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Public sector malaise : Comments
By Gary Brown, published 18/10/2005Gary Brown argues a growing malaise is undermining confidence in Australia's public administration.
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One or two suicides in Defence or at the hands of Immigration etc are nothing compared to the character and scale of entirely preventable deaths in the State health system, especially in Queensland. But even this is only a small portion of the culpability of malgovernance. And foremost amongst the other killers are the respective State EPA's and Natural Resources Departments.
And while these deaths are dispersed, isolated and largely misreported, they still fall well within the "remoteness of damage" standards that have been applied by the courts.
For example, a farmer lies wide awake at 3.00 am worried sick about how his farm will remain viable in the face of so-called environmental protection measures. He has clearing controls that prevent him clearing regrowth that has been wrongly mapped as Remnant, he has development restrictions that prevent him from subdividing a single house block from the main property to enable his daughter to share in his estate, his water rights are up for renegotiation because the uncontrolled regrowth in the upper catchment national park has seriously degraded the catchment water yield.
Most public servants under this type of stress will get stress leave, but only after they called in sick to recover from the previous night of sleep deprivation. Not so, the farmer. He gets no sickies and stress leave would only make his problems worse. So hops on the tractor and struggles through another days work. That is, until about an hour after lunch when the sun, and drowsyness catches up on him. A moments lapse in concentration and another horrendous farm accident statistic is notched up.
And we all know how the courts would allocate blame if the same happened to a public sector employee, dont we?