Exactly who's in charge?

From this morning's AM. Chris Uhlmann interviewing Andrew Robb, Vocational Education Minister.

CHRIS UHLMANN: This argument on experience, this argument on experience, saying you can't replace experience with inexperience is a self-annihilating argument. If you argue that then you would never change governments, would you?

ANDREW ROBB: But people need to look long and hard at, you know, at what the circumstances, the economic circumstances are that are there.

Labor is promising to scrap our industrial relation laws which will only remove the checks and balances on inflation and risk an interest rate break-out.

Now, when, the thing is, when you look behind Labor's slogans, when you peek behind Labor's, there is nothing there. Nothing but what they've copied from us.

The rest of it, they have not done the policy work, they have not made a case for taking over government. And people do face a choice in an election.

Governments do change, but, but when they change the Opposition should have made a case. They should have established a set of policies, an alternative program and shown that they've got the ability to carry that through…

...

CHRIS UHLMANN: But again, you can't argue that they have copied you, and that things will be radically different under them, can you?

ANDREW ROBB: No, they have, they have just parroted our policy programs…

CHRIS UHLMANN: So if it's the same, then why should people worry?

ANDREW ROBB: But they do not understand how to structure those policies. They have never done the work which has put those policies together, haven't got the experience to deal with and manage the economy, to find that mix of policy responses in difficult international economic times.

We are confronting, we are confronting some serious issues across the United States. We are confronting a booming economy. We've got a drought of major consequence. Now all of these things, all of these things, make if extraordinarily difficult to maintain strong growth.

CHRIS UHLMANN: And all are beyond your control.

ANDREW ROBB: This could all be put in jeopardy, Chris, by a Labor government which is union-dominated, which is inexperienced, which is, with a prime minister that would have to be beholden to a union movement that's put $30-million on the table to buy government in this country.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Andrew Robb, thank you.

I do like Chris Uhlmann.

Now apart from a fairly ordinary performance by a second-rate Government minister, complete with foot-tangling and slogan-pushing, this got me thinking.

Chris Uhlmann was quite rightly calling Robb on the ludicrous Government line that you can't trust inexperience and hence the Government should, in effect, never change. Andrew Robb's weak response is predictable, but utterly nonsensical: "But they do not understand how to structure those policies. They have never done the work which has put those policies together, haven't got the experience to deal with and manage the economy, to find that mix of policy responses in difficult international economic times."

Ignoring the inconsistencies, why is it that on these matters, no one ever points out that the economy is actually run by bureaucrats? Does anyone for a moment believe that Peter Costello is personally responsible for the running of our economy and that he receives no assistance at all from the vast and complex network of public servants whose professional existence keeps this country operating?

Do you think that to be a Treasurer you really need to have any idea about fiscal policy, or do you, like me, suspect that Kyle Sandilands would probably do as good a job as long as he took the advice of those paid to actually know what they're doing?

Under the Howard Government, the Public Service has been turned into a kind of blame absorption device. The cavalcade of I-wasn't-tolds that tumble from the lips of Ministers when things start to go dodgy is a testament to this. Yet while they're perfectly willing to crucify a public servant when things go bad, never is a mention passed their way when things are going well.

Have you ever heard ANYONE say that the good management of a particular Government Department (let alone the economy) is thanks to the people who actually work there? No, it's always the Minister and only the Minister. There's a reason bureaucrats are often called faceless.

And yet what happens if the Labor Party wins the upcoming election?

Peter Costello, Dolly Downer, Kevin Andrews, John Howard (all our favourites!) will empty their desks, tuck their butchers paper under their arms, clutch their whiteboard markers and shuffle out to less dignified offices down the way and Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Peter Garrett, Linsday Tanner and Kevin Rudd will move in. The wallpaper will get changed, the unseen bits behind the filing cabinets dusted for the first time in eleven years, new pictures, new plants, maybe a new set of cubicles for the apparatchiks. A wave of change.

And in the meantime, thousands of Australian public servants, the same ones as before, will continue to show up every day, doing their thing, organising their bit of the country, actually ensuring it doesn't all fall apart and why? Because that's what they do. It's not Joe Hockey who runs Industrial Relations in this country, it's his Department - he's just the tip of an enormous iceberg, the puppet who stands up and says what he's told by people who know better.

Whether the policy is heinously racist, or staggeringly compassionate, it's the same people who write it. Sure they get their instructions from someone different and that's where that difference comes from, but it's still the same Department, the same staff that has always been working at the Department of Immigration.

I think you see my point (I've certainly laboured it enough).

Which brings me back to Chris Uhlmann and Andrew Robb.

The Government line seems to go thus:

a./ the Labor Party has copied our policy;
b./ this is bad because they didn't write it and consequently don't understand it;
c./ unless you understand it, you'll fuck everything up.

Even if this WAS the case, it's completely irrelevant because the people who wrote that policy in the first place, the people who actually deal with it's minutiae every single day, the ones who enact it's suggestions, who see it's programs through, will be exactly the same under a Rudd Labor Government. They are the same people! If the policy is the same, why would they suddenly forget how it works?

It's a stupid argument and I think the Government knows it.

Today's interest rate rise has boxed Howard and Co into a very awkward position and I expect we'll see a lot more of this ludicrous logic over the next few days.

I for one intend to just sit back and enjoy it and in the meantime, raise a glass to those wonderful Public Servants who actually do all the work.