we have money left in the budget?
2. do we really need them?
3. how much will they cost? (which also answered how long they would be with us for)

Provided I had the right answers, he'd sign the single bit of paper that I had with me that would approve hiring a contractor of my choice. The bit of paper would roughly state:

"I wish to hire a contractor from company A to perform task B for a period of C days/weeks/months. Their hourly/daily/weekly rate is $D, and they will costs $CxD all up, plus a contingency of 10 or 20%. "

And that was it. If it was below his delegation of $50,000, all I had to do once he signed it was to ring the agency of my choice (from a state government panel) and pick an appropriate person. I'd usually done that in advance of course - I knew that if the need was there, they'd be approved straight away by my boss. He trusted me enough to know that if I asked for something, I wasn't bullshitting him.

Then the clowns got involved in this process. And somewhere along the way, our group acquired a Resource Coordinator. The Big Boss of our group (which at the time of my departure, was around 1,000 staff) decided that because we were employing lots of contractors, we needed someone special to coordinate them all. So a Resource Coordinator was recruited from an employment agency, and that was that.

As soon as the Coordinator had found her seat, I was standing there with a request for a contractor. When I dealt directly with an agency, I would normally call my agency of choice and chat with them about the sort of person I wanted. After 10 minutes of to and fro, we'd agree on the requirements, and I would dash off an email to that effect, formalising the sort of person they were going to look for (a mate of mine in HR used to simply specify "blonde, with big tits").

The Coordinator was fresh from an agency, and that was the way she operated too. We chatted for 10 minutes, confirmed what I wanted, and then she picked up the phone and started calling agencies on the state contract panel.

By the time I had left the building, the Clowns had become involved. They told her off for being so presumptuous. By the time I returned to my desk in another building, there was a message from the Clowns stating that I had to supply a formal Position Description (PD) for this job.

That was news to all concerned. The Coordinator refused to write it point blank - it was not in her PD to write such things, and no one had mentioned it in her job interview. Things blew up, and were escalated up the management hierarchy. Managers in the chain of command were also confused, as they had never before seen a requirement to write a PD for contractors at this level.

After a bit of yelling, it transpired that the Clowns had simply decided that it was time for a change, so they had invented the requirement on the fly, but hadn't bothered to tell anyone that things had changed. It was a change known only to themselves. By using words such as "probity" and "corruption" and "excellence", they managed to cower all the managers who objected to it, and their requirement stayed.

So I wrote the PD. It ended up being three pages. Of that, 2.9 pages consisted of the usual rubbish about EEO, OH&S, ethical behaviour and so on, and my two line description of what I wanted. My description was so short, it was sent back because the Clowns had missed it. They thought I had sent them an empty PD. I had to explain to them that the skills I required could be listed in about 10 words, and that anything more was useless padding.

Since their entire lives and careers consisted of useless padding, this was something they found hard to accept, and they insisted that I add more words. I fought back, saying that was all it took to communicate my needs, and that I would not add frivolous requirements just because they wanted a PD that was 4 pages long instead of 3.

Eventually, they accepted my PD, and the Coordinator once again picked up the phone and started calling agencies.

After two phone calls, the Clowns were onto her again. She did not have approval to call any agencies. A Submission had to be written and approved before she could phone any agencies.

Again, this was news to all concerned. The usual process was this:

1. size the task, estimate the number of days or weeks to complete it
2. work out the skills required to perform the task
3. call an agency and discuss the rates of people with the appropriate skills
4. use those rates to work out a rough budget that you could then use when discussing the work with your boss.

My boss would never accept me asking for a contractor unless I had a good idea of what that contractor would cost - in advance. But here were the Clowns, telling me that I could not make a phone call to find out what the current market rate was, so how could I come up with a total cost?

This presented a chicken and egg conundrum that they had not expected. For once, the Clowns actually huddled for a few days and talked to each other in an effort to solve it.

Here is their solution - we were allowed to call agencies to sound out market rates, but only in an unofficial capacity. They were not even sure if we could call from a work telephone. Until we had approval in written form, we could make no official contact with an agency.

The first time I met this pair, I walked away thinking they were short a few roos in the top paddock. It was quickly becoming clear that they were short more than just a few.

So I unofficially sounded out an agency, got a rate I was comfortable with and wrote a submission stating that I wanted approval to get quotes from some agencies for a certain task.

The Clowns rejected it, because how could I possibly know that the agencies would be asking the rate that I had specified in my submission?

As you can imagine, I swore a lot when that happened. Although my boss had his office in the opposite corner of our floor, he (along with another 100 staff) could hear me venting at the Clowns. He walked over to see what the fuss was about (since I never lost it in the office), and before you knew it, he had picked up my phone, dialed a Clown and was swearing at him at the top of his lungs.

That made me feel better.

They accepted my submission.

Now I worked with about two dozen other managers who had to jump through the same hoops as me, and we all regularly communicated about how we were getting along. As soon as they knew I had successfully navigated the shoal of Clowns, they asked for a copy of my submission and PD so that they too could follow in my footsteps.

The Clowns of course immediately rejected all their submissions, because they were "not in the appropriate format". Questions were asked as to what the appropriate format was, since mine was the only one that had ever been produced up until that point, and it had passed muster. Since theirs were an exact copy of mine, how could their submissions not be in the "appropriate format"?

The response was that they were not happy with mine, it had only been passed under sufferance, and they were working on a new template. When pressed for when they would deliver it, they replied "in about 6 months".

Predictably, people exploded at that point.

So the Coordinator picked up the phone, now armed with a PD and approved submission (in an inappropriate but passable format) and started calling agencies.

The Clowns once again stepped in - only they were authorised to deal with agencies. Even though her PD stated that it was her job to deal with agencies, and there was nothing in the Clown's PD to indicate talking to agencies, they had decided on the spur of the moment that only they could do so.

The Coordinator blew up at this point, and stormed off to see our Big Boss. The Big Boss caved in to the noxious demands of the Clowns, so the Coordinator quit on the spot. As far as I know, that position was never re-advertised, and is still vacant to this day. She quit in such a towering rage, spewing so much invective in all directions, that the job has been cursed forever.

I would normally call three agencies and ask for 2-3 resumes from each - and no more.

The Clowns had different ideas.

There were forty agencies on the state contracts panel. They wanted to issue a formal tender, 30 pages in length, to all forty agencies, asking for an unlimited number of resumes that met my requirements.

I could immediately picture a stack of 400 resumes, from which I would have to find my contractor. It took me a week to talk some sense into them - 3 agencies, no more than 5 resumes each. The Clowns went pale at this idea - Bozo took another week to get written arse coverage that this idea would not land him in jail. He talked to our internal legal staff, then to lawyers at the Public Works Dept (who administer the contract panels) and finally the Attorney General's Department. He wanted each to give him written authority to proceed.

He was completely off his rocker.

Finally, the 30 page tenders went out, with my 3 page PD attached, with its two lines of appropriate information. The tenders were a waste of time, since the agencies had already completed much more onerous tenders to get onto the panel in the first place. Bozo was asking them to provide the same information again, and predictably, the agencies were not impressed. He saw no problem with asking them to waste hours pulling all that information together for a second time, and he also saw no problem with doing this every time we wanted to find a contractor!

The agencies of course all rang me straight away to ask, "What the fuck?", and I simply directed them to the appropriate two lines in the PD - which they had missed, since the only information relevant to them was buried in 33 pages of bumpf.

Bozo would not let me see even a single resume until all the agencies had replied. On the big day, he handed me a thin stack, and I went to work.

I was expecting 15 resumes, but he only gave me 10. On top of that, I had been chatting with the agencies, and they had all told me informally who the best people were. Their resumes were all missing.

When I asked Bozo about the missing resumes, he finally admitted that he had culled them himself. When I questioned the grounds for culling them, it turned out that he thought that they were "too technical".

Which of course is just the sort of people I was looking for. After threatening to tear his precious filing cabinet apart in a search for them, he relented and handed them over.

I stood in front of him, flicked through them and handed one back. "I want this person".

Bozo just looked at me with his mouth agape. After a few speechless seconds, he told me that I had to write a tender review package, which he then had to review and approve. Once the review package was approved, I could formally review the resumes with my panel.

Panel?

Yes, I had to review them with two other people, to ensure probity.

So I wrote the review package, got it approved, and proceeded to fiddle with the weightings and essential and desirable criteria to cull all but three candidates. The review package consisted of a spreadsheet with multiple worksheets, each compiling and weighting and averaging certain criteria. By the time that was over, two of the prime contractors had a job elsewhere, so we only interviewed the third. They were acceptable, so I then told Bozo that I wanted that person.

Not so fast. I now had to formally document the findings of my review by writing a report, collect signatures from the other panel members on that report, have the report reviewed and approved, and write yet another submission to approve engaging that contractor.

Each step took a few days, since Bozo always found some reason for rejecting all paperwork on the first pass. He often rejected things twice. The first time, he would insist on a certain change, then he would insist that the change be reverted to the original, since he had changed his mind about that clause in the interim.

By the time my submission was approved, my contractor had a job elsewhere. So did all the others.

We had to start again - another round of resumes from the agencies. One agency spat the dummy, so we had to find another - and that required another submission to vary the initial submission so that we could deal with another agency.

The paperwork was starting to pile up at this point.

So were the complaints from the people who were relying on that contractor to do work for them. One really angry manager came over to call me all sorts of names, threatening to outsource the work that us "useless c&^ts" couldn't perform. I told him that I had no problem with him outsourcing the work - except that he would be forced to follow the processes laid down by the Clowns.

He laughed at that, so I took him through the 3 inch thick file on my desk that related to him, showing him every bit of paper I had produced and redrafted and had approved, plus all the emails that had flown back and forth, plus the file notes that I had made of phone conversations (and I never, ever made file notes until the Clowns made me decide now was the time to start).... and then I showed him the other stack of files that I was also dealing with, each of which had an angry customer like him on the end of it.... and at the end of it, the poor bastard was in tears. Tears of fury and disgust.

But we persevered, went though the whole thing again, and this time managed to nab about the 9th most suitable candidate, who turned out ok in the end.

The sad thing is, this is not the whole of it. I have left certain parts out, as I am too weary to document them. The Clowns made our lives a complete misery. You see, buried in parts of the public sector, there are people that care, and see it as their job to make a difference. You have managers in the health department who understand that their job is to make it easier for others to turn sick people into healthy people. In the education department, there are those who strive to assist others to teach children. In the RTA, there are those who want us to have a better road system.

And then there are the Clowns and their ilk. They manage to insinuate themselves into certain critical points where they can essentially bring an entire, multi-billion dollar agency to a grinding halt. And they are unmovable. They can take a simple, two hour exercise and turn it into something that ties up half a dozen managers for months. They regularly derail, disrupt and damage project after project, frustrating suppliers, contractors and employees in the process. I am sure they have also bankrupted plenty of businesses along the way.

They are psychopaths of the first order, but we don't see them as such because they are wearing grey cardigans and plain, polyester shirts with short sleeves. They tend to be grey, mousy little men who live with their mothers. Some are still virgins in their forties. They are sick, bent, twisted individuals who only have one passion in life, and that is in seeing other people suffer at their hands.

When Rudd told us last year that he was working the public service hard, I had a good long laugh. I remembered the Clowns, and all the unnecessary, useless work they made us do, which resulted in long hours for some of us as we battled to get things done. We'd think we had done what was required, only for them to make last minute changes, negating all our work and putting us back to square one. I believe Rudd had the public service doing the paper shuffling equivalent of digging holes and filling them in again - all very busy and time consuming, but not terribly productive.

I just know that if I see the Clowns again, I will shoot on sight.

Not burning our money, part II

In this post, I will focus on two clowns that I will call Bozo and Bumbling - I had to deal with them on all contracts that exceeded a certain value - I think it was $100,000. The two sat together at a single workstation with no partition between them. However, they refused to talk to each other, and communicated only by email or memo.

If I went to visit Bozo to discuss some aspect of a contract, he would talk to me as if Bumbling was not there, saying that he would have to take this up with Bumbling after I left - even though Bumbling was sitting there listening in.

Bumbling could not be enticed to join the conversation unless I ended my "meeting" with Bozo, at which point Bumbling would schedule five minutes for me to see him - generally in about two weeks time, and always in the middle of a meeting that he knew I couldn't get out of.

Although they worked on the same contracts and supposedly used the same policies and procedures, they could always be relied upon to contradict each other and sow endless confusion within the ranks. They were roundly hated by one and all.

I had to attend a project meeting every week with another bunch of managers, and we'd discuss our progress (or lack of it) at these meetings. A continual stumbling block for everyone was these two clowns. During one particularly exasperating meeting, one manager explained how Bozo had told her that say a purple X-41 form now had to be filled in as part of the contract approval process, which caused another manager to pipe up and say that Bozo had told him that morning that the X-41 was not to be used ever again under any circumstances.

At that point, I suggested we call Bozo. The first manager got him on the speakerphone, and we all sat back silently. He told her that the purple X-41 was now mandatory, and had to be completed for every project. She thanked him and hung up. The other manager then took the phone and called Bozo again. We all listened in some amazement as Bozo now told him that the purple X-41 was superceded, and not to be used ever again.

The manager of this group sat there slightly stunned for about 10 seconds, then blew a fuse and stomped off to tear Bozo a new arsehole. For the previous 6 months, he'd had to listen as we all told him how these two had been giving us the run around, and until then, he really didn't believe us. Usually, we'd tell him that Bozo had told us one thing, which we had done, but when we gave the file to Bumbling, he'd blow up and ask us why we had done something so stupid. For him to hear Bozo contradict himself within a 2 minute time period was just too much.

When Bozo was confronted not 5 minutes after these two calls, he denied everything - even talking to those two managers, even though a dozen of us had been listening in. The clowns certainly had a lot of front. In the state sector, you can get away with this sort of crap on a regular basis. We all knew that if he got the shove, the unions would be called in 1 minute later, and all of us would spend the next 6 months in an out of the arbitration commission, arguing over the minutae of conversations, and in the end, his lawyers would convince us that we were confused, rather than the clowns.

By a stroke of fate, the two clowns would end up reporting to that manager a few months later, and he did all he could to get rid of them - but in the end, he failed. They wore him down, and went back to their stupid old ways. None of their processes were documented or flowcharted, so no one could tell when they were being led up the garden path. The first thing that manager did was to bring in a process engineer, who sat with them for a month in an attempt to work out what they did.

After a month, the process engineer quit in disgust. They pulled the same stunt on her. They'd have a talk about a process, she'd document it as described, and in their next meeting, they would flatly deny everything they'd told her. I advised her to tape the meetings as a precaution against this - something she found preposterous at the start, but something she tried just before the end, only to see the two clowns walk out of the meeting as soon as the tape recorder was switched on. That was it for her.

I really don't know what their problem was. I suspect a lot of it had to do with there being two people doing the job of about 1/3 of an efficient employee. It was in their interests to make their jobs look as difficult and time consuming and confusing as possible, thus guaranteeing their future employment.

I usually spent my meetings with management pushing for both of them to be sacked for their appaling behaviour, but that was just too hard to contemplate. Much easier to delay, frustrate and damage millions of dollars worth of projects, as well as waste the time of rather expensive managers and staff, than sack the clowns.

I am still writing this. I had to publish it partway through due to some Blogger error. Come back for more later if you are still reading.

aa

Not burning our money

I wrote recently about an example of how the public sector burns our tax dollars. Now comes an example of how difficult it can be to burn money - and why talk of a "stimulus" often turns out to be just "talk".

The agency I worked for spent about half a billion a year on capital works. Our section got about $20 million of that, and my share in any given year was usually around $2-4 million.

We worked on a financial year of July to June, so in about January, the budget bean counters in Finance would ask us for our budget forecasts for the following financial year. Our management team would find a room with a big whiteboard, organise some coffee, and do a bit of brain storming to work out our capital bids.

All the managers would rock up with their wish list of pet projects, and we'd then rank and rate them using a simple matrix like this:


Obviously, our matrix was much bigger, often having 50 or more projects that someone or another would deem worthy of being fed by our tax dollars. Fuckwit, who I have blogged about before, would present a list of utterly ridiculous and inane projects, usually as a result of him being sold an idea by a salesman that week, or from him reading about a Bright Shiny New Idea in a magazine.

The only way to keep his mitts off your money was to cancel all his magazine subscriptions, and to banish him to somewhere like Mudgee, where salesmen would never find him. He was the greatest fadist I have ever met. No fad was too useless and ridiculous for him.

Here's the way the matrix works. You are comparing pairs of items, and giving them a score of 1 (we prefer this item) or 0 (we don't prefer this item). After working through the matrix, you total up the scores, and the item with the highest score is top ranked.

For example, the first pair to compare is a fridge vs air conditioner. The fridge is preferred, so it gets a score of 1, and the air con gets 0. And so on. If it wasn't for Fuckwit, the process would have only taken an hour or so. He could make it extend for the better part of a day.

This technique is taught on some of the more useful MBA courses, so if you are a manager faced with a plethora of competing priorities, this is a good way to do a brain dump and crystallise your thinking and show how you should be moving forward vis-a-vis your strategic direction in the context of your visioning environment. Blah blah blah. Out of all the management crap that I have been fed over my career, this matrix is one of the few gems that has produced any value at all.

So after a day of argument, usually 5 of us ganging up on Fuckwit to shoot down his stupid ideas, we'd have a clear consensus on what we wanted to do the following year. We had a rough idea of how much money we could ask for, so we'd start at the top and price up each project, and work our way down the list until we ran out of our notional budget. If we reckoned we'd get $10 million, and each project was going to cost $500,000, we'd ask for 20 projects. If the big boss came back and said we could get more money, we'd look at our list and add more projects in ranked order until the budget bucket was filled. If the budget was being cut, we'd simply lop off the lowly ranked projects.

Knowing the ranking of each project removed all argument when the amount of money in the budget bucket went up and down - we had all participated in the ranking process, so we didn't have to revisit it to add or remove projects. It also made it easy to sell our list of preferred projects to our staff, because they could understand the logic that had been applied to create the list.

Every group has a few moaners, who always think that their managers are a bunch of clueless monkeys, but once they were shown the matrix, they generally agreed that we had managed to descend from the trees for a short period and produce something halfway sensible, and earned our ration of bananas for the day.

If only our political class used a similar system for determining how they blow our money on their pet projects.

By the end of January, we'd have submitted our bid to the bean counters, and they'd put it in with all the other bids from the other divisions, and they'd spend the next few months sorting and deliberating and arguing and so forth, and then they'd go to Treasury to present the bid for the entire agency, and then once Treasury gave them a number, they'd come back and tell us what we were getting.

Around June 30, we'd be madly spending the remains of the budget for that year, and wondering how much cash we'd be getting the following financial year. In August, we'd still be waiting. In September, we'd still be waiting. By then, all the projects from last financial year would have finally wound down and been wrapped up, and we'd be cooling our heels in the coffee shop, twiddling our thumbs and looking for things to do. Some would spend the time cleaning up their files, or rearranging the artwork on their office walls, or counting whiteboard markers. I'd usually wrap my projects up long before anyone else, so I'd spend a week or two in the snow, carving first tracks each morning before the lifts opened.

Finally, in October or November, the bean counters would return and tell us what we got. By that point, we had 7 or 8 months left to spend the entire budget allocation for the year.

The first step was to write a Project Brief - a document around 100 pages long - explaining why that project should be approved. You'd think that once money had been put aside for the project, that would be enough. But that was not sufficient to satisfy the paper hungry burecaucrats.

Each year, the brief would get longer and longer, as new requirements were added by this department or that. When I started writing them, they were around 10 pages long. After a few years of Treasury, ICAC and the Premier's Department adding crap, my last one was about 120 pages - and in the scheme of things, that was fairly short! Other groups within our agency had all sorts of additional requirements to meet that we didn't. As you can see by my blog posts, I am a prolific writer, so it took me no time at all to write my briefs (comparatively) - only around a month of total slog, working 6 or 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.

Those public servants who refused to work more than a 35 hour week, and who idled their time away in frivolous meetings, could take 4 or 5 months to produce their briefs.

Fuckwit, who was essentially functionally illiterate, never produced a legible brief in all the time I knew him. Our boss had to write them for him - a case of delegation in reverse. And then our boss got me to polish them, which shat me no end, knowing that Fuckwit was downstairs in the coffee shop, having a smoke and telling everyone on his work provided Blackberry how hard he was working and how stressful his job was.

Once written, these briefs had to be approved. Depending on the amount that we proposed to spend, they might have to go all the way to the CEO for signature, collecting a myriad of other signatures along the way. Six signatures was pretty typical, but I saw some that required as many as 14. Since they could only be approved by someone writing their name in ink, the briefs had to be printed and circulated on paper. For my briefs, here is a typical travel route:

1. me to my boss - same floor, both in building A
   
2. my boss to Finance - travel from building A to building B
3. Finance to Capital Works - travel from building B to building C
4. from Capital Works to the boss of my boss - building C back to building B
5. boss boss to boss boss boss - from one floor in building B to another floor in building B
6. from there, to the Program Office - off to building D
7. from the Program Office back to me - building D to building A
   

Our internal mail system was rubbish, so there was a 1 in 10 chance that the paperwork would get lost travelling between any pair of locations. Of the 8 or so briefs that I would write each year, I'd generally have to reprint half of them to replace lost copies. It was not unknown to have to reprint some 3 or 4 times. It was a really big problem for people in distant offices, who had a 50% chance of losing their paperwork at any given step.

I pitied our CEO, who had to read and approve around 500 of these things each year, some running into 300 or 400 pages. The volume of material meant of course that he never gave them more than a cursory read, so all sorts of crap slipped through. If they'd applied a bit of common sense and kept the briefs down to 1 page, chances are he would have read them properly, and that would have stopped a lot of rubbish from being approved.

No one had the guts to say that the system itself was producing and facilitating bad results - not even our CEO. Rolling back paperwork means reducing bum coverage in case of a disaster, and no one is willing to take that risk.

Bureaucrats above us thought that if they added more requirements and conditions to the briefs, that would filter out a lot of the crap. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, the more stuff that was added, the more likely it was that crap would slip through. Sometimes, the simplest things in life are the best.

So here is our timeline so far - we find out what was approved in October, and then spend a month writing briefs to get a further layer of approvals. They get sent up for approval in November, and come back approved or rejected in December - just in time for everyone to go on holidays for 3 weeks or so.

A sensible person might think that you could save time by starting to write the briefs back in July, before anyone knew what was approved. If you wrote 90% of the briefs before the budget approvals were known, it would only take a week or so to finish them off and put them into the approval process.

Wrong.

Every year, the format of the briefs changed. Sections were added, deleted or moved. Or simply renamed. The font they had to be produced in changed one year. The spreadsheets of financial information that had to accompany each brief also changed. It was easier and less soul destroying to simply twiddle your thumbs for a month or two, rather than write something that would end up being a complete waste of effort. Better to save your energy for the real thing.

Everyone would come back to work in mid January, and we'd start the process of actually running a project. Except that nothing could be done until our approved project was loaded into the project tracking system, and assigned a capital works number. Each required a stack of paperwork, a long wait, and then a number of increasingly abusive phone calls to each department in order to shake them out of their post-Christmas torpor.

At last! We have a project number, a budget allocation, and account numbers that we could use to actually spend money. This would be the end of January or early February. But could we start writing purchase orders?

No.

I now had to write a detailed Project Plan (another 100 page document), provide a detailed GANTT chart to go with it, along with monthly expenditure forecasts, a resource plan stating how many staff were required, plus a risk analysis and get all that loaded into the project tracking system. Phew.

Let's say my project was to build a bike parking station. For that, I'd need to buy some bike racks, engage a builder to install them, buy some trees and plants for landscaping, and engage a gardener to put them in.

Buying the bike racks would appear to be fairly straightforward, except that I would have to go through the following:

1. write a submission to get approval to get quotes for some bike racks
2. depending on the estimated value, this submission might require CEO approval (see great chain of approvals above)
3. once approved, I'd see our Contracts Management people and write a tender for bike racks. It didn't matter if there was only one supplier in the country for bike racks - it still had to go to tender
   
4. that would be reviewed by Legal (who were in a different building to us, and Contracts were in yet another building)
5. the Contracts group would issue the tender, often to bidders that I had not asked for, and would leave out the companies that I wanted to use
6. make many abusive phone calls to Legal and/or Contracts for their balls-up
7. re-issue the tender
8. give respondents 3 weeks to reply
9. in the meantime, write a Tender Review package, and get that approved by Contracts and Legal
10. rewrite the review package to meet their nit-picking requirements
11. form a tender review panel, consisting of me and two other people
    
12. revert back to the original review package, because they changed their minds partway through
13. get the tenders, convene the tender review panel, review the tenders and submit the results to Legal and Contracts for review
14. rewrite the review because they changed their minds about the format yet again
15. Contracts would then tell us the value of each tender, and thus who had won the tender. This was usually a completely unsuitable company, so we'd spend a few weeks arguing about which tenderer to use
    
16. write a submission to have the tender approved, and then get a brace of signatures on it - sometimes up to CEO
17. get Capital Works to give that particular bit of expenditure its own account number
18. have a long and depressing conversation with the winning bidder, who had just put their prices up because the 30 days on their bid had long expired
19. write another submission to vary the original submission, asking for more money
20. get Contracts to issue a contract, which of course had to be reviewed by Legal along the way (and me, because they usually made a balls up of that too, resulting in the wrong stuff being ordered).
21. along the way, every week or so, I'd have to report on the progress of my project. I could spend as much time reporting on my lack of progress as I spent on actually fighting the project through the swamp of processes.
    

If I was lucky, the supplier would get an order before the end of June, and might even deliver before the end of June, meaning I could get their invoice processed before the end of the financial year. Often as not though, the stuff would be delivered in July or August, and all sorts of eyebrows would be raised as to why I was such a lazy git, and failed to expend my budget allocation in the required year.

I once got into hot water for daring to explain this process to a bunch of very senior managers, who were so far above the fray, they had no idea of what was required to get a project off the ground. Back in their day, all that had been required was a 1 or 2 page submission at the start, and that was it - you got your approval in say late August, and off you went. They had no idea about all the crap that had built up since they had been promoted into the exalted realms of upper management.

I got into trouble because I produced an honest timeline for them and showed that it was actually impossible to spend any money in the required year, even if all processes went like clockwork.

If paperwork was lost, as it invariably was, or critical staff went on leave for 2 months (as they did), or one or more departments decided to change their templates or processes partway through the project (as they always did), then it could take 16 months to undertake a process that always started 2 to 3 months into the financial year.

The only way to shoehorn 16 months of paperwork into a 7 or 8 month window was to lie, cheat and fudge - which is what we all did. They didn't want to hear that, even though it was an unavoidable fact. Once people got used to lying, cheating and fudging as the normal way of doing things, that opened the door to all sorts of unethical and corrupt behaviour.

Many managers just gave up when faced with all this crap. It was just too much for them, and they expired in despair. Projects simply fell by the wayside, and sat their gathering dust until someone noticed that nothing was happening. At that point, a manager would get really upset that no one had noticed this was occurring, and an even more onerous project management reporting system would be implemented, making it even tougher for anyone to actually get anything done. More forms would have to be filled out, and more reviews instituted.

When I left that particular agency, its projects were going so badly, a whole new team of Project Managers were recruited to help things along. I was quietly informed that if I applied, one of those $140,000 - $180,000 a year jobs would be mine.

At the same time, I was told that an additional layer of approvals was being built into the process - something I estimated would add two months to the timeline - if they were lucky.

I declined to apply, and left for greener pastures.

Our area was outsourced. I handed over my projects to the outsourcer.

4 months later, I heard that the outsourcer was recruiting 6 project managers to do the work I had been doing. The pay rate was about 50% higher than what I had been earning. Feelers were put out to see if I was interested in one of those jobs.

No thanks.

I was walking past our old offices one day and ran into my old boss. We sat down and had coffee and a chat. At that point, about a year into the contract, the outsourcer was already 9 months late on all my old projects, even with six people driving the work.

Anyone who deals with government knows that there is a collosal rush in June to spend as much money as possible. Now you know why. When so much money is being shovelled out the door in a short space of time, there is an enormous risk of completely wasting it. It was quite common for our area to buy several million dollars worth of stuff in June, and then leave it stacked up in every corner of our offices as we spent the next 9 months trying to get it installed. The time it spent in boxes was of course money wasted - but it was more important to spend the money in a timely fashion, rather than to spend it well.

I had to laugh when I read that Rudd wants to spend money on building stuff for schools. The Education Department has processes as stupid and bizarre as those I have just described, and you will have the added complication of a Federal-State relationship to deal with. If the stimulus gets approved this month, the first bricks will be laid in schools in around 2012 - by which time the economy should be growing briskly again, and this will simply add to an inflationary boom.

Madness.

Wimping out

It's so nice to have kids at times - like when the mercury is scaling stupid heights and you have no way of escaping the heat. I went shopping for a cheap fan this morning, didn't like the look of the stock that our local shop was holding, so I bought a portable air conditioner instead. The forecast for the rest of the week is low to mid 20's (celsius), so we might not use it again this summer - but it was $600 well spent. My excuse to my wallet was that the kids need to be looked after, rather than me.

We set it up in the kid's bedroom and spent the day huddled around it. My neck was playing up, and the best way to get through a dose of neck pain is to sleep, so I spent much of the day curled up in the Monkey's bed, which is about 2/3 my length, trying to sleep as he alternatively built and then Godzilla'd a train track. Every now and then, he'd run Thomas the Tank Engine up my arm, and then peel an eyelid open to enquire as to whether I wanted to play with trains.

As it was, even with the relatively cool air, the kids were grumpy and grouchy, and they spent most of the day eating icy poles. I hate to think what it would have been like if I hadn't spent the money. Just plain misery. It's days like today that reinforce my desire to build a house with a certain amount of straw bale or rammed earth walls - walls at least a foot thick - with one or more rooms underground, to escape the heat.

I've lived in Sydney for nearly 20 years without benefit of air conditioning, so this can only mean that I am going soft in my old age.

And you know what? I don't mind at all.

Oddball rules

I'm at a site at the moment where I have a number of tradies doing some work for me. The site manager turned up today and booted a few of them off - they were contravening the "no shorts" rule, which was news to me. I'd never heard of it.

I found out later why this site has a no shorts rule. It's nothing to do with safety.

A few years ago, a tradie was up a ladder fixing something. As a woman walked by, she looked up and noticed his tackle was hanging out. It was not a good day to be free-balling at the office. She kicked up such an almighty stink, all tradies were banned from wearing shorts from that time on.

I guess it is easier to ban shorts as an official policy than having a document that states "free-balling, going commando and letting the lizard loose are not allowed on these premises". I'll have to ask tomorrow whether it is ok to free-ball if you're wearing pants. And if kilts are permitted.

The ridiculous thing is that we are working 2 floors underground, and in the year or so that I have been visiting this site, I have never, ever seen a woman anywhere near our work site. They never venture down our way. The entire site also appears to be at least 90% male. So men who work in hot conditions are forced to be uncomfortable because there is a 1 in a million chance that a woman might descend into our work area, and a further 1 in a million chance that a tradie will be up a ladder at that time. But I reckon there is a 1 in 5 chance some bastard will be going commando at any given time.

Obama has more chance of finding an honest Democrat to serve in his administration than a woman has of seeing a one eyed trouser snake on our site.

I think it's a terribly discriminatory rule. Would Sharon Stone be banned from visiting as well? I bet they'd welcome her with open arms (and legs?), making this a decidedly oddball rule.

FRED

Crikey, haven't seen a P-38 in years. I found this by accident when looking up the mandoline.

The FRED is a scream though - "Fucking Ridiculous Eating Device".

Cracker driveway

There is an old estate in Concord, just near the hospital, that I discovered by accident recently. I'm not sure what it is now - some sort of historic wreck I guess. Council, developers, NIMBYs and greenies all seem to be squabbling over what to do with it. It's on quite a few acres, with horse paddocks on either side. I've cycled past the horses many times, but never noticed that the driveway was open to the public. I pulled in the other day and had a squizz.


Here's the driveway, stretching into infinity. I didn't find the old buildings that interesting. I'm sure someone will want to save them for posterity. I looked at them and went "bleah". Some old buildings are beautiful, but face it, lots were put up by badly by fly-by-night builders after being designed by the useless, wingnut architects of the day.


The avenue of trees was lovely though. It really is a nice little oasis in this part of town.

I'm sure it will end up being covered in 3 storey glass boxes, all home to computer companies of some form or another, with a Starbucks on the corner and nary a footpath or horse to be seen.

Salad days

"...My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood..."

I'm not sure about the "cold in blood" part. We're very warm blooded at the moment, thanks to days of 30+. We've adapted to the heat by avoiding cooking in the kitchen at all costs. I tried warming up an apple pie in the oven for dessert at midnight last night, and just about died of heat stroke.

The kids have not taken to this well. I don't mean the heat - I mean the lack of cooked meat. Junior stomped inside after a dinner of roots and leaves the other night and microwaved a pie. Monkey looks at his bowl and says, "Where chook?", and stomps off to smash his latest Lego castle to bits.


For the sake of variety, we've been hitting the Jamie Oliver cook books for salad recipes. On the left, the pile of purple matchsticks is a raw beetroot, pear and feta salad (with a lemon dressing). I thought the beetroot would produce purple poo, but that was not the case. It was interesting, but not great. It lacked oomph. It's the sort of thing you produce when you've got guests coming over that you want to impress, so you put out 4 or 5 salads - made up of 1 or 2 normal ones and then some wierd ones that will have them saying, "Ooooh, aren't you a talented cook". This is one of those wierd salads. Tell people it's raw beetroot, and then check out the expression on their faces.

At top, we have a couscous salad with orange and nuts. It needs a really good yoghurt dressing made with lots of mint, lemon and cucumber, and I completely forgot to make that before putting dinner on the table. Bugger.

On the right, we have Jamie's new style coleslaw. I love it. I can eat this stuff all day now. We were fed soggy, grey coleslaw from a can at school, and it's taken me over 20 years before I could start eating it again. As you can see, the mandoline has been getting a workout lately. Dried cranberries are fantastic in this coleslaw.


The last one is a tomato salad, made with some grape cherry tomatoes that J found in a specialty grocer. This photo does not do them justice - they were almost purple on the outside (like a red grape), and the seeds were bright green. The skins were really thick and chewy, and the tomatoes were quite tart. Interesting as an "ooh-ah" salad, but the last bits of it went in the bin.

So there you have it - our salad days. I can't wait to get rid of our busted BBQ and get a new one.

2+2 = 6

Tell me if these two policy ideas, when taken together, make any sense.

Greenhouse evangelists want us to cut electricity usage. Yeah, I know they say that solar and wind and tidal can be used instead of coal and gas, but only if you are prepared to pay a hefty premium for the stuff. And only if you don't mind having no power on a still day or a hot night. Realistically, the greenhouse groupies should drop the whole wind power facade and just come out and say that they want us to use 30% or 50% less power. Be honest.

One way to cut power consumption is to stop using air conditioning. I like air conditioning, and wish we had it now, but I can live without it. Sure, Sydney can be miserably uncomfortable for a few weeks of the year if you don't have it installed, but it's not like we're going to die if we don't have it.

So that is government policy one - reduce power consumption. Build no more coal powered generation.

On the other hand, the state government is concerned for the welfare of our kiddies, and wants to air condition every classroom. Given that it also wants to keep kids in school until they are 17, which will require lots more classrooms, they'll also have to install lots more air conditioners into those new classrooms.

Hmmm. One department is trying to cut power usage, and another department just down the road is doing its best to increase power usage. Disjointed government is the order of the day.

I have no idea what schools spend on their electricity bills, but given that they are now going to be running scores of computers and air conditioning, I'd figure the bills would have to be pretty nasty. Computers put out heat, so even more air conditioning will be required. What's going to happen when carbon taxes put up the price of power, but state governments find that they can't tip any more money into education, because they're broke? Where will the cost savings come from? Turning off the air conditioners and computers presumably.

The sort of people that think up these idiotic policies never have enough brain power to work out that they are the cause of most of these problems in the first place. We have a rather thick Green on our local council. She sounds like she spent the last 20 years drinking bong water. Her crowd have spent the last 5 years campaigning for more expensive electricity, with the aim of making us use less of it.

I heard the other day that the council's electricity supplier for street lighting is about to jack up the bill. The only person to make a fuss about it was our stoned Greenie - and instead of making a positive fuss about it (this is a good thing, this is what we've been looking for, t his will be great for the planet, Gaia will weep tears of joy at this decision, we can all learn from it and should emulate it, let's hold hands and chant our thanks), she went ape shit, demanding that council switch to a cheaper supplier etc etc etc.

The way I see it, council has some limited choices:

• pay a higher bill
• install lower wattage globes in our street lights
• reduce the hours of street lighting at night
• reduce the number of street lights
• hang greenies from lamp posts

We could of course just get used to the idea that electricity is civilisation, that cheap power is a good thing, and that cheap and handy power has made our lives - and especially the lives of women - so much less of a drudge. Do we really want to go back to the days of wringers for our washing?

The green, who wants our lives to include more drudgery, is of course a woman. But she is probably one of those inner city greens that can afford to employ a maid from the lower orders to do the washing, so higher power prices won't bother her.

Someone find me a lamp post and a length of hemp.

What drugs is our government consuming?

The NSW government decided to ruin what was left of the state school system last week by announcing that kids would have to stay "in school" until they are 17.

I know that sounds like a wonderful "skills building" exercise, but to me, it looks like an almighty sellout to the Teacher's Union.

To start with, the announcement was totally uncosted. I have been unable to find a press release anywhere that mentions a single dollar figure. The NSW budget is already buggered. The school system is a mess, and now they want to inflict on it a costly disaster of Godzilla proportions.

Something like 30-40% of kids drop out in year 10. No, bugger an estimate. Here are the actual enrolments from the Education Department for 2007:

State schools

Year 10 - 52,411
Year 11 - 43,699
Year 12 - 36,141
31% drop out by year 12.

Aboriginal kids

Year 10 - 2,293
Year 11 - 1,274
Year 12 - 833
64% drop out by year 12

Private schools

Year 10 - 32,141
Year 11 - 27,815
Year 12 - 25,572
20% drop out by year 12

If we ignore the different drop out rates for a moment, consider how many extra kids are going to be taught in years 11 and 12. There will be an extra 14,000 year 11's and an extra 22,000 year 12's, or an extra 36,000 kids in the system all up - private and state.

This should do wonders for unemployed teachers - assuming schools want a ratio of 1 teacher to 20 kids, that means an extra 1800 teachers will be required, plus the usual army of non-teaching assistants and admin staff. Assuming an average salary of $60,000, and not including on-costs, the education system needs to find another $108 million per year just for salaries. Then there is the cost of all those extra classrooms (can't teach them under a tree all year), extra school bus costs (got to get them to school somehow) and all the other malarkey. Given that we know it costs something like $7,000 per year to educate a high school student, that puts the extra annual cost up around a quarter of a billion dollars - and that ignores the capital works to build extra classrooms etc.

Ouch.

Do we really expect to get better educated kids for all the money? Will we accrue $250 million worth of benefits every year?

I doubt it very much.

Let's divide people into talented and useless, and hard working and lazy. You can be one of four types:

• talented and hard working - the high performers
• talented and lazy - poets
• useless and hard working - a potentially dangerous group
• useless and lazy - the dregs

Everyone fits somewhere along these two axes. I have known two extremely smart and hard working people - both won a University Medal, both studied hard sciences and they are the two biggest brainiacs I have ever met. I went to school with one and uni with the other. I am in awe of both of them - for their unbelievable brains and their fearsome work ethics. Most of the people I choose to associate with are pretty smart (in one way or another) and work their arses off. They don't need to have brains the size of a planet like JC and the Rock Lobster, but they need to have enough smarts to carry on an interesting conversation and to have the gumption to be working hard at something - I don't care what. Anything. I'm just not that fond of lazy people. Don't just sit on your arse I say - go do something.

That aside, this group do well at school, they enjoy school, and teachers tend to enjoy teaching them (unless they are the type that get annoyed at being shown up by a kid 92 times smarter than they). When the Rock Lobster did his PhD in some obscure branch of astro-something-or-other, there was no one qualified in Australia to mark his dissertation. You need an IQ of about 150 just to understand how smart he is.

I also know a poet (of a sort). A bloke who has spent years working his way through all the classic works of philosophy and literature, and who is easily one of the most erudite and witty people to have over for dinner. If you can get him out of bed. He is prone to being utterly bone idle. I love him, but he shits me at times. A brilliant waste of God-given talent.

Again, I am sure this lot are not that hard to teach - if they bother getting out of bed and going to school. The poet could be the sort of annoying prat that, when asked by a teacher if he had read any Shakespeare, would reply by speaking half a play from memory, and then asking if the class wanted to hear any other of the Bard's plays.

Then we have the hard working thickos. At school, these were the farmer's kids - brought up to be immensely hard working from dawn to dusk, but not much smarter than the average sheep. They somehow battled their way through to year 12, scraping passes in all subjects, and then retired for several years of drinking and ute rolling at an Agricultural College. They're quite happy to spend all day up to their armpit in a cow's bum, but at the end of the day, can't count how many cows they probed that day. They're the type that used to be sent down a coal mine at age 12, where they did an excellent job of whacking coal with picks for 12 hours a day. Solid, dependable types. Funnily enough, a lot of them ended up being stockbrokers or real estate agents.

There is a place in school for these people. Maybe not in an English Lit. class, but certainly in the more practically minded courses.

And then there are the stupid and lazy. The dregs. The grogans. The bumwipes. They have a talent for shoplifting, manufacturing bongs from anything that can hold water, stealing cars and telling lies. They're not interested in learning anything. They're waiting for the day they qualify for the Dole, and from that point on, they are going to embark on a career in waster leisure activities.

These are the sort of people that drop out of school at the end of year 10. These are the people that the government wants to retain for another 2 years at our expense (yes, ultimately the taxpayer has to pay for every stupid government decision - there is no magic pudding that creates government funds).

There are some very gifted and talented and caring teachers out there that can reach these creatures, and get them to take an interest in doing more than impregnating 16 year old girls with blond streaks and facial piercings. Maybe 1 in 1,000 teachers can do it.

We need 1,800 teachers. Given a ratio of 1 in 1000 really talented ones, we are going to get 1.8 outstanding teachers who will really make a difference to these kids lives. Let's call it 2 teachers.

Great. We are going to force 36,000 useless bags of shit to remain in school, and 40 of them might get something out of it. $250 million dollars a year down the toilet for 40 drones to be saved. I am so far gone, I can't even work out how much that is per drone. Let's call it $6 million dollars each.

They'll be the Six Million Dollar Men and Women. Except they won't be able to run fast or lift things with a du-du-du-du sound effect.

At least the Teacher's Union will get another 1800 dues-paying members. You have to remember that there is upside for some.

PS - fascinating to note that the group with the lowest drop out rate is the English not spoken at home crowd. It looks like the number of Chinese kids that drop out in year 10 would all be able to sit in a rather small wok.

A sob story without basis

The Smith Family are at it again.


I really want to know where they get this "680,000 disadvantaged kids" number, as well as the idea that there are that many kids who don't have proper uniforms or books.

There are 780,000 kids in the NSW state school system. NSW has 32% of Australia's population. If we assume kids are evenly distributed across the country in the same proportion as NSW, and that similar proportions in other states go to state schools, that ads up 2.4 million kids in the state school system - give or take a few hundred thousand.

I'm also assuming here that if a kid goes to a private school, they are not "disadvantaged'' to the point where their parents can't fork out $150 for a basic uniform. I may be wrong, but run with that assumption for a minute - those that hate the private system are always saying that it is "only for the rich", so by their definition, there can't be any disadvantaged kids at private schools.

The Smith Family is implying that 28% of all kids at state schools are disadvantaged - that sounds like an incredible statistic to me. 28%. Do they really expect us to swallow that? 28% Twenty eight percent.

I will admit that in some areas, where you've had three generations of single parent root-rats existing solely on the public teat, you might find that a lot of the parents place a higher priority on buying VB and Winfield Blues than books and uniforms.

Junior goes to a state school. We don't have to buy text books - the school lends them out. The uniform is as basic and cheap as it can get - I just ordered more summer uniforms for Junior, and it set me back less than a case of plonk. Shirts are $25 each, shorts are $25 each - and it's not like he needs a whole wardrobe of different coloured shirts and trousers and ties.

If we were utterly cheap buggers, we'd get him two pairs of each and that would be it - one would be for wearing that day and the other would be in the wash. It's not like we're talking enormous expenses here, and even if we had lots of kids in school, the younger ones would simply be wearing hand-me-downs.

I ride past a few of the schools in our area on a regular basis, and one thing you always see out the front at the end of the day is a pack of feral mums, all slothing around in their tracksuit pants and thongs having a fag. Or ten fags, depending on how long they have to wait. I stopped for a breather at their fagging place one day and was amazed at the carpet of butts and empty packets that they'd left on the ground.

What are the chances that if you asked a charity about their "disadvantaged" status, the Smith Family would all nod their heads sagely and intone in a deep and caring voice, "yes, this family needs help".

My next inquiry would be as to how many packs of fags they smoked a week, and how much they spent on booze (the mums have that wrinkled, unhealthy look that you get from having a bottle of vodka before dinner every day). I'm sure the answer would be something along the lines of, "Yes, we realise they have problems with addictive substances, and that is why we need your money to help them".

I say they need a good kick up the arse. I say that they wouldn't have any problems buying school uniforms and books if they stopped smoking and getting pissed every night.

Charity can provide perverse incentives. If you have someone that currently drinks heavily, they will prioritise their spending so that booze comes first, then non-essentials like food for the kids, rent, bills and school uniforms come way down the list. However, if they have to stop the kids from dropping dead from starvation, or going to school naked, then they will rustle up some cash from somewhere to provide the bare essentials.

However, if a charity then comes along and feeds and clothes the kids, a devoted piss-head will just drink all their money, knowing that the charity will take care of all the things that they really couldn't give a toss about.

Anyway, I really don't believe that there are 680,000 disadvantaged kids in Australia. I think that number is a collosal beat up, designed to maximise fund raising from the gullible. If the Smith Family wants to fluff numbers in this manner, it can kiss my arse.

Is this a good idea?

One has to ask why several major economies are currently in the crapper.

The short answer to me seems to be that people who already had a lot of debt borrowed even more money, and spent more money than they earned. Eventually, the whole thing collapsed.

So how will Obama and Gordon Brown combat this?

Both the US and UK governments already owe an awful lot of money - their debt levels are huge. But they are going to borrow even more money, and spend more than they take in as tax.

Anyone see a horrible symmetry there?

Why is it that something which led many individuals to their financial doom is suddenly a good thing when practiced by socialist politicians?

Madness.

Spending the stimulus

Giving stimulus money to the public service in order to "improve services" is like giving a 10 year old kid a 20 dollar note at the pool and telling him to get something to eat. I did that last week and found out the hard way that I need to make my instructions crystal clear when dealing with kids of that age. Instead of him buying just one thing that he wanted - like an ice cream - he took the handing over of $20 as instructions to spend the lot, even if he ended up buying an armful of stuff he didn't want.

The fabulous photos from the 2008 Contractors Awards illustrate one way our tax dollars will be spent. I have seen results similar to this in my career in the public service. If a new and imaginative way can be spent to piss away money with no result, or even a negative result, then you can be sure that at least one public servant will indeed do it that way. (Via Margo of course).

I will tell you about two nasty little wastes of money that I saw close up, and utterly failed to do anything about (not for a want of trying though).

We had a waste of space manager in our section that I called Fuckwit (for obvious reasons). The guy put the "t" into "tool". He looked after some of our hardware, and every year, he got to spend a small pile of money on replacing some of it.

There are several facets to hierarchy in the state sector. Some pubes, when out on the piss, will only talk to other pubes at or around their pay grade. The first thing they ask at a bar is "what are you?", meaning what is your pay grade. An SO9 will not deign to talk to a lowly SO2 for instance.

Another facet is the size of your spend (or budget). The more money you spend, the greater the size of your penis. Fuckwit loved to go to conferences and tell all and sundry (mainly other government employees) how much he was spending that year (with an obvious inflation figure, usually around 100%, thanks to his fuckwitery). He embigened himself with his budget. Which is why he fought tooth and nail against all efficiency measures, because they had the potential to reduce his budget. If a new thing came out that would cut his costs by 50%, he'd find a way to waste the other 50% of his budget so that it wouldn't be cut the following year.

I'm serious. As a taxpayer, this behaviour used to drive me crackers.

One year, he managed to convince our boss that he urgently needed to replace a pile of oldish, but serviceable stuff with new, shiny stuff. Our boss agreed that the need was urgent, and the paperwork to spend $600,000 was rapidly pushed through. The paperwork made numerous statements and claims that a great deal of money would be saved in future years by spending this $600,000.

We weren't really spending $600,000 that year, as we were leasing the stuff over 3 years. But that meant paying a rapacious bank $200,000 per year, and then handing the gear back in pristine condition after 36 months - for if not, penalties started to kick in.

Three weeks later, a pile of stuff arrived. There was so much of it, it caused a health and safety hazard in our offices. Somehow I ended up with the job of moving Fuckwit's stuff to its eventual home in another part of town.

So I moved it down town, and there it sat for 12 months, gathering dust. Every week, he'd be asked at our management meeting when work would start on replacing the old with the new, and when we could expect to see savings. Every week, we'd be told to expect progress next week. But nothing ever happened.

Our boss, who was a very nice guy (way too nice if you ask me) eventually blew a gasket and told me to get the stuff installed, and to turf the old stuff (which is what he had promised to do when submitting the paperwork). Fuckwit acquiesced, and then immediately started white-anting me behind my back. But that was normal, and I could handle that. It's how he always operated, and everyone eventually learned to ignore it.

So I recruited a few guys, got the gear installed and then started a crash program to get rid of the old stuff. I'll blow my own trumpet here by saying I worked 14 hours or more per day, 7 days a week, for 7 weeks without a break in order to get that done. When I was finished, I was pretty happy with the result. The new stuff was doing the job of the old stuff, and I could rip the old stuff out and flog it for a few dollars.

Fuckwit had spent those 7 weeks touring our operating divisions, telling them that the work I was doing would lead to utter chaos and disaster, that they shouldn't trust what we were doing, and it was all doomed to failure. Only he was capable of doing it properly. Most divisions had dealt with him before, and knew he was an utter fuckwit. They politely heard him out, then went back to work. But he raised enough suspicions to make my job a lot harder.

At the end of the job, when it was seen to be quite successful, he then started going around telling everyone that it had been his project all along, and he alone was responsible for its success. Thankfully, I had been around long enough for most people to know who had really done all the work, and his antics only served to add to his aura of fuckwitedness.

When I went to remove the old gear, he put up all sorts of roadblocks, claiming I had no right to get rid of it. When I pointed out that he had signed a stack of paperwork a year before stating that the gear had to go ASAP, he simply strung together a long monologue of ridiculous management wank-speak, and managed to convince our boss that it had to stay.

About a month later, I discovered that Fuckwit had not entered the new equipment into our financial system, so we were not accounting for it. However, because the old gear was still in the system (the idiot had not written that off either), once the new gear was put in, our boss's budget would be hit by a double-whammy of costs.

So much for the vaunted cost savings.

I sneakily submitted the paperwork, and waited for the bean counters to strike. A month later, the monthly financial statement landed on the desk of our boss, and about five minutes later, the whole floor could hear him ranting and raving. I had blown a pretty big hole in his budget. I didn't admit to submitting the paperwork (not my job to do that after all - I told him that Fuckwit must have finally figured out how to do it after 14 months and followed the correct process. Fuckwit denied submitting the paperwork, which only got him in more trouble, since if he had put in the paperwork 14 months before when he should have, we wouldn't be facing a massive budget blowout. Sometimes, you just have to love paperwork).

The upshot was that I got my approval to rip the old gear out, and it was gone before the sun went down. Fuckwit stormed off, because he had never intended to get rid of it - he was going to use it for an unauthorised project, and I had thwarted his plans.

Where is this story going?

About a year later, I left the company. Fuckwit stayed, but his responsibilities were handed over to another bloke.

10 months after that, the new guy rang me to bitch and moan. Some of the stuff had broken down, and it was out of warranty because Fuckwit had never submitted the warranty paperwork - and he hadn't bought the extended warranty (as he was supposed to), so they were facing a bill of over $50,000. To cap it off, the 3 year lease was almost up, and he was spewing because they had to buy new stuff to replace stuff that had only been in service for 2 years - effectively costing $300,000 per year instead of $200,000 per year - a fairly major cost difference. He was facing all sorts of problems because before Fuckwit handed over, he had to put in a budget forecast. He of course completely forgot to forecast the replacement of not only all that gear, but about $4 million worth of other equipment.

The point of my story is that there are many Fuckwits in the public sector. They are responsible for spending millions and millions of our dollars, and they cock it up almost every time. The squandering that goes on is criminal. The best thing that can happen to the NSW government is happening - revenues have slumped dramatically, pushing the budget into deficit. They'll soon have no choice but to cut like crazy. I think Costa saw this coming, and look what happened to him for daring to point it out. The public sector will soon be going on a crash diet, and it's about bloody time.

What sickens me though is that Rudd is going to throw billions at the state sector this year in the belief that the money will be spent on "refurbishing" the public sector.

If he really thinks that is the case, he has his head even further up his arse than I ever would have thought possible.

And if you think I am a bit over the top, look at this example from the UK.

OK, I only described one waste of money in this story. I felt it was getting too long to describe a second one.

Fake charity peddles the usual fear and angst

The SMH decided that it was a good idea to run a story about MySpace bullying, even though the report was put together by what I would call something verging on a "fake charity". At least they were honest enough to note that the report was released by the "federally funded Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies"

To me, the report looks like a waste of trees and our tax money, but I guess it must have kept a few luvvies employed in this time of economic desolation. If Krudd gets his way with democratic socialism, expect an army of the unemployable to be marching the streets, looking for problems that can be investigated and reported on with an appropriate research grant.

The idea of a "fake charity" was brought to my attention by the always swearable Devil's Kitchen. The little devil has made a career of unmasking report peddling "charities" as front groups for various government agencies.

In this case, the report calls for more training for teachers. It would therefor not surprise me if we found that the Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies was funded by the Education Department, which is always looking for an excuse to extract more tax dollars from Treasury.

Don't you love the way the public service uses our money? They use our money - money we paid in tax - to fund a bogus report with the sole aim of using that report as leverage to get their hands on even more of our tax dollars.

This report tugs on all the usual heartstrings. The big unspoken one is "won't someone think of the children?" Bleah.

What I don't get is why teachers and schools should be involved at all. The report makes it clear that students are bullying other students in their free time after school, using computers provided by their parents at home. This is a job for parents. I hate the modern idea that teachers are supposed to raise children, rather than parents. Parents are the ones that should mould and shape their kiddies - they have to do the hard yards. All teachers should have to do is apply a bit of polish here and there.

I liken it to carving a statue out of wood - the parents carve out the main features with a chisel or chainsaw, creating the statue from a block of wood. All a teacher should have to do is sandpaper off a rough edge here and there, or chip off the odd splinter. However, many parents seem to have given up on wielding the chisel, abrogating that responsibility to teachers (by which time I think it's way too late in many cases).

Anyway, I don't see what teachers are supposed to do about cyber-bullying when they have a tough time dealing with physical bullying.

What a waste of time and money.