Corruption Is The New Governance

It's Not "Corruption" If It's Officially Sanctioned? Wow

Pleiades has been sending me material about Dick Warburton and his report. Naturally, as I pointed out yesterday, it is symptomatic of this government that it would appoint a climate change denier to head up a report on Renewable Energy Target. Predictably the Warburton report has recommended the we simply shut up shop on renewable energy. Of course he was savaged by Fran Kelly and promptly lost what little dignity he might have had in pretending he was somehow impartial.

I've been thinking about this a little more and it seems to me there is a much bigger problem than just the appointment of the eminently-wrong-person to review something that does not need to be reviewed, especially in the manner that an eminently-wrong-person may review such things. It's basically handing out policy to be designed by the lobbyists - which is basically as corrupt an enterprise you can have, running a government. We saw this earlier in the year when they handed out the economic policy thinking to the likes of  Tony Shepherd and Amanda Vanstone. Basically, this government doesn't have a thinking function, and glommed into government through nay-saying. Having put themselves in government it has dawned on them that they haven't got any kind of coherent policy so they've decided to do the classic corporate thing to do and handed out the thinking to subcontractors who are lobbyists, as a company might subcontract out some tricky bit of business.

The problem is all these lobbyists are the most vested of vested interests and worse still are not accountable to the public in the way the politicians are meant to be accountable. So now, there is no denying that corporate lobbies pay money into parties to get access, and when they get access to the ministerial level, they return favours by saying. "look, you tell us what you want and we'll just do it." It genuinely is government by the lobbyists of the lobbyists for the lobbyists. And there's no shame at all. There's no need for corrupt little brown envelopes with cash in them because these Liberal Party government office-holders just want to openly do exactly what the lobbyists want and tell them. It's like that joke: "what do you call a hamster with its own roll of gaffer tape?" - "A slut". The only reason it's not called corruption is because there's nothing subterfuge about it. It's a bit like how the hamster in the joke might not be considered a prostitute because it doesn't take money.

It's a classic case study in what happens when you substitute actual thinking with ideological slogans. It's staggering, even if we knew this was exactly what we would get if this bunch of traitorous sell-outs got into power. Yet, that's essentially what we've got - a government busily selling out the interests of its people in the name of doing and being open for business. They're a truly repugnant lot.