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Useless Spinners

A fabulous article by Chloe Booker in the Age about government spin in the health department. Firstly, please give Ms Booker a big payrise, and an award for this article. And please Chloe, keep writing more stories like this.

The point of the article is that Victoria’s Department of Health and Human services spent a great deal of time and resources covering up the disastrous hotel quarantine virus breakout. In particular, Chloe notes in the article that a spin doctor insistently tried to divert her away from the issue- even as it was happening and accelerating.

This is just appalling. I think Chloe has broken down an important barrier here, often left unsaid by journalists in general- how many of their stories are ‘guided’ by these worthless PR hacks and spinners working for government departments. These spinners are literally worse than useless. They are being paid massive money- 150k plus, to basically lie and divert and cover up disastrous department mistakes. In other words, a bunch of government workers is being employed to cover up the mistakes of other government workers. And there is a mountain of these hacks out there.

In this case Chloe did not back down, did not get ‘spun’, but unfortunately many journalists do.

The DHHS is a bureaucracy riddled with waste and uselessness. The sight of these grossly overpaid bureaucrats, many on 340k plus per annum, all being provided with wasteful QCs at eye watering cost at an inquiry so they can shift blame is nauseating, especially with the knowledge that none of these bureaucrats will be sacked (ie properly physically sacked, ie no more money, rather than being put on overpaid ‘leave’ while the storm blows over).

We have too, too, too many bureaucrats, too many spinners (there should be none), and too many laws and regulations, driving on this mad bureaucratic farce. Time to sack every single bureaucrat on more than 150k at DHHS, sack every single media officer, sack every single person named at the inquiry as being responsible for this mess (without one dollar of further salary or entitlement paid) sack every single ‘adviser’, and pump that money either back in real actual frontline services, or just return it to the taxpayers who paid it in the first place.

Please also can we have the name of the PR hack in the article who tried to cover up the hotel quarantine disaster. We are paying the salaries of these morons who lie to us, we deserve their names.

We have to tell these useless overpaid bureaucrats that enough is enough. Individual taxpayers should be given the right to audit and sack as well.

The DHHS, like most bureaucracies in Victoria and Australia, is a bloated mess run for the benefit of its own staff that should be simply shut down.

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Let the universities die

Another day, another whinge piece about how our wonderful universities are dying, evil conservative govts etc etc. Perhaps the author of this piece could talk about how many of her journalism graduates are unemployed (and what the employment rate of her course has been over the past 10 years?)

The universities have long ago forfeited their right to be considered places of education. They are in it for the green. And no, its not just that they are chasing overseas (really visa) dollars (although they absolutely are), its the general hunger for cash, so they can bloat their administrations with useless admin workers on vastly inflated salaries (and of course their grossly overpaid Vice Chancellors).

And no, its not because ‘government cut their funding so they had to look for other revenues’ it was always greed, full stop. Let them die. Good riddance.