Today I sat in a Centrelink office, waiting to show someone a tax assessment so my student/child might continue to receive Youth Allowance. Yes, I sat. I recall the last time I was there, you stood in line unless you had a formal appointment and a time for it. You did your business in a minute or on a bad day ten, and then left. In my case, today, I was very nicely greeted and identified, my name was taken and I was asked to sit. I was assured that someone would call my name shortly.
Now, I'm a little cynical about that. It might be the study of politics, which tells me that public services these days behave as though they're providing a product for the buying public, when in fact they're providing cost cut service (as low cost as they can get away with), for the public they serve. In truth they're providing a social 'good' to citizens of a state, and in Australia, citizens have a legal right to such 'goods'. It might have been the daggy carpet and vinyl seat covers, or perhaps the two men swearing at one another in a fight they were asked politely to 'take outside' where they continued swearing at one another, while a couple of nervous aged pensioners watched them and waited inside to talk with someone.
I did not leave that office feeling cheated, after waiting forty minutes (where I used to wait only a few) having been told that the document I was clutching was the wrong document and I'd need the formal Australian Tax Office assessment, for nothing. I got nothing. For my time, for my attempt to fulfill Centrelink protocols and avoid having my child's payment suspended until the time the formal 'proof of income' arrived, for my nice-as-pie response to the nice-as-pie presentation I found when I entered the office. Next time I'd like to let the woman with the headset know that I think she ought to be standing behind the empty counter doing my business, rather than playing it as if she were presenting some television audience show . Of course I won't. I need the support for the poverty stricken student. In fact I'm one of those myself, but at the moment I'd rather eat grass than ask for support from Australia's 'pretending to be a corporate offering' welfare system.
Kathleen Flannagan1 examining Housing Tasmania, reminds us that after the 1990s, the discussion about corporatisation of government services became limited, focussing on profit. This confines the conversation to financial matters, evading the key issue, which she identifies as “...whether the model is appropriate for achieving social outcomes.” Given that anything designed to provide a service should properly provide that service, focussing on profit seems odd. Profit might encourage cutting of corners. Legislative provision goes some way toward protecting citizen rights to effective and appropriate service. But according to Flanagan, where government funding is inadequate, as it appears to be with Housing Tasmania, and if the chief focus is on profit, the effect on already disadvantaged people can be “devastating”.
John Ralston Saul2 discusses this issue at length in the Massey Lectures and his subsequent book, “The Unconscious Civilisation”. In his view, it is not even loss of service that ought to worry citizens. It is our loss of consciousness, our loss of sovereignty, our tendency toward comfortable inaction and laziness. It is our willing silliness; “How is it then that we have fallen into taking seriously someone like the economist Milton Friedman who walks about equating … democracy with capitalism?”(87) It is our tendency to be lulled by the ideas of economics which in his view, have become a substitute for god. In Saul's view god is another result of our laziness and weakness. Our being readily convinced that pursuing our daily economic interest is more valuable and more important, than is having freedom in the public space. Perhaps it is these things that engender my discomfort, when entering a place offering public service, I am confronted with head sets, screens and the kind of decor that might be at home in my doctors' office, or my dentists'. Perhaps I am sensing and disliking, the lack of real freedom that has become part of our society.
12008, The corporatisation of government agencies: Does it work for public housing?
21997, The Unconscious Civilisation
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