In another lifetime and on another planet, Foodge had the good fortune to spend a while in the Cabinet Office – the Special Forces Unit of a government.  The members of this elite crew were the hand maidens of the head of that government and the gatekeepers for incoming flak (letters from shock jocks and hard-to-resist FOI requests) and outgoing (and I use the word loosely) “policy”.

Foodge was just breezing through cleaning the Ethernet cables.

But these Special Forces Cabinet Office people were a driven lot, usually hard and experienced from being bloodied in former campaigns in lesser theatres (inner and outer budget departments).  These were the gentle folk who could turn a complex issue and a complex set of attendant costs into a one page decision document for Cabinet’s consideration.  Cabinet would decide on the strength of say 300 words to spend or not spend say $300 million of taxpayers’ money – or money borrowed on behalf of taxpayers.

Cabinet discussions, papers and cabinet meeting minutes are sacred and Foodge thinks it’s fair to say that a person found to have engaged in a bit of pillow talk that led to a traceable leak could reasonably find themselves promoted to a challenging position on a wild pig eradication program or be posted to a vibrant centre 200 kilometres from Woop-Woop where the nearest viable cappuccino was 3,000 light years away.  It’s surprising how much leaking goes on these days at stratospheric levels that not even Wikileaks can fabricate.  Assange that, will you, Oaks …… showing that the failure of fatal consequence has the Cabinet leaking like a sieve.

Foodge, in an idle moment, once asked a wizened old wizard maven what constituted “good policy” ?  The Wiz thought for a moment, smiled and answered “no unintended consequences”.

This suggests an uncommon insight into the world of policy.  According to Foodge, “policy” involved what Sir Humphrey Applebee habitually referred to as a “brave” decision to actually do something about a problem that government was unable to slough off to some other hapless organisation – say the not for profit non-government charity sector.  Policy is clearly becoming an increasingly rare species with even fundamentals like incarceration of citizen criminals being outsourced to the  for-profit commercial-in-confidence very very private (immune to even FOI) sector.

The genesis of policy apparently had to be a problem, but the problem was not necessarily explicit.  The problem of deaths on unsafe roads was really only a problem in certain swinging electorates.  The problem was more generally the incumbent needing to stay in government.   And the policy was nothing so fancy as building a dual carriageway to totally prevent head-on crashes with an outcome as clear as X fewer crashes and Y fewer fatalities.  The policy became the spend.

Hear the announced policy, brethren “ MY government will spend $1.7 billion upgrading the <insert whatever here>”.    This saves the government from messy things like details and allows for massive adjustments to policy imposed by other more competitive policies.

A failure of policy then becomes an accounting exercise.  The opposition will attack the government because it has:  a) overspent (79% of cases), b) spent too late (21% of cases), underspent (a whopping 43% of cases) and d) no idea what it has spent or what it promised in the first place (39.6%).  Smart arse readers will notice that these percentages don’t add up to 100%.  That was a conscious policy decision – so, tough.

So when we hear critics say that government has, for example, not delivered on its promise to do something, to develop and implement a policy and (whoa Nellie) deliver a wanted outcome…… it wasn’t a case of the fact that a) some politicians had no understanding of the problem, b) no idea about what to do or c) refused to listen to people not in the Cabinet Office who actually DID know what to do and how to do it.

But the policy itself was basically sound.  MY government’s policy was basically sound.

It was well-intentioned at least, but it had an unintended consequence.

It was a cane toad moment.   It was a spending f*ck up.  Accounting blame game starts now.

Foodge looked balefully into his receding Trotter’s Ale, skipped the 24 hour news coverage of the election, opened his paper and checked the form of the Dapto doggies.