IF YOU BREAK IT YOU PAY FOR IT

Wikileaks was right, a good government has no need to keep secrets from its electors. Admittedly little porkies have to be told now and then just as we mere mortals do to protect ourselves or the other people around us. That is acceptable behaviour but to deliberately hide the processes of determining the law and how to formulate new ones should be out in the open and public.

Guess what. In Australia as with other democracies it is.  It is just that we can’t be bothered to watch them being created, and frankly, don’t have the paid time to waste watching the process evolving. It would be more productive if we just went outside and watched the grass grow.

One reason we don’t participate is that these processes are so shrouded in protocol and ritual, rules of order, mysterious procedures, confronting participants, confusing conclusions, convoluted and in Latin the language of law not the language of the people. There are dozens of wherefores and art thou’s, parties of the first, second and third parts, respondents, defendants, witness tampering, whips and slings, speakers, registrars, notes and minutes larger than telephone books and all the legal paraphernalia that enables lobbying by special interest groups like the Lone-legged Vegans Association and the League of Cycling Lycra Lovers.

It is a pity that we have to trust people we can’t trust but had to elect because nobody sensible put their hand up. Where are the statesmen and not politicians, where are the ordinary people and not the party hacks and arse-lickers or Union executives elected in return for little favours, like being allowed to root prostitutes on the Unions Credit Card. Where are the people who are altruistic and don’t have an agenda or their own selfish interests to protect? Where are the laws that apply to ordinary people that don’t apply to our elected officials?

Bureaucracy loves things to be over-complicated. It employs people just to translate the rules not just apply them. It is a self-preservation society intent on creating it’s own planets within the universe of government. Bureaucracy loves duplication because it creates competing power bases each intent on making their department the biggest, best, brightest, fattest and least productive. When executive salaries are linked to the number of people they get to boss around rather than the effectiveness of your realm, then we have a veritable army of competing interests each soaking up their proportion of the taxpayers dollar.

Then there is the spin. Top spin from the government, bottom spin from the opposition, yarn spin from the media and salad spin from the members dining room. The various spin cycles, timed for the next news cycle, are simply the re-interpretation of truth, cooks call it garnish, that makes everything look cheaper, faster, smarter, simpler and tastier than really are.

Why do we have the same departments at State and Federal and even some at Local Level as well? The Health Department is a prime example. If we had hospitals, medical centres, health and safety officers and pork rind inspectors at all levels controlled by one authority then that might be OK. But we only have two levels of Health - Government and Private - so why three levels of health officials? Health and Safety are almost costing us the equivalent of wages and salaries if you tack on all the compliance costs and health officials keep on adding new ones. Who invents the ideas for new rules is anyone’s guess.

An example might be in the extra-ordinary and unnecessary cost for nursing homes to widen the doors, not for wheelchairs or obese patients, but so a coffin can be removed without a twist or turn. I don’t think the occupant gives a bugger about whether their feet or head go first. There is an example of un-necessary regulation in the United States where the anti-abortion lobby in one state required all abortion clinics to have corridors a minimum of five feet wide. Not to facilitate health and safety but to drive the clinics out of business with costs that supporters and patients can ill afford to bare. 

Then we have three levels of builders of roads, footpaths, bridges and wombat under-passes. Expressways that don’t express, Freeways that aren’t free and bike lanes that we car drivers pay for but can’t use. We have them at every level as well. Working out who owns what, is responsible for and repairs what is a complicated process. The feds pay the states and the states pay the municipality, feds build these roads, state builds those roads, municipalities build our roads and developers of land pay to fill in all the gaps. It doesn’t matter who takes the high road or who runs along the low nobody, but nobody gets their share before the bureaucrats. Pot holes never get repaired because you have to first prove how they got there, who owns them and who should repair them.

The wages and salaries to run things can absorb half of the money allocated to any project. Linton’s Replica Railway Station funded from federal money through the state to the shire absorbed three levels of administrative costs before it even got to the builders. By the time the builders made their profit maybe less than a third of the money was left. This is probably why we only got a third of the original project as  planned.

I’ll cease this months diatribe before you regret it. But I am personally sick and tired of businesses big and small complaining about wages and salaries when it is really the cost of complying with all the rules and regulations, whether or not it’s fresh plastic gloves every time you touch a different food, automatic fire sprinklers over each kitchen appliance and one for the whole kitchen as well, that no food is sold without a licence and from an approved kitchen, that its packaged right, handled right, packed right and served right. That steps are clearly marked with lurid colours, which is useless if your colour blind. That we have fire warning devices inside our home that does nothing to prevent your house going up in flames from the outside. Maybe we should regulate nature as well we have damn well regulated everything else.

Mankind has lasted in this country without refrigeration and plastic gloves. They deliberately set fire to the land, they ate stuff raw, threw it on a fire guts and all before eating it, in bad times they stuffed their mouth with anything they could find, not even a dragon fly was safe and they survived for 40,000 fucking years. Food has not changed so why should we, genetics has not changed so why should we, people still root each other in every orifice so why change, babies are still born somewhere between a five-star maternity suite and a shit ingrained dirt floor so why should we change.

We have too many regulators and to many regulations, you can never regulate stupidity nor can it be eradicated like common diseases. We cannot prevent people from being stupid even if they are wearing a crash helmet. We can still get sick from inhaling air so why stop smoking, some men still beat the shit out of their wives in drunken rages yet we still drink.

Lets just privatised the whole rotten system and then we will see efficiency at its finest as everyone strives to make money and not waste it. Lets take away all laws which protect people from themselves, maybe nature will take its course and all stupid people will eventually disappear. We only need laws to protect other people from us but not ourselves. As living entities given free will we can decide what is best for ourselves, if we get sick or even kill ourselves that’s our problem. Let their be one over-all rule, and start by not inventing a new one but using an old one,

‘If you break it you pay for it’.