Leonard Colquhoun
At least, the old landowning aristocracy had to have some useful skills: administrative skills, for example, in managing their estates (or at least in appointing the right managers), or war-fighting skills as officers in His Britannic Majesty’s Army or Navy. And pre-war Labor MPs could relate to the sorts of everyday jobs they had before election. But, and here’s a very frightening thought, exactly what Really Useful Skills do the members of our current political class have – what jobs could today’s MPs could walk straight into ? Writing one’s memoirs doesn’t count, nor becoming a ‘consultant’, and even less joining the ABC or becoming a Visiting Fellow; and, as for ‘spending more time with my family’ – wouldn’t that be cruel and unusual punishment ?
ARE YOU BEING SERVED ?
“No, we aren’t” more and more of us seem to be saying. “No, we are definitely NOT being served.”
Screwed, yes, but not Served.
Not by our parliamentary representatives, nor by local government.
Not by our public servants, for whom the notion of ‘service’ increasingly seems a quaint anachronism.
Not by the media, which gives us a choice of sensationalist trash-mongering or ideological brainwashing.
Not by our constabulary, who seem unable to notice a speeding log truck, but quick to spot a fine-yielding scratch on a windscreen.
Not by the courts, which appear to alternate between slapping a criminal with a limp CBO and punishing a ‘crime’ such as being a klick over the speed limit with a pocket-emptying fine.
Not be public institutions such as public hospitals, mass transit and government schools, with these in turn being neglected by the political party which you’d expect to care about them.
Judging by remarks in the Comments boxes to many Mercury articles, Letters to the Editors here and elsewhere, and vox pop radio talkback, we are really pissed off by Not Being Served.
Our intellectuals give the impression that scholarship is a dirty word, too ready to follow some of the most conformist herd-thinking since Galileo confronted the university groupthought of his time.
Our teachers have been told, and far too many have taken far too much notice of this, that Teaching is Out and Facilitating is In, that Knowledge is a No-no, and that Plural Abstract Gerunds such as Learnings are It. Which makes teacher preparation so much cheaper: all that time wasted in teachers learning stuff is no longer needed.
Not happy, Jan, with any or all of the above.
Our parliamentary representatives are getting less and less representative. A current Labor PM having been an engine-driver is as unlikely as a future Coalition PM ever running a small business. A claim that the newly appointed NSW Premier had once been a garbo was speedily revealed as yet another devious example of the spinmeister’s craft.
“Hacks, flacks and apparatchiks are taking over parliament”, writes Christian Kerr in HOUSE RULES [The Australian, Tues 9 Sept 08 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24316110-5016936,00.html ]; “ . . . members of a new professional political class are taking places on the benches of the Senate and the House of Representatives”.
And what Kerr writes of Canberra would equally apply to the States: do a search of the biogs of our Tasmanian MPs, and find out how many of them have NOT been advisors, consultants, union officials, media managers, political staffers, and other jobsworths which cut them off from, if not elevate them above, us plebeians. How many have spent ten or fifteen years as wage earners, small business owners, professionals working in the core fields of their professions (which, for example, rules out hacks such as failed teachers carving out safe and comfortable careers at EdCentral, far removed from the perils of the classroom; you could equally rule out soft-handed union officials from the physically demanding trades) ?
And, asks Kerr sharply, “Whom do they serve?”
Not us.
“They serve themselves – and when a Liberal leader tells his party’s think tank that the solution to big government is to hire more public servants, it is clear that the professional political class is in charge.”
A really useful constitutional change that our republicaneers could get stuck into might be this: work out some way that our increasingly unrepresentative MPs can be made to have at least a minimum experience of the lives lived by us voters: perhaps something like in the US, where presidents need to be over 35, although that does not necessarily mean 15 years of life outside politics, as some of the criticisms of Senator Obama seem to indicate. Can any nation, ours included, afford to be run by a governing class who, in the words of Peter Osborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class (cited in Kerr’s article) “tend not to have significant knowledge of industry, commerce or civil society” ? Should qualification for parliament be having had a ‘real job’, however difficult defining that may be ?
At least, the old landowning aristocracy had to have some useful skills: administrative skills, for example, in managing their estates (or at least in appointing the right managers), or war-fighting skills as officers in His Britannic Majesty’s Army or Navy. And pre-war Labor MPs could relate to the sorts of everyday jobs they had before election. But, and here’s a very frightening thought, exactly what Really Useful Skills do the members of our current political class have – what jobs could today’s MPs could walk straight into ? Writing one’s memoirs doesn’t count, nor becoming a ‘consultant’, and even less joining the ABC or becoming a Visiting Fellow; and, as for ‘spending more time with my family’ – wouldn’t that be cruel and unusual punishment ?
Of course, even if a Previous Occupation Pre-requisite Qualification were enacted, hardly 24 hours would elapse but that the lawyerly class would have worked its dark magic on redefining real jobs beyond anything we could recognise.
Even so, it’s surely worth a thought, even to forestall a future PM’s plonking down a $5 note for a shout.
PS: At least we haven’t (Have we?) reached the administrative nadir to which local government in the UK seems to have plunged. In many LGAs, basic services such as rubbish collection have either been cut by 50% or more, either in frequency or volume (or both), or have been saddled with unworkable, user-unfriendly fees and conditions, such as having to sort out stuff for recycling into ten or so categories, resulting in hugely disproportionate fines for misses; you’d be financially better off having coshed someone. Coupled with this, the perversion of counter-terrorism laws to send squads of spies armed with police-style powers, some of them kids still in their tweens, to play ‘gotcha’ on people who commit such crimes as inadvertently dropping, say, some flakes of pastry from a sausage roll. Ross Clark in The Spectator [Wed 3 Sept 08] reports on how local council ‘services’ have become impositions:
“Ted Patel, who runs a convenience store near Upminster Station, was fined £50 after a council employee discovered a delivery note bearing his shop’s name next to a street litter bin. In vain did Mr Patel point out that the point of a delivery note is that it gets handed to a driver — who on this occasion perhaps dropped it: any piece of paper bearing your name found in the street is seen as reason enough to fine you. An 11-year-old boy in Manchester was fined for littering after an envelope was discovered next to a waste tip, having been blown across the fence.”
Mr Patel was certainly NOT being served, not, at least, in the way he expected to be, by his elected local reps.
For the full horrorshow story –
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/2057251/labours-punishment-freaks-are-hounding-honest-citizens.thtml
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
Sept 2008
