John Linton .....who once ran the British Foreign Office with a total of 18 people make of the 'public service' in today's Australia?
It seems that 'government' is becoming ever more intrusive in commercial life in the telecommunications industry - or maybe Exetel has grown to the size that attracts the drones that work (and I use that word loosely) within the ever increasing number of 'regulatory' agencies. Since we 'created' Exetel we have had an almost 'contactless run' with these dimwits bt I have noticed that over the past year or so we have had an increasing number of contacts nit-picking our web site text and the occasional 'spam' complaint. Then of course there is the ongoing sheer nonsense of the TIO employees with their zero understanding of the industry generally which remain unalleviable courtesy of a lack of intellectual reasoning capabilities equivalent to rotting meat.
In both of the countries in which we operate we adopt the only attitude allowable - complete conformity with the laws of the State and countries in which we operate. No company of Exetel's size can sensibly do anything else. However, while the laws of this country may be quite sensible when they are drafted and promulgated (though that isn't always the case) they are, it seems to me, more often than not 'carried out' by quite extraordinarily stupid and incredibly lazy "public servants' (though that phrase has become an oxymoron almost everywhere it is applied). For a brief summary of how many Commonwealth public servants there are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Public_Service
So - well over 150,000 of these drones drain Australia of more and more money each year. Bad enough but then you have each State's "public servants":
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/bureaucrat-blowout-27-billion-for-nsws-322000-public-servants/story-e6freuzi-1226065978447
and I cant be bothered to find the number for the other States but it seems likely that would add up to a total of around 100,000 State "public servants" to which you would have to add the number of local government employees. Probably a total of unproductive, meddlesome drones of between 400 - 500,000. So not only do the tax payers, rate payers and Australian citizens generally pay for these people to do no work (sort of a gigantic CentreLink work for the dole scheme - except at infinitely higher pay levels) they are actually paid to disrupt the work done by people who are forced to pay for these parasites to exist. We pay for this to happen at a rate of approximately one "public servant" per 20 working Australians - I can't quickly find the actual number.
It would be interesting to find out what has gone so wrong with the concept of "public service" from the days when only the best of the intellectual best were 'privileged' to be selected to serve their country to today's dross with their incompetence, dullness of mind and overwhelming self aggrandising interest.
As Josephe de Maistre so cogently put it one and a half centuries ago - "Toute nation a la gouvernement quelle merite"
I wonder what we have all done so wrong we ended up in this giant mess to be so endlessly punished?
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