Failing to plan is a plan to fail

It sounds like something your father might say as you wave him goodbye and set off on your “gap year” experience in an old Combie Van. “A failure to plan is a plan to fail, son!” you hear him yell as your $1,500 mobile home backfires as it putts down the street and you wonder if you tied your $2,000 surfboard on the roof rack tight enough.

Who knows if that’s good advice for a young person these days. But one thing’s for sure: in politics, it certainly helps to at least look like you have a plan - especially when you are racking up debt at the speed of the current Western Australian Government.

So it is very surprising that when Premier Barnett was last week asked to respond to New Labor’s 20-year State infrastructure strategy, he said:

“This Government doesn’t do that… It’s so much Labor: set up new bodies, new organisations, new committees, lots of plans, lots of glossy documents…”

Now, with my empathetic hat on, I feel for the poor bugger. I mean what can you say when your primary competitor gets the jump on you like that? If they have a 20 year infrastructure plan and you simply don’t, I guess it’s hard to say, “Yeah, great idea – we should have thought of that!”

But quickly ripping that empathy hat off my balding head, I say hell yes Premier, you should have!

In fact, the empathy hat shouldn’t have been used here because the state’s peak business lobby, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry who hosted the New Labor launch last week, have been calling on the Government since its election to do just that. In each of its 2009, 2010 and 2011 “scorecards” on government, the CCI identified the need for a long term infrastructure plan. In fact, this snippet from their 2010 scorecard shows they couldn’t have been more explicit:

“The Government must introduce a state infrastructure plan, to provide greater certainty about future projects and assist with the prioritisation process.”

So back to what I said in Friends, non-friends and enemies - why would the government not only ignore (and therefore probably irritate) their typically conservative friends at the CCI AND provide a massive opportunity for their opposition to wander in a pick some rather influential low hanging fruit?

Arrogance in the belief that Labor won’t win the support of the CCI? Maybe, but that would be stupid in the current political climate that allows the Nationals to propose a government with the ALP…

Poor political judgement? I hope not - Premier Barnett used to work there so I really do hope he knows just how influential the CCI can be…

Fear? I think we’re finally on to something…

I remember as CoS to the Minister for Mental Health, we received an order from the Premier’s office to change the name of a document proposed by the Drug and Alcohol Office before it was allowed to go to Cabinet. The order was to change the word “Plan” to “Framework”.  When I questioned the command, I was told the Premier didn’t like the definitive sounding nature of “plan” – or “strategy” as was my second choice.

Ok, out with the empathy hat again…

I guess I see the point: If you call something a “plan” or even a “strategy”, you set yourself up for questions like “Why didn’t you follow your own plan” at some point in the future. If, like Premier Barnett, your primary goal is to just keep the sailors and sail the ship nice and smoothly, why would you tell anyone where you going – just in case you changed your mind?

Empathy hat gone, for the last time I promise…

The answer Mr Premier is quite simple: at the moment, you are our captain and we sailors do just want to be happy – but since we all own shares in the ship you are steering, we will all work much more efficiently if we know in which direction you plan to sail.

It doesn’t have to be glossy Mr Premier, but people (and lobby groups) find plans very reassuring - and reassurance is not what we take when we hear our captain is steering us toward $23 billion of debt without even consulting a map.

Power Minister’s powerbroking powers broken

“Thank you for your application. Although it was of a very high standard, the Board has decided to extend the deadline and re-advertise to fill the position. To be clear, you are still being considered and are highly competitive - you may be contacted for an interview after applications close.”

Yeah right! If you wanted me for the job, why would you waste time and money re-advertising?

If, like me, you’ve ever received one of these pseudo-rejection letters as a job hunter, you’ve probably got some empathy for those Liberal Party members who nominated for the highly coveted State seat of Churchlands.

You see, on Saturday the WA Liberal Party’s State Council confirmed more candidates to run for various seats at the March 2013 election. However, despite a number of long-term Liberals having already put up their hand for Churchlands, where Independent Liz Constable will retire after 22 years, the Council decided to delay the decision and re-open nominations.

There’s all sorts of spin they can put on a move like this: we want to make the process as competitive as possible and therefore need more time to get (even more) candidates; since there is an incumbent government Minister in that seat it’s not that important to select the candidate early; given one of the candidates is a Ministerial Chief of Staff, we want to delay it as long as possible so he can stay in that position without a perceived conflict of interest…

Whatever the official line, it has to be said that it looks a lot like none of these candidates, who followed due process and nominated within the allowed time, ticked all the boxes required by someone above. It really is hard to argue that the decision to re-open nominations amounts to nothing more than a rejection of those loyal nominees in favour of a preferred latecomer.

And it’s no secret that latecomer is the Premier’s choice - long time critic and recent member of the Liberal Party, Chairman of Tourism WA and promoter of Bali, Sydney and France as holiday destinations, bolshy local restaurateur Kate Lamont. Whether or not this qualifies Ms Lamont to occupy a safe Liberal seat in Parliament is a matter for the State Council in a couple of week’s time, but the way this has happened raises a couple of broader issues worthy of comment from the QBF.
The first is the wisdom of the Premier being tied to the process anomaly.

If it is true that Ms Lamont is being parachuted in by the Premier, it’s probably for two very worthy reasons:

1. Ms Lamont is a woman and the Liberal Party is very thin on the ground for women in the Lower House; and
2. Ms Lamont will have the blessing of the outgoing, strong-willed friend of the Premier, Minister Liz Constable.

The gender issue is a no-brainer. The Liberal Party needs to do whatever it can to improve its female voter-base and that’s nearly impossible with so many crusty old men (and bra-snapping younger ones) on the front line.

The second point hasn’t been raised in the public sphere, but Minister Constable’s endorsement of the candidate is absolutely essential to a Liberal victory. If the very highly regarded current local Member Liz Constable (Minister Constable got a whopping 67.30% of the primary vote in 2008) didn’t like the Liberal candidate and decided to throw her support behind another, presumably independent candidate, the seat could very easily remain in the hands of an unaligned Member – and perhaps one that is not as Liberal-friendly as Liz Constable.

Liz Constable is a solid friend of the Premier, so presumably if Kate Lamont is being dropped in with the Premier’s support, she also has the blessing of the current Member.

But the loudest message sent by the State Council on Saturday is that Peter Collier is not the “powerbroker” he is often alleged to be.

Despite Mr Collier’s relentless behind-the-scenes cajoling and conspiring to “control the numbers” required to determine the outcome of pre-selections in all of the western suburbs electorates, what is obvious from this is that he simply doesn’t have the courage to go head-to-head with the Premier.

Mr Collier has his own preferred candidate for Churchlands - and it’s not Kate Lamont. Mr Collier’s choice is a fine young man who is a long-term supporter of the Party, very active and loyal to a fault. He followed due process in nominating for Churchlands within the prescribed time and hasn’t particularly upset any powerful figures within the Party nor has he been involved in any major external controversy. Other than not being a woman, on paper he looks like the perfect Liberal candidate for Churchlands.

And yet on Saturday, the Party snubbed Mr Collier’s preferred candidate to facilitate the late nomination of Mr Barnett’s – even though in theory Mr Collier controls the numbers to stitch-up Churchlands and even overturn Mr Barnett’s pre-selection for Cottesloe.

This, on top of Mr Barnett’s very public humiliation of Peter Collier in 2008 when he inexplicably took the Education portfolio away from him, would make any fan of the Godfather or West Wing think the puppet master would initiate a swift and bloody retaliation.

However, those who know the man behind the “powerbroker” tag also know that payback will consist of little more than a bunch of bitchy text messages to and from his troupe of fine young supporters and if things get really heated, possibly a new nickname for the Premier.

How deeply disappointing that courage isn't a prerequisite for candidacy.

Friends, non-friends and enemies

At its core, winning a democratic election is pretty simple. It can be broken down into 2 basic concepts:

• You win by getting the votes of the majority
• Friends are more likely than enemies to vote for you

Next, after years of people-watching and political tomfoolery, I’ve decided that there are three basic relationships in politics:

• Friends
• Non-friends
• Enemies

Clearly that’s pretty simplistic but you get my point. There are people who will actively vote for you (friends), people who might vote for you and have no reason to not support you (non-friends) and those who you can count on to vote against you (enemies).

Putting all that together, political strategy for me has always been a derivative of the following:

1. Try to keep your existing friends
2. Try to move people from being non-friends to friends
3. Don’t waste time trying to please your enemies – and sometimes it pays to purposefully antagonise them so your team has a clearly identified opposition
4. If you really have to do something that will lose a friend, try not to push them into the 3rd category of becoming enemies

Fairly sound political theory 101, right?

Bewildering it is then, that this first term government that hangs on to power only through a tenuous partnership with the “independent” Nationals would do something as mindless as create new enemies from its group of friends.

There are many sad examples of the Barnett Government doing exactly that but today’s launch of the WA Independent Power Association (IPA) tops the cake. The IPA is a group of big companies (typically very strongly aligned with the conservative side of politics) that was formed to advocate for further competition in the power industry (typically something ONLY conservative governments support).

But why would they need to set up a lobby group against to lobby against the conservative government? The answer is as bizarre as it is disappointing.

Quite simply, Premier Barnett and Minister Collier have been shooting from the hip about re-merging two of the Government’s power utilities - Synergy and Verve and the uncertainty they have created by doing so has really annoyed some of their long-term friends. As I acknowledged above, sometimes in politics you just have to do something that will irritate the best of friends, but in this case the noise around a re-merger is nothing more than that – unnecessary noise.

Neither the Premier or Minister for Energy have done any formal analysis of this plan - it’s just something they think might be good to do. They haven’t confirmed that it’s actually going to happen. Indeed the only thing they have confirmed is that while it is definitely being considered, it’s not currently on the government’s agenda.

It’s kind of like if you were planning to invest in some property and the current owner told you that it was for sale but he might not want to sell it… what the hell are you supposed to do with your money? I suggest it wouldn’t be long before you would take your money elsewhere.

And that is exactly what is at risk here.

I know for a fact that some members of the IPA are actively considering whether or not to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Western Australia’s energy sector.  Their decision to create a new “enemy” lobby group and risk their relationship with the government points to a very real lack of confidence in the way our state’s energy sector is being managed.

Those pesky Sherpa’s!

I distinctly recall it. It was early in 2010 - back in the days when the weekly Chief’s of Staff meetings were content rich and consequently, well attended. In fact back in those days, there weren’t enough comfy leather chairs for everyone who attended. Latecomers had to scavenge the nearby office and sit behind me and the other pinstriped ambitious men (and a couple of bright ladies) who were always early enough to secure a front-row seat at the big oval slab of old-growth forest.

Those days are long gone and so it seems, is the commitment to the Premier’s personal commandment on that day that he would no longer tolerate the State’s Public Sherpa’s, oops, Servants (see Sherpa's Revolt for the background of that) speaking publicly about Government policy. That decree had been provoked by a number of government agency bosses who had recently made public statements regarding the direction government should be taking in the future.

As a fairly new recruit to the big table, I remember being both impressed and fully supportive of the directive. To me, the Premier had it right – the Sherpa shouldn’t lead the expedition… our elected representatives should set the policy agenda and the public service should provide the administrative support required to enact the agenda of the government of the day.

Back then, us Chiefs of Staff were told in no uncertain terms to ensure the heads of our respective agencies understood that the media was not the appropriate forum in which to float policy ideas. That seemed to work, for a while at least.

But check out today’s media:

• Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan has written an opinion piece for the West Australian Newspaper and appeared live on ABC talkback declaring that juvenile offending is “rapidly spiralling out of control” calling for a higher rate of juvenile detention (and effectively shifting blame to the Courts and Corrective Services for the current juvenile crime rate).

• And Road Safety Council Chairman D’Arcy Holman is again on the front foot by appearing live on radio 6PR proposing all manner of government policy in the area of road safety.

This comes after a couple of weeks during which a Departmental THIN report ruled out keeping our MP’s in touch with current IT trends (Col Pot: No iPad for you!), the Public Sector Commissioner said the Premier’s dismissal of a senior media adviser was not justified and the Economic Regulation Authority contradicted the Premier and Energy Minister’s declaration that a re-merged Synergy and Verve would reduce upward pressure on electricity tariffs.

I really don’t know what happened to the Premier’s dislike of public sector employees publicly leading the state’s policy agenda but with less than a year before the next election, it will be important for him to clarify with the public whether the dog is indeed in control of its tail.

iPad rage

Wow!

My post this morning exposing the Department of Premier and Cabinet report constructed to justify Premier Barnett's decision to not provide an iPad as part of the standard kit provided to Members of Parliament has caused a bit of a stir.

Not only have I been flooded with support for bringing the nonsense report to light but I've also had a bunch of people providing names of others who use an iPad - apparently without any of the security risks or technical problems the WA Department forecast.

So, with thanks to the knowledgable readers of QBF, please allow me to include the following names as an addendum to Dixie Marshal, Kim Hames, Pope Benedict and President Obama:

- Prime Minister Gillard (at the dispatch box no less)
- Malcom Turnbull
- The Queensland Cabinet
- The ACT Cabinet
- Joe Francis
- Christian Porter
- British Prime Minister David Cameron
- Sweden's whole Parliament
- The Dutch Senate (and they had a secure App written by local developers to manage their Parliamentary business)
- And while they haven't yet been delivered, every Member of the UK House of Commons

Hmmm, looks like the DPC really did their homework before recommending against the proposal for our local MP's.

To wrap it up, I'll leave you with a quote from Charlie Sorrell in an article he wrote advocating (as I am) for British MP's to to have access to the tool, simply because I can't say it any better:

"Those paper-loving members could of course simply opt out, or give the thing to their secretaries who probably do all their work anyway. But what Boon is missing is that iPads will make the process of government quicker, smoother and more modern.

Besides, who would you prefer running your country? A gaggle of old men and women who scoff at this passing fad called “the Internet” and pass laws to break it, or a bunch of tech-savvy politicians who are living and working with the very tools that will shape the future?"

PS. I wrote and uploaded this on my iPad while enjoying a quiet moment in Kings Park this afternoon.