Shifting accountability

A deft turn of phrase here and there can shift all sense of responsibility and lead to the marvellous manifestation of government decisions occurring by themselves

MORE than 20 years ago, when I was a young journalist freshly arrived in Sydney, I attended the house party of a fellow cadet.

I was chatting in the bathroom to my friend Darrin, who was resting his not inconsiderable mass on the towel rack. Mid-sentence it was ripped from the wall and fell to the ground with a modest thud.

Meanwhile, somewhat distracted by these events, I accidentally knocked the lid off the cistern while flushing the toilet and the thick ceramic slab smashed onto the tiles below, literally shaking the floor.

Unsurprisingly, the host soon appeared at the door and surveyed her newly demolished bathroom.

“What the @#$% have you two done in here?” she asked, perhaps rhetorically.

I quickly apologised profusely for knocking off the cistern lid and promised to replace it as soon as possible.

“And what about that?” she said, pointing to the ruptured wall and the metal towel rail on the floor.

I was suddenly conflicted. I didn’t want to lie, nor wear the blame for the newly liberated wall fitting, but I didn’t want to dob in Darrin either.

“That,” I said upon reflection, “happened earlier.”

Throughout my decades in the media and politics since then, that story has been a touchstone for me – not to mention for Darrin. Because when things just start happening of their own accord, it is almost always a harbinger of disaster.

This is the hallmark of the half-arsed cover up: Not “I broke the towel rail” but “the towel rail got broken”.

This shifting of language from ownership and responsibility to ascribing objects or tasks with their own internal animus is as sure a sign of a dysfunctional organisation as 10kg of ceramics rubble is of a dysfunctional bathroom.

It is also, needless to say, a sign of gateway-level insanity.

And so I heard these familiar alarm bells in the John Barilaro affair when I saw a senior bureaucrat say the highly dubious changing of trade commissioner selection from an arms-length process to ministerial appointment was the result of a “government decision”.

It is, to say the least, self-evident that anything that happens in government is, by definition, the result of a government decision. But note that there is no mention of who decided it, let alone how or why.

As with the mysterious decoupling of the towel rail from the wall, there is no actor, no subject, actually doing anything. There is no actual person who decides – the decision simply makes itself. And this is why the Barilaro appointment has blown up into the all-consuming s..tstorm that it has.

Not because it was a cosy job for the boys – there are plenty of those going around – nor that Barilaro was necessarily unsuitable to be US trade commissioner, which we will now never know.

It’s because the entire governmental process involved in making the decision has been revealed to be at best opaque, dysfunctional and devoid of accountability and at worst downright dodgy.

Indeed, the government’s only defence against allegations of dodginess is to claim dysfunction. And this is what happens when you have institutions and indeed a whole modern social mindset that disregards individual responsibility and accountability in favour of ethereal notions of “systemic” or “cultural” behaviour.

In the Barilaro case, this resulted in the ridiculous suggestion, uttered without irony, that the system somehow made the decision itself without human involvement. This raises the rather alarming Terminator-esque prospect that the system has somehow become self-aware, which is more than one can say about the speaker.

Likewise, you will often hear academics and activists complain of “systemic” bias or bigotry without being able to nominate specific examples, or financial hustlers blame their behaviour on a “culture” of wrongdoing at their organisation.

In extreme cases this, doesn’t just absolve wrongdoers of guilt, it also blackens the reputations of the innocent. And in relatively benign cases it facilitates laziness and failure.

At one former workplace of mine there was a period in which things were constantly going wrong and even the most fundamental and rudimentary tasks were regularly not being performed.

But what most perplexed me was that at every post mortem into the latest snafu, no one ever said: “Sorry, I didn’t do that.”

They always said: “That didn’t get done” – as though the task had failed to perform itself.

Needless to say, the tasks continued in failing to perform themselves.

At least in the NSW government the decisions are making themselves.

The only question is that given these decisions are capable of manifesting themselves from thin air, why are we spending all this money on ministers and bureaucrats?