Further reasons why the South Australian State Government MUST GO!

Not only has this government presided over the 'achievement' of worst measures on most important measures as outlined in my previous post, but it has evolved into something very much UNLIKE what I understand Labor government to be.

J’accuse! (I accuse!) the 14 year old-and-tired state government currently led by Jay Weatherill, of behaving without traditional Labor values, examples being:

• Significant payrises and side-benefits to political-position employees (eg Winter-Dewhirst as CEO of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, a journalist and lobbyist by profession...$500,000+ pa, and a BMW thrown in, without being disclosed)

• Jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls (eg Grace Portelesi, Chloe Fox...the MP's who lost their seats)

• Bread and circuses (eg the Rolling Stones, Liverpool FC…literally millions of dollars paid to mega-multi-millionaire individuals and organisations)

• $14 billion of public sector debt…and stuff-all all to show for it…sticking this dead-weight debt on our children and their children

• 500 more deaths in the state public hospital system than external benchmarks would indicate (where is the uproar?!?...10 South Australians each week have been dying unnecessarily…)

• WorkCover declared ‘buggered’ after 12 years of Labor oversight…before anything is done about it

• Spending significant public dollars to gain/sustain government (eg appointing Martin Hamilton-Smith as an extra Cabinet member, at a cost of $8 million)

• Quarter-baked economic development ideas (eg Positive Psychology Institute, and SA as the ‘well-being’ state)

• Treatment of high-profile distinguished South Australians who dare to speak truth to power (eg Justice Blue who described, in a judgement, the Gillman transaction as ‘unlawful’, ‘irrational’ etc and was then backhanded by the Premier as ‘some judge’; Professor Richard Blandy as ESCOSA commissioner pointed out that water charges were significantly inflated due to government fiat, and was the backhanded as a right-winger…)

• Passionate only about politics and politicians – deliberately and cold-bloodedly saying that there ‘was a special place in hell’ for those seek to use child abuse for political purposes…and directing this at members of the opposition and independents – reserving anger for political enemies, instead of those who perpetrated the abuse on poor Chloe Valentine, and those who were charged with preventing such abuse ie the government and its department

The SA Labor Government must GO!

After almost 14 straight years of a Labor government in South Australia, we now have the worst, or nearly worst, position in the following very important areas (on an 'apple-and-apples comparison):

• The highest unemployment

• The highest public sector debt

• The highest taxes

• The highest electricity prices

• The highest water prices

• The oldest population

• The worst educational standards

• The largest public sector

And, of course, nothing much to show for it.

They must GO!

Donald Trump/Drumpf

I was asked today, following the violence at a Trump/Drumpf rally, what if The Donald was assassinated?
Without thinking, I replied: 'Well, he couldn't be President then.'

Cory Bernadi is being a fwanker again. He threatens to cross the floor to vote against any move to increase the GST to 15%. He has apparently declared himself to be on the side of the un-reconstructed Labor Party diehards on this issue.
Cory, please leave the building!

When the voters in the US, whether at primaries, caucuses, or the general election, please think about your choice of candidate as potential Commander-in-Chief.

The Congress can constrain a mad-hatter President in matters domestic, but in matters of foreign policy, they have much much less power. To quote Richard Nixon: 'The President can bomb who he likes.'

Donald Trump as POTUS and Commander-in-Chief?

Ted Cruz able to fulfil his promise to 'carpet bomb Islamic State'?

I could go on.

Things I have worked out to be true and important

In the early part of my 59th year on earth, here are some of the things I have worked out to be true and also important, not in any order -

• The internet is both a good and bad thing (Neils Bohr's Complementarity Principle at work)

• The best people work because they gain deep satisfaction for what they do, not because of what they are paid. Performance-based remuneration is nonsense

• There is very little point in drinking bad wine

• Electric toothbrushes are a good idea

• You don't have to beat your Black Dog; instead just keep wrestling it to a draw

• Don't work in an Australian university, as it is very likely to be bad for your mental health

• Abbott and Costello, the 3 Stooges, and Fawlty Towers will all live on forever as comedic genius

• JFK was right when reading Ted Sorensen's words in his late-1963 speech at the American University:

         'In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we inhabit this small planet, we       breathe the same air, we cherish our children's future, and we are mortal.' 

• There are 2 types of people - quants and poets. Try to be both

• Climate change is real, Always has been and always will be. The issue is about building human resilience to it, not babbling on about whether it is a great moral issue or not. 

• I have never seen a thin kookaburra on the Fleurieu Peninsula

• If there is a God, there is no point praying to it. If there is or isn't a God, that's OK

• Generation Y will generally do better than Generation X

• Islam urgently needs its own form of the Reformation; and to somehow create equality between men and women

• Tarzan (JW version) lives on his escarpement, will do so forever, and is the ultimate alpha male

• We should be very grateful for the ancient Greeks and Romans for the foundations and principles of democracy, duty, science, art etc

What should/do Boards and directors do?

Our current Premier, Mr Weatherill, has stated that South Australia’s 400+ government Boards and Committees will have to justify their existence or be axed.

Whilst it is admirable for a head of government to declare an attack on unnecessary public expenditure, it is entirely another to successfully do something about it, and without creating serious negative unintended consequences.

As a good Labor man (ie without the ‘u’), the Premier would no doubt oppose unfair dismissal wherever he found it. Any Board/Committee member who lost their position as a result of this initiative would very likely have (moral, if not also legal) grounds for an unfair dismissal claim, on the grounds that the required performance has never been specified, nor actual performance assessed and communicated. How can you be axed for not performing to standard, if the standard has never been set out?

This is my most fundamental point – the Premier’s announcement, taken at face value, simply demonstrates that the current government doesn’t really grasp what Boards/Committees are supposed to do, and what ‘good performance’ looks like. (I am, of course, leaving aside the purely political aspects of creating political cover for Ministers, and using appointments to these Boards/Committees as means of rewarding party and loyalists…on the latter, if you creatively Google for a while, you will see what I mean).

All Boards/Committees – state government, not-for-profit, private sector, etc – should periodically ask themselves: ‘Over the past year or so, where have we as a Board/Committee, ‘made a difference?’...what has been our ‘value-add?’…and has this been more than the cost, reasonably assessed, of having us?

A good practical way of approaching this question is to ask the hypothetical question: ‘Imagine the organization did not have its Board over the past say year, with the organisation’s management running things…then consider that the Board was indeed in place – what was materially done better because the Board was in place?’ That is, where did the Board (as a whole, through its Board sub-committees, through individual directors, the Chair) intervene to make a difference?

For those inexperienced in Board/Committee roles, this seems to be a fairly straight forward question. For those quite experienced in this area, the question can be particularly subtle. For example, a Board/Committee can tell its CEO not to do something ie stop a bad/inappropriate thing happening. They might provide relevant experience from their other involvements that are taken on board by management; they can go into problem-solving-mode with their management team to use collective wisdom to crack a truly wicked problem; or perhaps in workshop-mode with management, a new plank in the organisation’s strategic or policy direction emerges.

These ‘interventions’ can be broadly sorted into two general types – firstly, ‘telling’ management what to do/not do (which involves the Board exercising its power under the organisation’s constitution, which may be an Act of Parliament in the case of a state government Board). Secondly, ‘influencing’ management, through guiding, counseling, questioning, challenging, providing input etc (in fact everything other than giving instructions), albeit done in the context that the Board can indeed ‘tell’ if it so decides.

Another way to sort or segment the Board/Committee ‘value-adds’ is into ‘negative’ (eg ‘CEO, you’re fired’…the ultimate Board intervention) and ‘positive’ (eg the Board and its senior management team working as a collective to determine how to address a particularly complex and difficult issue).

In over 20 years of working with Boards/Committees and directors as an advisor, performance reviewer, educator, and practicing director, I can without hesitation say that the best Boards are those that find a way to have the great majority of their ‘value-adds’ as ‘positive influencing’ types, and work the ‘Goldilocks’ principle of governance well – not too many interventions, not too few, just right.

Unsurprisingly, where this is the case, the Board members almost always say that they enjoy a high level of satisfaction in their Board role, and when asked to give brief descriptors of the culture of their Board, report strongly positive words – robust and respectful; collegiate; all feel comfortable to express their views; and similar.