Systemic, endemic, pervasive. Yes, Bernard (The great public policy mystery: just why is the Morrison government so inept? Bernard Keane Crikey Jan 17,2022 https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/01/17/scott-morrison-inept/) we have a crisis of inadequate government and public administration. Government ineptitude is indeed a public policy nightmare. Scott-the-Announcer has repeatedly shown hesitancy and incompetence in the face of decision making. He is always late to an issue because he is looking for the right sound and sight rather than strategic insight to solve a problem. He seems never to anticipate, just prevaricate.
Is there an area of public policy and attendant program management Sco-Mo hasn’t stuffed up? Refugees, Covid, Aged Care, Women’s Safety and an endless stream to follow. Is the most critical flaw his failure to think ahead or constant lying or automatic preference for corruption? Does anyone know what sort of advice he is getting from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet? Who, if anyone, is he listening to in order to make such poor precipitous judgements?
He oversees an integrity and ethics free zone quite at odds with his assumed Christian principles. In any of his former roles was he subject to the merit principle to earn them or has sycophantic networking always worked for him? In an act of self-harm many voters will regrettably still vote for the ineptitude of this do-nothing government bound tight by the shackles of vested interests. To paraphrase Scott-the-Announcer’s prefix to each random thought bubble, how good is Charles Dickens? With supernatural prescience he provided an apt description of this government’s modus operandi thus:
“It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honorable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done.” (Dickens, Charles (1857) Little Dorrit, p108)
Across an expanding range of public policy issues, the Morrison government has shown how not to do it. Being there is not enough for good government; you need to actually do something.
Awesomely Astute 