Parkinson's Law still applies: as long as your salary and status depends on how many subordinates you have working under you, public servants will be motivated to build up their own empires, regardless of how trivial their contributions is.

My suggestion is that bonuses should be paid proportionate to the decrease in departmental costs between one year and the next. The more unnecessary services and useless staff that get cut, the more that everyone who's left gets paid.

Is this writer really saying that education and hospitals don't produce anything?
Godo,
Well, education produces masses of hangers-on & hospitals produce unmanageable, highly polluting waste.

I think your Scot tradesman would like "The Diagonal Steam Trap"
It is over the size limit for here but this is one link
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~rdelzell/general/jimmie_steamtrap.htm
Any shop floor man would get a laugh.

Thanks Belfast. Old Jock is no longer with us, but I'm sure he would have enjoyed it.

He was too serious to ever do something like that, he would have been the one who was first to see what Jimmy Dalzell was up to.

Dr Novak has missed a key point about unemployment figures. The real unemployment figure is 2 million or 20%. No one in their right mind should take any notice of the monthly unemployment figures as they are based on a politicla definition of unemployment not an actuarial one.

In February 2012, the PM said possibly up to 2 million working-age Australians ''stand outside the full-time labour force, above and beyond those registered as unemployed''. These included about 800,000 in part-time jobs who wanted to work more; 800,000 outside the labour market, including discouraged job seekers; and ''many thousands of individuals on the disability support pension who may have some capacity to work''.

All up 2.6 million unemployed.

Imagine if the public service pays & conditions were reduced by 10%. This would have no impact on anything apart greed. These 10% would provide so much work we'd need to import workers to fill the positions. Coalition there's your chance. Also start national service & work towards flat tax.