New policy setting ---Premier de-activates activists
Australia’s immense public service has been told to pull its head out of the ideological clouds and instead focus on supplying the everyday necessities of life such as water and power, however tedious these tasks are, points out our Australian correspondent.
When Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison told the nation’s public servants to be more diligent in serving Australians he was delivering a message to the bureaucracy to concentrate on essential if rather dull services instead of being distracted by and dissipating their energies on the pursuit of ideals.
The message to cease being diverted by causes was only lightly encoded by Mr Morrison in terms of the public service imperative of looking after everyone instead of activists of various descriptions, the “noisy lobbyists.”
This was reinforced by his call for public servants to cast their efforts and concerns beyond the “bubble” which is the Australian colloquialism for the political class concentrations described elsewhere as “beltways.” In the line of fire is the public service’s preoccupation with climate change lobbies which exert a strong and distracting pull over the imagination of the bureaucracy’s administrative class.
This influence and the corresponding misjudgements induced are directly associated with the fall of federal premiers Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, and Malcolm Turnbull on the two occasions in which he sought to straddle the climate lobby. More recently still Labour’s Bill Shorten lost the “unloseable” general election seeking to appease the lobby with open ended promises. Mr Turnbull especially saw the issue in quasi messianic terms.
Only now are Australians realising that during his premiership and at a time when Darwin’s port was being transferred to Chinese control that a public sum of money equivalent to the Darwin acquisition price was ex gratia placed at the disposal of Queensland climate friendlies.
The shift of the bureaucratic administrative class in Australia and throughout the Commonwealth, the one based in London, toward activist-grade ideology can be traced to the election of Donald Trump. This by itself was not enough to trigger the ensuing intensity of the Commonwealth administrative class partisanship. President Trump’s rubbishing of the Paris climate agreement was followed by his overt support of Britain crashing out of the EU.
His trashing of these two bureaucratically-driven and covenanted transnational creations ensured that a cross-section of the administrative class everywhere set out to do everything it could to capsize president Trump’s hegemony.
It was now that it found its instrument of retaliation in the form of climate change which had mutated from a scatter of alarms such as food miles and peak oil via the greenhouse effect and global warming through to a status as an exalted and inclusive rallying call for the high-minded.
As recently as two years ago the dominant issue in Oceania for Australasia was the practical one of the supply of mutton flaps from New Zealand and the ensuing diabetes amid the island population. The issue now could not be further removed. It is now one of cash endowments and the gigantic enabling financial transfers which are conducted under the climate change banner.
Commonwealth bureaucratically controlled state television broadcasters the BBC and Australia’s ABC now ensure under shared contents arrangements that the climate change banner is constantly unfurled, visible. Leaked diplomatic communiques between the British Embassy in Washington and Whitehall portray the Trump White House in terms of a Wild West saloon serve to underline the administrative class’ scoffing attitude to the Trump regime.
The prospect of the not-so-quiet American president securing another four years to indirectly influence the lives of Quiet Australians, as they are described by premier Morrison, enrages and inflames the politico-media class.
Australia has an unusually high percent of its workforce in the public employ and it is considered to be in the 18-20 percent range. In the event, the premier’s words can be seen now as extremely focused. The warning is aimed at the rapidly expanding branch of governmental service in the policy and advisory category, the realm of researchers, analysts, and officials especially those in the diplomatic category.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has fired a warning shot across all their lofty brows. He has told them to pull their heads out of the ideological clouds and do the work that they are paid to do