Unrepresentative swill

It has been a hard won battle to gain a universal suffrage and all the associated
democratic rights and responsibilities. It is imperfect, but to bring out the
Winston Churchill chestnut yet again ”…. it has been said that democracy
is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been
tried from time to time.”
It may have given us the mediocrity of the masses, but conversely it hasn’t
given us the terrors of tyranny.
Superficially the business of government is to make more laws and spend the
money raised by the many and varied taxes that we pay. Personally it is a mystery
why the business of government is not to repeal laws, as you would think we
have enough by now. Perhaps we should have a sunset clause on all legislation
so that every ten years we could ask if we really needed the Superannuation
Contributions Tax (Members of Constitutionally Protected Superannuation Funds)
Assessment and Collection Act 1997 to continue in its present form. If nothing
else such reappraisals would limit the creation of new legislation
However if we are to have representative government surely we need to know what’s
going on in the world of the governing class. Not just the Ministers and their
advisors but also the myriad Civil Servants who are offering fearless, though
never courageous, advice to their masters. At the moment we have no idea how
the decisions made in our name are arrived at, what learned correspondence flowed
between Civil Servants, what department were involved, or what experts were
consulted. I know we get some sanitised version if we wait around for thirty
years for Cabinet documents to become public and for us to belatedly find out
how the government of the day arrived at its decisions. It seems far too long
to wait to find out that we were not the only ones to think that William McMahon
had the intellect of a licked postage stamp.
Obviously this is at far too high a level and ridiculously late. If WikiLeaks
proved anything it was that the release of even classified and nominally secret
information made very little difference to the fate of individuals and the running
of Governments. What was frightening was the banality of concealment and the
general contempt for the public’s right to know.
To quote ‘Yes Minister’, “If people don’t know what you’re
doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”

Now I have simple proposal. Rather than have a Freedom of Information Act,
let us make all Government and Civil Service correspondence freely available.
As real time is probably not a feasible option, I would propose that as soon
as a contract is signed or a piece of legislation enacted all correspondence
relating to it must be freely available on-line. Rather than the citizens
of the land having to apply to find out expending disproportionate time and
effort that the bureaucracy will not tell them anything, make the bureaucracy
have to apply not to have documents released. They should have to approach
a judge or an Ombudsman-like figure whose charter is to make concealment as
hard as possible.
But even this would not answer one particular and idiosyncratic question that
I have.
Thanks to my very knowledgeable daughter I now know that one of the few good
things that exist in the world of freedom of information is that most State
and Federal contracts are gazetted on a regular basis. We know what has been
spent and to whom the money has gone. Now there are Public/Private Contracts
whose commercial details are regrettably concealed in various iron clad Confidentiality
Clauses so that we can’t work out why we are paying too much for a hospital
or desalination plant but these are such egregious examples that I won’t
discuss them here.
I just have a simple and perhaps frivolous question which I’ll background.
Melbourne has two airports: Tullamarine, which is incredibly busy, and Avalon
which is a large field near Geelong with a shed and about five flights per
day. Melbourne airport has millions passengers, hundreds of national and international
flights daily and is serviced by a freeway that is a clogged artery. Everybody,
except the State Government knows that Tullamarine needs a rail link to the
city as a matter of considerable urgency.
Last year the Government proposed that a rail link be built – not to
Tullamarine – but to Avalon. The reason? It was easier to do, apparently in
the same way that a drunk who loses his keys in the dark searches under the
light because it’s easier to see there. Unsurprisingly there were hoots
of derision, general mirth and we all thought that it had been ridiculed to
oblivion.
But perhaps not. The Department of Transport has just awarded four contracts
with a total value of $703,697: Current Avalon Airport Rail Link Project Social
Impact Assessment, Current Avalon Airport Rail Link Heritage Assessment, Current
Avalon Airport Rail Link Project Noise Impact Assessment, Current Avalon Airport
Link Preliminary desk top assessment.
I wonder what it all means?