Number One Bag has been cleaning out my closet, Eminem style, and stumbled across the following gem in my collection of trivial newspaper clippings:
"The financial markets are
populated by a lot of immature, younger-type people who play with their
computers and drive home in their Porsches, and who have no
understanding of the of the human or economic dimensions of
unemployment."
Who is this wild-eyed Trotskyite? None
other than Wayne Swan, now Federal Treasurer, but quoted in 1994 when he
was chairman of the ALP Caucus Economics Committee and not yet in the grip of his current delusion that the market must rule us all.
1. As an Australia Post employee, it is a high probability that you may not be aware that your arse is on fire.
2. If someone draws your attention to the fact that your arse is on fire, sigh volubly and say, yes, that always happens. Mutter darkly to yourself and then continue with your prescribed task.
3. If you are a supervisor you will certainly not be aware that your arse is on fire.
3a. If a Mail Officer, PDO1 or contractor draws your attention to the fact that your arse is on fire shrug, and walk slowly away and make a cup of coffee before returning to reading the morning paper.
4. If you are an Australia Post manager, file a report with your state manager that significant improvements are being noticed in your initiative for increased thermal energy production in the spine base region amongst staff, consistent with Australia Post's FutureReady plan and four cultural pillars, going forward.
5. At no time should emergency equipment be used to extinguish an arse that is on fire. This equipment is very expensive and using it would add costs to Australia Post's bottom line, and this will, in turn, impact on profitability.
It provides a link to the evcricketblog,
which provides some very interesting facts about electricity generation - facts that seemed to elude Mr Abbott this week.
Energy policy, specifically electricity policy, is an interest of mine as it
strikes me that much of what we view as civilisation is heavily dependent upon
the ubiquitous 240 volt three pinned wall socket, yet few Australians are aware
of how their energy is generated - apart from vague idea of power stations -
let alone where the power for their house actually comes from.
I became acutely aware of this issue when I
became involved in the electricity privatisation "debate" in NSW from
late 2007 onwards. Much of the verbiage in this process was absolute garbage
peddled by discredited hucksters such as ratings agencies (Standard and Poors
being a serial offender, scripting NSW Treasury and that political zygote
Michael Costa) and other intellectual pygmies, such as Federal Energy Minister Mar'n Ferguson (whose claim to his position in public life is solely based on the fact that he is the son of former NSW Deputy Premier Jack Ferguson).
Electricity infrastructure was rolled out
in this country largely by local government, aggregated by state governments in
the latter part of the post-war boom and then corporatised through the eighties
to become a ripe plum for the usual suspects looking for easy pickings in this
neoliberal age.
The assumptions of the market - and even
the idea of a market as the best instrument to allocate energy resources in
Australia - are seriously flawed when one gets to grasp the fallibility of base load power generation.
And this isn't even getting close to the
ridiculous subsidies that taxpayers fork out to Alcoa and other aluminium
smelters giving them electricity at absurdly low prices so they can produce what is little more than bottled electricity. If we had an
informed populace most state and federal energy ministers would be
swinging from their largely redundant lamp posts.
An example: The Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission recommended a major overhaul of the 'poles and wires' network that was fingered as partly culpable in the disaster that swept parts of Victoria in 2009. This network is owned by SP AusNet after the State Electricity Commission of Victoria was privatised by the Kennett government. Surprisingly, the private company put commercial considerations ahead of the public good and allowed this infrastructure to run down. Now
that they have to do something about that little oversight they are seeking permission from the Australian Energy Regulatorto pass the costs
through to the privately owned retailers (the people who send you your electricity bill), who will no doubt show the same consideration of the public good as SP AusNet, given that the electricity pricing market in Victoria is totally deregulated. That's why your electricity prices are going up - nothing to do with Carbon Price there, Tony.
It's a fascinating example of how privatisation allows corporations to socialise costs while pocketing profits. Singapore Power is owned by the Singaporean government through a company called Temasek Holdings. So apparently it's bad for Australian governments to own infrastructure, but totally OK for foreign governments to own Australian infrastructure. Gotta love the pygmy logic of neoliberalism.
So while our parents generation paid for our electricity infrastructure once, through taxes, we are now paying for it again, through power bills. It's what Arthur Daley referred to as 'a nice little earner'.
It is not far removed from government
underwriting the installation of horse watering facilities on every street corner ten
years after the arrival of the Model T Ford, and charging the cost back to
households.
Wonks talk sonorously about 'not pickling winners' , but what is
gold plating baseload power and charging the bill back to households who have
no choice but to cough up the difference?
So a fixation by a failed politicians on hanging on grimly to baseload power generation is going to see Gen X pick up the tab, and that's why power prices are increasing. Who benefits? The private corporations who have snatched public infrastructure from the Australian people courtesy of culpable politicians from both major parties.
I wouldn't be surprised if in my lifetime we re-invent the wheel and see local government becoming the driver for community owned power generation from a range of sources distributed on a cost basis to ratepayers. It's cheaper, works for the public good, is a local employment generator and cuts out the carpetbagging middlemen fleecing us at the moment.
Maybe that's why we did it that way to start with.
The great
enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between
one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were,
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
squirting out ink.' - George Orwell
Post's version of The Pyongyang Times, Post Journal,
arrived in the PO Box at Rabbit Flat last week with the usual
colourful and didactic array of exhausting hagiography. Along with
the usual celebration of Post as some bizarre corporate cult
there was an A5 insert containing the results of the 2012 employee
survey.
It wouldn't be good
enough for Aussie Post's internal communications team to refer to this survey as, say, an
internal staff survey. No, that's just so active and accurate, so
instead the survey has been 'branded' as say2action.
Calling the survey
Say2action does several things; it creates the illusion that
Australia Post management are listening; it creates the illusion that
some tangible change will result from the survey; and it creates work
for graphic designers who would otherwise be doing something else.
Like a lot of agitprop,
Australia Post's internal communications are an irony-free zone. When
the A5 insert uses the phrase “an incredible increase of 4.6% since
last year” it does so without any acknowledgement that the word
'incredible' includes the meaning 'hard to believe'*, which undermines the veracity of the survey figures furnished.
The increase
concerns 'engagement', although what this means is not entirely
clear. The insert describes employee engagement as “what you think
and feel about working at Australia Post and the extent to which
employees go the extra mile”. No, I don't have any idea what that
means either, unless they are referring to those employees that will
have to move further out in the suburbs because with falling real
wages under Post's Fair Work Agreement they will no longer be able to
live closer to inner-metropolitan Post facilities, but I digress.
“Australia Post has
higher levels of engagement than other companies going through
change” according to the survey, although the source for this is
somewhat obscured, in fact non-existent, and how you measure
something as unclear as 'engagement' has got me beat.
I certainly hope this
'engagement' is not important as, based on the figures supplied, one
in four employees at Australia Post are not
engaged, which constitutes about 10,000 people, or something
approximating a fair sized regional town.
Your humble blogger
wrote to the say2action 'team' to for further clarification: “The
'Four Enterprise Focus Areas' figures similarly remain clouded in
mystery due to the absence of any verbs. Verbs are doing words and
are useful in communication to qualify nouns and create context.
Without context attaching numbers to nouns is meaningless. For
example, to say that Leadership and Supervision is 54 percent means
nothing. I realise that this is qualified on the reverse of the A5 by
saying that, in this example, "our leaders are more decisive and
responsive to changes in the market". But this begs the question
'What decisions?' and 'what is their response? Is it to run away?
Curl up in a ball? To dress in yellow and sing Korean pop songs?
These are all responses and thus involve being "responsive to
changes in the market", but are they useful or appropriate? Are
their decisions to have two sugars instead of one? To demand the
sacrifice of every third child? Once again, these are decisions and,
by definition inherently decisive, but not necessarily
useful.
Without context this language means nothing,
so I am curious as to the detailed results contained in the survey.
I remember the
scene in the Tennessee Williams' movie Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
when Burl Ives, in one of his few big screen roles as Big Daddy (and
what a belter it is!), confronts Paul Newman, playing his alcoholic
son, and tells him that “...every man I knew who drinks has a
reason! What's yours?'
Newman's answer?
Mendacity
“You got to live with
it. There's nothing to live with but mendacity”
Mendacity - the
appearance of seeming truth; which is to say, using the vernacular,
bullshit - seems to be a central cultural pillar of senior Australia
Post management.
They say they are 'for
zero' when it comes to accidents, but their lack of investment in
capital equipment exposes thousands of postal workers every day to illness and
injury while they harass, intimidate and belittle those employees
that are injured.
They say they value
their staff, so much that they are cutting postal workers' wages in
real terms by over eight percent in the life of the current
agreement.
They say they want to
serve their customers better but all they have succeeded in doing is
turning post offices into bargain stores, or closing them, while
creating an army of underpaid contractors to trash Post's 'brand' across the
nation by doing slipshod service in order to survive on the piece
work rates Post pays them.
They say a lot of
things, but much of it is mendacity. I'm not a religious Mail
Officer, but there is much wisdom in the biblical quote 'by their
fruits so shall these trees be known'. In the meantime frontline
service delivery staff at Australia Post continue to be treated as
second class citizens in their own organisation.
Your correspondent is a slightly humble Mail Officer with Australia Post who wishes to provide an insight into the lives of the working stiffs that do the actual work of this planet. You know, the stuff that actually has to be done, as opposed to the frippery that entire civilisations could happily progress onwards and upwards without, such as marketing and financial speculation.
So it's a window (or a mirror for the rest of us) on that world that the mainstream media largely deems invisible, irrelevant or unimportant yet fills up most waking hours for the majority of us. So there will be no commentary on MasterChef or Australia's Got Talent here, sadly. Nor will there be any unctious barracking for tribal politics, the internet is already rife with that detritus.
The intention is to keep it vaguely intelligent and provide some form of light relief from the prolix and fulsome enthusiasm we are pummelled with on a daily basis by marketers, consultants, change management hucksters and other carpetbaggers whose zeal is only matched by their worthlessness.
As my Authorised Union Rep (AUR) at work said to me the other week, 'Some people get their ambition and their ability mixed up'.
