The bureaucratic class is an incestuous beast whose gluttony is never satisfied. We’ve all seen it in action: a company “restructures” and “downsizes” and, by some strange miracle, coalface workers are either laid off or expected to do more and more work with less and less people, but the bastards with the clipboards strut around, untouched.
Nowhere has this become more obvious that in the government response to the Wuhan pandemic. Millions of us are blithely labelled “non-essential” and chucked on the scrapheap. But the bureaucrats issuing these dictates carry on unscathed.
In fact, they’re getting fatter while the rest of us starve.
Last week alone, during the biggest economic downturn in a century, [Victoria and NSW] were advertising 20 high-paid jobs variously requiring skills in “change, culture, transformation and strategy”, with total salaries above $3.5m.
Pick of the bunch was the $249,000 director of intersectionality and inclusion role at the Victoria Department of Justice, who must, naturally, “provide authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality”.
Also appealing was the $327,000 director of people and culture role at the NSW Department of Education, who should “provide expert strategic advice across a range of strategic priorities”.
Trades, hospitality, factories, farms: these are all essential jobs. These public service wank-jobs could all vanish tomorrow and not a damn one of us would notice.
Our two biggest state governments would appear to have provided an answer to anthropologist David Graeber’s 2019 book Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It. Answer: not much.
“Economics around the world have become vast engines for producing nonsense,” Graeber writes in a book that delineates five classes of bullshit jobs, of which change roles fit best into “flunkie” and “box ticker” categories. The former “exist to make someone else feel or look important”, the latter “allow organisations to claim they are doing something that in fact it is not doing”.
No-one outside the bureaucracy asked for these jobs to be created. No-one needs them. None of these jobs is answering a need for anyone outside the public service.
The most useless clowns in the public service rake in the most money. The BFD.
Jobs that are necessary, which arise from real demand from households and businesses, such as accommodation, retail, many professional services, have been wiped out, while those existing purely by fiat, for which no one would pay a cent, flourish.
It’s government arrogance and amorality that justifies such “jobs” — and the extraordinary salaries — in a major recession. It’s not the job creation we need[…]
Meanwhile, as government sucks intelligent workers into the pointless work Graeber identifies, it hobbles the private sector’s scope to generate jobs.
We might be able to tolerate such public service indulgence if the economy was cracking on and real jobs were booming. Maybe.
But the worst of it is that these useless parasites are actively paralysing the private sector, where actual work gets done. A builder recently told me how, thanks to the strangling amount of red tape, he actually lost money employing his apprentice.
Ronald Reagan was right.
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