If watching this video robs you of your will to live, call Lifeline on 13 11 14

 

 

John Anderson sits down with former NSW Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner Mike Newman to examine the culture, size and direction of Australia’s modern public service. While both men acknowledge the vital role of capable public servants, they question whether the system has become bloated, inward-looking and detached from the realities faced by households and businesses. At a time of falling productivity and rising cost-of-living pressures, they ask whether the balance between administration and wealth creation has drifted out of alignment.

The discussion moves beyond numbers to deeper questions of accountability, incentives and institutional culture. From regulatory overreach to major project failures, Newman argues that expansion has too often come without corresponding responsibility. Yet, he also highlights examples where strong leadership and a service-first mindset have delivered genuine reform. It is a serious, practical examination of how Australia governs itself, and what must change to restore discipline, effectiveness and public trust."

 

After having watched this gob-smacking video clip, I was too much lost for words to find my own and simply copied the above text from the YouTube recording; however, on later reflection and drawing on my years living cheek by jowl with both local and federal public servants — whoever came up with the term "public servant" must have had a great sense of humour — and a brief brush with the public service during my time with ATSIC, I can confirm that everything is only oh so true!

In Canberra I lived in a cul-de-sac of fourteen houses in which I was the only one who was not a public servant or, to put it more bluntly, who worked for a living. The rest of them went to work long after I had gone, and by the time I came home again, they were already cutting their lawns within an inch of their lives (the lawns', not their lives'!)

For my six months inside ATSIC I was hired to do the work the others didn't do because they were too busy discussing what colour donut to buy for the next coffee break, and once that was done, to take the lift downstairs to stand outside the office building for a cigarette break - I heard of people who took up smoking to get the extra break! - after which it was almost time again for another discussion about donuts.

Public Service? Give me a break, but not a donut or smoko break!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. For equally brilliant videos from John Anderson Media, click here.

 

.

The (articled) year my voice did not break

 

An excursion by the office staff to the head office in Hamburg.
'Yours truly' is at the far right in a shiny new suit and glasses.
Click on image to enlarge.

 

My biggest cock-up in life was to have allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen to become an articled clerk in an insurance company.

For three years, my fellow-articled clerks and I worked a six-day week, practically for nothing, while being force-fed on subjects such as accounting, commercial law, economics, business ethics, and more.

Being much older and better educated, they'd already gone through puberty, dealt with acne, and were shaving daily, while I was still a complete baby face who unsuccessfully tried to fill out his first shiny business suit and was yet to spend his first Deutschmark on razor blades.

 

 

At home I was known as "der Dünne" — "Skinny" — but at work I was already "Herr Görmann" and entrusted with more and more professional work despite the pittance I was paid as an indentured articled clerk. We were cheap labour, the price we paid to get our professional training.

 

 

My reference at the end of the gruelling three years mentions my 'way with words': "Viel Freude bereitete es ihm, den dazugehörigen Schrift-wechsel zu bearbeiten. Wir konnten ihm schon während der Lehrzeit gelegentlich auch schwierigeren Schriftwechsel übertragen." see Google

We were trained to dictate our correspondence, complete with full punctuation and spelling of particularly difficult words, to a typist who took it down in shorthand, or onto a tape with a GRUNDIG Stenorette.

 

 

All the typists knew my age, and were used to my prepubescent voice. Things became a bit more tricky when one client, in answer to one of my written 'masterpieces', called me on the phone. After a lengthy talk concerning his insurance claim, he followed it up with a letter which opened with the very embarrassing salutation, "Dear Miss Görmann ..."

I never lived this down with my fellow-articled clerks. I completed my articles and eventually found a new voice and new home in Australia.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

 

 

No, this is not Gregory Peck, but Tim Breckwoldt, last of the Breckwoldts who once operated an empire of branches all over the South Pacific. Where were their branches, you asks? Perhaps it would be easier to answer the question, "Where weren't their branches?" As I wrote in an earlier post, they were everywhere.

Then, suddenly, they were all gone without a trace sometime in 1980, which was too soon for then still nine-year-old Tim Breckwoldt to step into his father's and grandfather's shoes to continue the proud tradition.

There's a German saying that suggests that "Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm". In Tim's case the apple must've kept rolling downhill as he became a public servant in the family's hometown Hamburg, which is the very antithesis of his father's and grandfather's pioneering spirit.

 

 

However, he has decided to keep the history of Breckwoldt alive by publishing, either here or on a separate website yet to be done, lots of archived material that will document the rise and rise and then sudden fall of Breckwoldt & Co. who were once proud South Sea Island traders.

I'll drink to that with a BREWO-BEER!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Early morning at "Riverbend"

 

 

The river is blanketed in thick mist which heralds another hot day coming up. The house is still all quiet as I make myself my first cup of tea for the day. Padma will meet another lady from the 'bitch-and-stitch' craft group for coffee at the café in the village across the river which will give me a few hours of uninterrupted reading-time.

My old Windows 10 computer wouldn't start this morning. I 'Ctrl-Alt-Delete'd it several times, then pulled the power cord, then started again. It's getting old like me. Perhaps it's time I traded it in for a new one! Perhaps it's time I traded in my old body for a new one as well!

Anyway, Padma has prepared my breakfast; the radio is shouting out the latest news; my short reverie is over and I'm back in the land of the living. To my friends in the (c)old country, don't despair! The world hasn't ended yet; it's already Saturday morning here. Seize the carp.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Sense of an Ending

 

 

Julian Barnes' book "The Sense of an Ending" is so much more than the memories of a retired man named Tony Webster who recalls how he and his friends at school vowed to remain friends for life, and who now reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken.

It is a meditation on ageing, memory and regret, and hard to imagine to be made into a movie. I mean, how do you turn into a movie something as beautifully written as "Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be"? [Page 105]

"We live in time - it holds us and moulds us - but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."

And then "... you get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"

"The Sense of an Ending" was also the favourite book of a friend who passed away six years ago this month, and whose slow decline over a couple of years I witnessed. The Sense of an Ending indeed!

 

Googlemap Riverbend