Job Cuts to Continue in 2013

PUBLIC SERVANTS in Queensland must be dreading coming back to work after Christmas.  There is a growling fear that the public service will continue, literally, to be decimated throughout the year.

Roman legionnaires: hoping for a good day and a centurion who can't count

Decimation was a process used to discipline Roman legions or cohorts that failed miserably in the face of battle.  Every tenth man was selected to be killed, so as to send a message to his fellow legionnaires.

There was no rhyme or reason: you were selected for execution if your number came after “nine” on parade that day.  Workers on George Street must be familiar with the process.

The process of chopping away at public service numbers will continue right through 2013, extending the dominant narrative of “job losses” in Queensland politics right up until the election year.

Truly, perhaps, a death by a thousand cuts.

What must be surprising to the former councillors in charge of the Queensland government is how long it actually takes to get rid of 14,000 people.  

Tim Nicholls was interviewed on ABC Radio on Friday.  If we carefully dissect what he said, we can discern that the abattoir work will creep on in 2013.

The Queensland treasurer said that 7,500 state public sector positions have been amputated so far.  But hey!  The pain is almost over as the final number won’t be 14,000.

The “real” number of job losses will be about 10,000 in total, he said.  The remaining 4,000 are “unfilled positions” or “short term contracts about to end”.

Campbell Newman, Premier of Queensland

He may be intimating that it is not “real” people losing their jobs, but that is not so.

Public service job losses will still be about 14,000.  Getting rid of “unfilled positions” or not renewing short term contracts still means workers and voters losing their jobs.

An unfilled position could be someone’s substantive position, which is a vacant position where the person employed in that job fills in a job higher up the chain.  Or the workplace has been “re-organised” to move someone on.

In any case, an “unfilled position” is no accident.  It is a device designed to get rid of costs, or represents job cutting moves already happening.

Not renewing short term contracts is the biggie. 

Many people who have joined the public service in last few years have been on short term contracts, not employed as permanent employees.  Whole units within departments are substantially filled with people on contracts.

These are “real” workers who have not done anything wrong and perform crucial front-line work. Yet they will go because they are easy to sack.  That’s why they were put on short term contracts in the first place.

So there is still more pain to come.  14,000 will go, in some form or another, and we are only half way through the job cuts.

And the final rounds of dismissals, redundancies or sackings will be long, slow and painful.  For everyone, including the LNP government.

One, it will be difficult selecting which positions must go.  The “low-hanging” fruit has already been picked, and the next cuts must come from workers performing the embedded core functions at work.

Two, public service bosses will be reluctant to keep slashing.

To be continually sacking people who are their work colleagues is genuinely distressing.

What’s more, the power and ranking of a public service boss is measured by the number of staff in their department.

They will find every which way to cut costs and keep staff, if they can.  In many ways, they will be deferring the hard decisions.

So don’t be surprised is the big political story in Queensland this year will continue to be job cuts and service cuts.

It will take a long time, and means the narrative of “job cuts” will be the one you see in the media for the rest of 2013.

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Brisbane's Bonds of Empire

WHAT LIES within the legislation program of the Queensland government in 2013?

According to the Queensland Attorney-General, we may be passing laws to tighten the bonds of Empire.

Our future of head of State (somewhere behind the flowers)

The Queensland Attorney-General wants to bring in an Act to nominate the unborn child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be a subsequent Head of State in Queensland.  The Federal government may be doing the same.

Let us pause and consider the long term implications of this rush to solidify the links to Empire.

Do we want to legislate that an unknown Englishman or woman will be the font of authority in our democracy in about 50 years time?

Many Queenslanders feel we will get nothing from being attached to the British Crown.  In fact, it is an attachment that has always entailed a significant cost.

Startlingly, I found this very sentiment reflected by Benjamin Franklin in 1775.

Franklin had spent months trying to negotiate with the British government to avoid war in the American colonies.  As Don Cook says in The Long Fuse, Benjamin Franklin became disgusted by the "futility of his efforts" and the continued British attempts at bribery.

Here’s what Franklin said:

When I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state … I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union.  I fear they will drag us after them in all plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustices and rapacity may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them.

Benjamin Franklin: still relevant today

These are the rapier-like words of a man whose nation was about to launch into a colonial war. Yet they have a real resonance with Australia in the 21^st century.

One phrase that leaps out is “swallow up every aid”.  It is what happened to Australia in the 20th century.

After World War II, Australians endured rationing for years as we sent our grain, meat and butter to England to relieve their paucity of food.

Yet the biggest aid we have always sent the English was ourselves.  In uniform.

“ … drag us after them into all plundering wars …” is a line that should send a thrill of recognition through nearly all Australians.

Most of the tens of thousands of Australians who have perished in war have died fighting under the British flag, not the Australian flag.

And although not plundering wars, they were wars of Empire that gave us no benefit.

The Australians who served in wars in Sudan and South Africa helped deliver an African empire to the British Crown.

And The Great War, a war that transformed our nation as much as any other event, was an avoidable clash of European empires within Europe.

The supply of men in uniform to fight the wars of Empire was what the British government really needed from Australia.  To make sure we were up for the job, Lord Kitchener toured Australia before World War I and assessed our military preparedness for colonial adventures.

Pick who is enjoying the "bonds of empire" here.

And when we ultimately needed our military, they were tied up under a British flag, half a world away.

Our airmen were in the air over Europe, inexorably embedded in the Royal Air Force.  When we needed our own air force above our own troops in New Guinea, we had to rely on American aircraft and American airmen.

It is our experience at the forge of war that makes Australians truly question if our system of government should be hinged upon a British monarchy.

One Australian Prime Minister saw the bonds of Empire through the prism of that war-time experience.

In 1992, Paul Keating addressed in Parliament Opposition “charges” that he had snubbed and insulted the Queen.  Echoing Benjamin Franklin, he said:

I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia – not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsula, not to worry about Singapore and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination.  This was the country that you people wedded yourselves to, and, even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.

It’s a speech delivered like a mace more so than a rapier, but many get that same rush of recognition.  It articulates a sense the British Empire has got much more out of us than we have from it.

So why are we running to bind ourselves once again to the British Crown?  Why not let future generations decide if they want the child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be our Head of State?

They can assess whether, as Ben Franklin said, there is any benefit from a closer union with this European nation and its ruling family.

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Bless the Parking Fairies of Noosa

PLEASE don’t send church missionaries or The Inquisition around to our place, but my family is currently praying to the parking fairies.

At Noosa in January, we feel the appearance of vacant parking spots seems like the true Miracle Of Christmas.

Our current devotional obsession started off as a joke.

Hastings St, Noosa: where the super cool need the supernatural

My family holiday near Noosa every year, and we start each day with an early morning swimming pilgrimage to Laguna Bay. 

One morning we got a brilliant parking spot, and one of us made a toast to the parking fairies that night.

But for three days in a row, we have got a parking space just off Hastings Street.  Right near the Gaston café, so we can hop into the car with cappuccinos after the swim.

I don’t want to jinx it.  Should we keep offering a toast of champagne, or do these parking fairies need some more substantial form of offering?

Do we need to make a sacrifice that involves the spilling of blood, or should we leave out a serving of scrumptious food or alcohol at night, like we do for Santa Claus?

Here’s another question.

Is it profane to assume it is the work of parking fairies?  Should I be praying to God for the continued deliverance of convenient parking spaces?  

I don’t want to disturb Him or Her with such a trivial request, when They have so many more profound requests to handle.

My friend Pastor David would say it is the work of God. I can see him slightly shaking his head and patiently explaining it to me in a quiet voice, the one he uses for difficult customers.

Does St Christopher also handle requests for parking?

But, I would say, it seems like a bothersome request for the Almighty.  Maybe God has delegated decision making capabilities for parking down to an angel.  Or a saint.

Is there a patron saint for parking?  If so, there should be a shrine to this saint at Noosa at Christmas time.  The order maintaining this shrine would have celebrity status on the Sunshine Coast.

Or it might be a local deity at Noosa in charge of parking miracles.  Minor gods arise to explain to the most important of baffling phenomena to a local population.

And the sudden magical appearance of empty parking spots near the surf at Noosa must be an all-consuming subject of conversation to Noosa residents and visitors. 

Whether it is parking fairies, God or a local magical being, it has placed me in a metaphysical dilemma.

Whoever or whatever is responsible has delivered the goods, and their wrath or indifference must not be provoked.

But I am safe in assuming there is a degree of supernatural intervention.

As anyone who holidays at Noosa in January can attest, the appearance of free and available parking spots just next to Laguna Bay surely ranks as an eye-popping miracle.

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2012 and the Sunset of Newspapers

2012 was the year I stopped reading newspapers.

After a lifetime of ritual, I realised the act of purchasing, unfolding and thoughtfully trawling through a newspaper was like an out-dated religious ceremony long divorced from any original faith and belief.

"How many advertising brochures can they fit in this paper?"

This year I have been unshackled from a compulsive action that has come to hold little value to modern day life. 

Two hundred years ago buying and reading a newspaper meant you were helping battle ignorance, and helping build a “fourth estate” that was a bulwark against repressive and unrepresentative governments.

Not now.  Buying and reading a newspaper is more an act of consumption, the forced swallowing of square metres of advertising and corporate messages from those that can afford it.

Truly, the realisation that I do not have to feel guilty about not purchasing the Sydney Morning Herald each week end is liberating.

What broke the habit was the Gillard misogynist speech.

It was a fascinating speech that addressed an issue that personally resonated within so many people.  It was grand theatre that meant something.

They don't  make papers like this any more (hooray).  Benjamin Franklin 1750

But many mainstream media commentators, the icons pictured on newspaper columns, could only view it through a narrow prism.

What did it mean to the machinations of Parliament over the next 24 hours?  And they even got that wrong.

They said it was a miscalculated rant designed to preserve the political skin of Peter Slipper.  Most everyone else said it was a speech of importance that would persevere, much long than the career or memory of Peter Slipper.

The lack of touch and perception by some newspaper columnists was exposed by the furious movement of opinion and comment over the web.

Especially on social media sites, countless people explained how the speech touched on what they experienced in their lives, how it electrified them.   It was plain the paper giants had got it wrong.

To me, the columnist line that the Gillard speech was a “misguided rant” looks like it was a line fed or created by professional political media advisers.

That makes sense because I know journalists are outnumbered and harassed by media advisers, whom have more time and resources at their command than the harried journalist.

If so, it is an indication that some newspaper commentators are embedded in the castle up on the hill with those that govern.  They look down upon us through the arrow slits in the towers.

The misogynist speech revealed to me I could get the news I wanted from linked pages, not inked pages.  So why should I persist in buying newspapers?

The forsaking of the newspaper gospel was slightly shocking to myself.  I used to consider the great columnists such as Alan Ramsey and Michelle Grattan as infallible and all-knowing giants.

Nowadays I go online and search for pieces by Daniel Hurst and Steve Wardill, both of whom I feel know the issues on the grounds outside the castle on the hill. And anything by Daryl Passmore and Kelmeny Fraser gets my attention.

For the others who have also abandoned the sacraments of the newspaper, we have found it is surprisingly not such as drastic change.

We had not fully realised we had already virtually stopped reading them anyhow.  Most of us are already getting our news from websites, or links on social media sites. 

However, I still get ink on my fingertips. I read my local newspaper: it arrives free on my doorstep.  I like to see if anyone I know is in it, and who is writing letters to the editor.

This kind of intimate newspaper experience probably reflects the desires and needs of the original newspaper readers two hundred years ago.

Do we need to despair that so many like me are perhaps condemning the daily newspaper to death?  Are we contributing to the demise of reporting?

Simply, no. Some broadsheets and tabloids may be on their way to extinction, but journalism is alive and thriving.

After all, the human need for news and gossip, timely and fresh, is as strong as ever.  The internet means reporters and journalists can fill that human craving in an instant.

For the rest of those who have stopped reading newspapers in 2012, even if they do not admit it to themselves, we will continue to pursue the news and a good read.

We have just forsaken the crinkly pages of newsprint to find the truth and facts that reflect the world we know.  

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