I am utterly amazed that in today's age a politician, namely Barnaby Joyce, can force the relocation of an entire government department into his electorate costing tax payers millions of dollars and stripping it of talent, without serious challenge. Done in no small measure to shore up his vote at the next election this should be considered an out and out abuse of power for self gain. Yet I have listened to at least three ABC interviews and in each case he has not been held to account, been allowed to bluster his way out of answering direct questions, and been joked with at the conclusion. It is insane.

I full expect the conservative press, which is very much in the majority in this country, to play this story with a dead bat but I want my ABC asking hard questions and not letting acts of bastardry and pork barreling slide through to the keeper. They have well and truly lost their spine. Is it because of the impending funding and job cuts? Possibly. But righteous anger should be driving indignation in any journalist worth their salt.

Pull your finger out and do your job.

//I full expect the conservative press, which is very much in the majority in this country, to play this story with a dead bat//

When they're always banging on about the need to reduce debt and be more prudent in Government spending? You'd hope they'd be asking some tough questions about the cost of this harebrained scheme.

You'd hope the opposition would too. Anybody heard from those guys lately?

Mass migration programs of federal governments that put 'diversity' first in lieu of community good have resulted in large numbers of migrants lobbing in Sydney and other large metropolitan centres, driving up house prices and overloading available infrastructure.

Such policies were criticised by Labor and LNP premiers and particularly by Labor premiers, eg Carr, who were exasperated by the feds importing big problems for states to solve, which they couldn't.

Federal governments always claimed that migrants would move to country areas. They didn't. The truth was that in the past migrants from some countries, eg from Germany could confidently be expected to do that, but others preferred to group together and in large cities.

In addition, Canberra has grown like topsy and is way too big.

Country towns are dying.

It is a smart initiative (and because other attempts to decentralise have failed), to move some bits of government departments to the country.

It must have been a shock for the original poster of this thread when Gough Whitlam and Dick Hamer cooperated to bring Albury-Wodonga to fruition. Although Gough's population forecast was never met.

I almost agree with you Steely. They & all the ABC should be moved from their incestuous current setup.

Every ABC function should be moved to any a wide number of sites west of Dolby, & north of Lake Eyre, with no more than 10% of it in any one location.

This should be the first act of draining the swamp in Australia, & would stop the left moving it to Adelaide to prop up their support there, after their catastrophic power policy.

Dear Hasbeen,

So dead bat from you as well on Joyce's naked self interest and abuse of power. Thought so.

Hell these guys didn't even have offices ready for them. There is an initial $22 million spend that will only grow as people take payouts and leave.

There is no doubt that local businesses and real estate agents are going to be pretty chuffed in Armadale so more donations for Joyce's election coffers no doubt.

Why isn't this pure corruption? This is costing tax payers, there is no economic justification for it, and all it is is the whim of a senior government politician making sure of the next election. All you can do is trot out some anti-ABC clap trap? Well done mate. You do our country proud.

Political corruption at is best.. This lot will do anything corrupted to save their own fury back.
Has been is usual 100 percent bias. Without the ABC in this country this country would be a remote outstation nation.

It's customary to introduce a topic by actually identifying what you want discussed. What are we supposed to be talking about here? A few public servants moved to Armidale? Or is it something so EastCoast-centric that those of us West of the Great Divide wouldn't know about it? I had to Google 'Joyce moves government department' to find out anything. I watch two news services every night - ABC and 7, plus radio through the day, and I haven't heard a thing about it. No big deal, it seems. And why should people paid by the the public not be moved about if it is in the interest of the country?

Dear doog,

Fully agree it is rank political corruption any anyone with half an interest in ordinary Australians who recognise it for what it is, nasty 'born to rule' elitism which thinks the public service is a plaything to be shunted around for their own gain.

But the issue is the ABC. At least we could always count on them being free from advertiser influence and this kind of thing was where they use to shine, but to me they are squimping it big time.

In many ways our bulwark against venial politicians and a Murdoch press was a fearless Aunty. The place has just got a whole lot worse if she is going soft.

//And why should people paid by the the public not be moved about if it is in the interest of the country?//

Why should people paid by the public be moved about if it is not in the interest of the country?

I thought we had a debt crisis. Why piss money up against a wall for no good reason?

Dear Toni Lavis,

It is a little bit more than that I feel. Joyce is the minister in charge of the department and he moved it to his own electorate. It stinks to high heaven but no one seems to be smelling it.

I would have thought that bodies like the pesticides
authority need central services, access to decision
makers or access to the very best in the way of
expertise and equipment. I imagine that such centres
would struggle to attract the best people and retain
them and influence the decision makers vital for their
function in the bush. The biggest losers will be
the people involved in agriculture.

Poor old SR. The Deputy Prime Minister of Australia didn't consult him on the business of running the country, and even his beloved ABC is not very interested in his ho hum bleating. No media interest: nothing to talk about. End of story.

Questions need to be asked because it is transparently
obvious that this is an attempt at vote-getting and not
for the good of agriculture. Barnaby Joyce needs to be
questioned - and not allowed to get away with this blatant
vote-grabbing tactic.

cont'd ...

Still, perhaps the Main Stream Media does not find
it newsworthy to report on agriculture in the bush.
You'd think the independent media would pick up on
it though - and our own Broadcaster - the ABC?

I think it is very brave of Barnaby, moving a bunch of radical ratbag lefties into his electorate. Obviously anyone working for the ABC will be a Labor or ratbag Green voter, so will tend to reduce his margin, & could actually infect people of the electorate with ratbaggery by association.

If you want to highlight political corruption, try looking at the ridiculous windmills causing blackouts in South Oz, or at Turnbulls 50 billion deal with submarines. Rank vote buying by both sides, & really damaging for real Ozzies, not like this little would be storm in a tea cup you are trying to generate.

SR,

The question that you and your ABC have been playing with a dead bat is the rampant pork barrelling of Tony Windsor by a grateful Gillard who sold her arse to him.

"Planes are a fixture in the skies here, with BAE Flying Systems winning a six-year, $120 million, Australian Defence Force contract the other day to continue basic flying training at Tamworth. On Tuesday, Ms Gillard announced $20m in new funding for medical training facilities in Windsor's home town and in nearby Armidale. Mobbed by schoolchildren, the Prime Minister opened a $10m sports dome in Tamworth, half of which was paid for by Labor's economic stimulus dollars. She and Windsor also visited Tamworth Hospital to promote a $120m allocation for a redevelopment and a $31.6m grant for a regional cancer centre, both projects financed by the $5 billion Health and Hospitals Fund.

NSW has been allocated $1.115bn from the HHF. Although New England is one of 48 federal seats in the state, its $151.6m represents 13.5 per cent of all NSW HHF grants. The following day, the House of Representatives partners travelled the 110km northeast to Armidale, where they flicked the switch on the first mainland section of Labor's $36bn National Broadband Network - a project Windsor has fervently supported and which he cited as crucial to winning his support for Labor after last August's federal election stalemate."

With respect to the APVMA, this was established 22yrs ago to assume responsibility for over 5000 chemical registrations granted under earlier arrangements by Australia’s states and territories.

From an original list of over 300 chemicals that were nominated as potential candidates for review by stakeholders, that only 75 reviews have been completed over 22yrs, which with a huge staff is piss poor, especially as the research from the USA, the EU etc is freely available.

That a department responsible for agricultural chemical registration should be decentralised to a prime farming area rather than a city is hardly a novel idea. That many of these bureaucrats are threatening to leave this bloated department is a bonus, saving the country $ms.

The only beef that I have with Barnaby's bit of decentralization is that the relocated department was sent to an existing city; far better for it to have been relocated to a smaller town, such as Tenterfield, Glen Innes or Inverell.

It's about time that many more Government departments were relocated in a burst of real decentralization.

Why were Mr Joyce and his colleagues silent in 2015 when
the Australian Taxation Office shut offices in Port Macquarie,
Toowoomba, Grafton, Orange, Cairns, Launceston, Rockhampton,
Bendigo, Mackay, and Sale.

How come he's suddenly interested in moving offices out to
the bush?

cont'd ...

Does he really think this will garner him more votes
for the Nationals

Is Mise, "It's about time that many more Government departments were relocated in a burst of real decentralization"

Well said. Agree with your comment on smaller places too.

Astounded that SteeleRedux, Foxy and others are not jubilant at the prospect of providing much needed employment for indigenous in country towns.

Why isn't the central office of the Department of Veterans' Affairs located in a country town?

It has no clients, those residing in the ACT are handled by the NSW office.

From the 2015-16 annual report DVA has 639, six hundred and thirty-nine staff sitting in Canberra, 'managers' and 'coordinators', who could do their jobs from anywhere. Doesn't DVA claim excellence in doing its business online and for umpteen years?

Why wasn't The Hon. Dan Tehan MP, Minister for Veterans Affairs leading the charge to the country?

Foxy,

What did the tax office in Sale do? All taxes are centrally assessed and reviewed, and the local tax office cannot answer any queries directly.

Shadow Minister,

You miss the point.

It's what they could of done. The same applies to any
government agency being moved to the bush.
What will they done?

cont'd ...

My apologies for the bad grammar in the previous post.

It should read - it's not what they did or did not do -
it's what they should and could have done.
Otherwise what's the point of moving them to the bush
in the first place?

It would seem a lot of people are on here defending the indefensible. It is not as though the people of New England came to Joyce and said they wanted that particular department in their electorate. The running was all done by him and he had to bring in a new regulation to make it happen.

I do not have a problem with orderly decentralisation. If there was a structured move based on the recommendations from an independent appraisal of the cost/benefits then it would get my vote. This was none of that, it was an extremely hasty decision based on rank self interest. It will mean stripping the department of much of its talent with 85% of the staff flagging they will not be moving. This will no doubt set the organisation back many years and the cost to the taxpayers will be considerable.

Public agencies change their accommodation often and there are almost as many instances of senior bureaucrats refusing locations and office space that was not to their perceived status and taste. They fight like a cage of neurotic cats over plumb locations. A move away from Barton or Parkes, "Quelle horreur!".

Incrementalism is often the key to successful public policy. Barnaby Joyce has done well and the only questions are:

- why has it taken so long; and,

- why haven't other Ministers had a word with their Sir Humphreys?

The question should be why was nothing done when
thousands of public service jobs in the regions have
been slashed since the Coalition came to power and the
Nationals were doing nothing that would seriously address
the economic decline of those regions. Communities were
hit hard on Mr Joyce's watch by the substantial cuts
across essential areas like bio-security, Centrelink,
Medicare, the Tax Office, Defence, and CSIRO.

Where were Mr Joyce and his colleagues and why where they
silent in 2015 when the Australian Taxation Office shut
offices in Port Macquarie, Sale, Mackay, Bendigo, Rockhampton,
Launceston, Cairns, Orange, Toowoomba and Grafton?

How will moving the APVMA (Australian Pesticides and Veterinary
Medicines Authority) relocation to the bush help the agency -
and agriculture when many of its experts have stated that they
will not be moving? Of course one can argue that this move
to push out of Canberra and to regional centres (mostly in
National-held electorates) is a blatant vote-getting grab.
But who will it really benefit?

Foxy, SR,

Still silence on the $150m Juliar spent on buying Tony Whinger's vote in parliament? I thought you would duck that one.

Secondly, the job of the APVMA would appear to be at best be duplicating the work done by other research centers across the world. That this bunch of 100 geniuses have taken 22 years to approve and register 75 chemicals is a disgrace. Simple maths indicates that the waiting list of 300 chemicals that are top priority will take nearly 100 years to clear.

A simpler solution would have been to fire these pinheads and largely adopt the findings of the US or EU, but moving the dept to a real farming area is nearly as good, with most of those bureaucrats grown fat on the taxpayers in Canberra resigning. Perhaps the new members will come with an understanding of the meaning of "top priority".

Dear Shadow Minister,

The facts speak for themselves.

The future will show whether Mr Joyce's plans will
translate into good positive action for agriculture
or whether it will remain the same old same old
that we've seen thus far.

I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. Mr Joyce
appears to be interested in only one thing - staying
in power for as long as possible.

He just may have a surprise in store at the next
election - as the voters in WA have shown Canberra.
Don't mess with us!

cont'd ...

What has Mr Joyce actually done for regional and rural
areas - does anybody know?

I've read that he's spent $32,000 of taxpayer's funds
wining and dining agricultural industry contacts at
top Australian restaurants. Entertaining useful contacts
is fine but does it require such over the top gestures?
And what in reality will that achieve? Surely the
agriculture industry contacts already know what is in
their interests to do or not do. It is a two-way street
after all. Lavish entertaining is so yesterday.

Foxy,

Before you get too excited, Labor is seriously on the nose in QSD, Vic and SA, and it won't be too long before McGowan's promises are shown to be bogus.

As for Tony Whinger, he personally made $ms from the sale of his farmlands to the coal industry whilst campaigning against them. As you live in the city you wouldn't know the country if it bit you.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Blaming others again?

You really need to acquire some new tactics.
The same old, same old, are wearing a bit thin.
But I guess that's all you've got. You could try
answering some of the questions I posed earlier
about what Mr Joyce and his party have done for
regional and rural Australia, apart from cuts
and spending taxpayer's money on entertainment.

As for my not knowing what country life is like?
Funny you should say that. I've got family members
who are stud-farmers in the Quirindi region of
NSW. Others who live in Kempsey. Still others in
Port Macquarie, South West Rocks. Others in Byron
Bay. And there's more on the list but I won't go into
further details. It just shows how much you think you
know.

Not much at all!

cont'd ...

If Labor is on the nose?

The Coalition is way past that point -
as you'll see at the next election.
WA - is just the beginning.

Foxy,

That's rich coming from you Foxy, considering your standard tactic is never to answer a question and reply by highlighting unrelated issues of the other side. That Tony Whinger profited $ms personally from the coal industry whilst slagging it off (Increase land sales prices?) is a matter of record, and probably one of the reasons he got booted from office.

Here is a long list of what Joyce has achieved, not only for New England:

http://www.barnabyjoyce.com.au/News/Releases/Two-years-of-achievements-in-Australian-agriculture/

FYI the next elections due are in the states of NSW, QLD, VIC, and SA, for all of which Labor are on the nose.

P.S. Having friends and family in the country is a far cry from actually living there. I have spent more than a decade living and working in small country towns where the politics is very different from the cities.

Dear Shadow Minister,

The same old, same old tactics from you.

That's more than rich - it's nauseating!

And giving me a link of Barnaby's achievements from one of
his own sites?

Joyce is an embarrassment. He does a good line in bluster
but not when you check the details.

"You can tell how he's going by the colour of his head."
(Scott Buchhotz).

BTW: - I was born and raised in the country.
Just thought I'd let you know. I also come from several
generations of farmers.

As for Barnaby - it's what he's going to do in the future
that will matter in regional and rural areas. The same goes
for the Coalition. Between now and the next set of elections
what will matter is how voters perceive both parties and what
they are providing. Nothing is set in concrete in the world of
politics.

The experience of country towns with the social problems from indigenous unemployment and resultant drug abuse and domestic violence should suggest to those who see everything through their far left political glasses that they should be reconsidering their stance.

For many years now federal government departments have been quite unreasonably highly centralist, even more than they have been in the past and have built up their pyramids of 'managers' and 'coordinators' in Canberra.

The management overheads in Canberra are excessive by any measure. How can departments have so few (almost rare!) staff at the bottom and lower rungs, but a preponderance of middle and higher 'managers'? The turnip-shaped organisation, where the base and lower levels, the production workers, are the tiny root below.

Departments conduct their business and manage and store information electronically. There is no justification for the thousands of public servants and the enormous central office overheads in Canberra.

I previously gave the example of the Department of Veterans' Affairs. So why isn't The Hon. Dan Tehan MP, Minister for Veterans Affairs leading the charge to the country and sharing the jobs, the much needed employment, around? It would immediately provide jobs for indigenous.

To add, relocation of departments to country areas would also challenge the cloned public servant.

Are there any figures available on the number of umpteenth generation Canberra bureaucrat? They marry one another and even the bits on the side, male, female and whatever, have Canberra lineage too! Incestuous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUwUp-D_VV0

leoj,

Ever thought of going into politics?

Foxy,

What a hypocrite! I give you exactly what you ask for, so you divert to an ad hominem attack on Joyce. You sound like the excerpt from the life of Brian, "but what have the Romans done for us?"

Joyce ran for the first time for New England against what the left assured us was a deeply popular incumbent Tony Whinger, and in spite of > $150m of labor pork barreling Joyce won in a landslide. The reality is that while Joyce is not popular amongst the latte sipping inner city dwellers, he is very popular in the country.

That Joyce has made the decentralisation of agricultural related bureaucracies a central feature of his election platform is also ignored by the left, probably because the concept of a politician doing what he promised is foreign to them.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Yeah right!

Keep up the good work!

Sarcasm?

Is that all that's left? No facts, no rebuttals, just school yard retorts?

Clearly you have no case to argue.

Dear Shadow Minister,

You wrote;

“Still silence on the $150m Juliar spent on buying Tony Whinger's vote in parliament? I thought you would duck that one.”

Compared to the one billion dollars Abbott offered Wilkie plus offering everything including his arse to Windsor? You are being a tad cheeky.

But these were different in that they were asset building, not shifting an entire department in a move costing 10s of millions of dollars, stripping it of talent, and doing it in such a shambolic way that the local Maccas became a temporary office for some of the staff.

I know we have low expectations around the behaviour of our politicians but this was naked vote buying to the detriment of the rest of the Australian tax paying population. If it were done by a Labour politician you would have been all over this rather than defending it.

It is this kind of elitist, born to rule thinking that will hopefully see your lot tossed out on their ear come the next election.

SR,

It is clear that Juliar sold her arse to Tony Whinger, and in her 3 yrs, far more was spent in labor electorates than Liberal electorates. As for the $1bn offered, I call BS on that. Similarly, the public servants using Macca's was also a furphy as subsequent reports indicated that there were already offices available. Pity, there was no fact checking on that story.

My personal view of the dept concerned is that it should be stripped down and amalgamated within other depts. 100 high paid civil servants to reproduce work done several times before is a classic case of waste. Getting rid of the 80% who won't move is a huge saving.

Dear Shadow Minister,

http://www.thepoliticalsword.com/page/Tony-Windsor-and-Rob-Oakeshott-two-gentlemen-politicians

And you want to be taken seriously.

Quoting a virtually unknown far left blog, and you expect to be taken seriously?

If Bob and Tony were such great pollies and gentlemen, why did their ungrateful electorates toss them on the political scrapheap?

Dear Shadow Minister,

You might ask John Howard the same question.

John Howard introduced work choices,

Oakeshott and Whinger supported Juliar.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Your attitude typifies why you guys lost WA.
Unless changes are made the rest of Australia
will follow suit.

So keep up the good work.

Foxy,

My attitude? you made the comparison.

Perhaps your attitude is why Juliar was thrashed.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Who's the one calling her by a derogatory name?