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Canberra Today 16°/19° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / Keep people on side, it really helps!

Utopia
“Utopia”… another cracking season.
THE ABC show, “Utopia”, is having another cracking season, but in its portrayal of Canberra’s malevolence it slightly misses the mark.

It’s easy to sympathise with the heroic everymen (and women) of the Nation Building Authority as they try and get something done in the face of the HR department, health and safety inspectors, ministerial advisers and, worst of all, the media teams.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.
I love the show but, to date, it’s failed to explain why the impediments to progress exist.

Health and safety exams certainly feel like a waste of time and oxygen, but the data is pretty clear that they save lives and an enormous amount of money.

Last week’s episode mocked the bureaucrats for wanting to figure out a name for a piece of tunnelling machinery.

Why would a borer need a name? For its Facebook page, of course!

We can all laugh.

However, the reality of politics is that, assuming a reasonably competent government, the best option for important works will usually be chosen. There is room for quibbling about priorities (some may ask why the ACT government has been investing in horse-parking facilities at the arboretum while homeless people sleep rough) but, generally speaking, intelligent people who spend months working on a problem will figure something reasonable out.

The problem with adversarial politics is that somewhere out there is a poorly thought out alternative that will cost much more, and deliver much less, to the benefit of some particular player.

That player will fill the opposition’s ear with all sorts of semi-lucid explanations as to why the crap option is the one best pursued.

Sadly, very few oppositions have the courage to support good government.

Even more sadly, very few journalists have the knowledge to handle the issues without simply letting both sides have their say.

The public rarely has time to get deeply across the issues.

Which means if a government is serious about getting a major project up, and completed over many years, they have no choice but to try and bring the public along for the ride.

Therefore the tunnel-boring machine needs a name, and a Facebook page, and a big launch with a troupe of Spanish dancers and 15 shovels.

The modern danger is that project teams seek out easily measured metrics (Twitter numbers) that bear almost no resemblance to general community opinion.

So there’s a balance to be found.

When governments seek to spend billions of public money there’s a case for making sure the public is across the project and in support of it, and that public support once gained will keep the project on course in the face of rent-seekers and minority nuts.

The alternative is the fiasco we’ve seen in Melbourne, and that’s threatened here with the light rail, where new governments break contracts at vast expense to pursue terrible options they’ve come to identify with.

All the while the preferred contractors of the previous government bank their contract break fees and retire to a yacht to soak their feet in buckets of Pol Roger, and the public slogs on with nothing ever getting done.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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