Democratic Extras

Sometimes you hear half a sentance when you think you hear a full one, and it can take a huge stretch in space and time until you catch the end of it and an even huger stretch in space and time before the two meet in the middle and become one.

In this case I heard the sentance over the course of what must have been 2006 and only put 1 + 1 together earlier today.

Yesterday I made a throwaway comment about an inherant flaw in democracy that in the absence of a suitable candidate you have to elect somebody.

Anyway here is the sentance, the first half came in my Economic Forecasting evening class one time. If you have ever studied part time, you like me would know that the last thing anybody wants to do at an evening lecture is be there so sidetracking is particularly prominent.

My lecturer said this 'the value of a degree isn't the specific knowledge of what you've studied. It's a communication to the employer, that you can do something without having to be told all the time.'

Later that year, I heard the second half of that sentance from my friend Tommi who was talking about being an extra. (he probably doesn't like me dropping the fact) anyway he said '...on the heirarchy the extra ranks lower than props, because they are props that need to be told what to do all the time.'

You see, put those two sentances together via a space time continium and you get:

'A bad employee is someone with no initiative, someone who has to be told what to do all the time.'

A lack of initiative for me is equivalent to risk aversion. I'm not a psychologist, but low initiative is best demonstrated by the behaviour of asking questions in the form of permission.

Now there are no 'stupid questions', but there are stupid people to direct them at. And asking for permission is one of those stupidly directed questions.

For me the definition of a bad employee is one that asks you a question they should know the answer to, typically 'how do I run report C?' with the answer 'the same way you did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and two days before that day because you took a weekend off. In other words, the same way you always run report fucking C!'

It's basically questioning routine actions that sends flares up into the sky.

A good employ in my book says 'what happens if I tweak this variable in the accounting rules?' and does it, and if it goes horribly wrong spends tomorrow and the day after trying to repair the damage. But who of this type of employee and the above type would one day end up managing the budget?

The one that took a risk, fucked it up and learnt the whole system inside out repairing it.

Miki loved the very unjapanese saying of 'Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.'

That's initiative.

Now whilst we here of government initiatives all the time, when did we last experience any? Never. GST could be said to be the last government initiative. But in implementing it the government demonstrated a remarkable ability to not learn anything from the experience.

Now to really take that completed sentance above and put it into the political realm it seems appropriate on our 4th 40 degree plus day in a row to put it in the context of climate change.

Climate change requires initiative, a change in behaviour in order to effect change, observe and learn from the experience. In other words, our systems need to be broken a couple of times in order to figure out how best to address this problem.

I for one, have no qualms about 10,000 australians or more losing their jobs. Even in the great depression, Australia has never experienced a 'famine' something experienced regularly in the good times of the past century by the majority of the planet.

SO if hutting down a lucrative coal industry is one way to address climate change, I would give it a poke, or tweak or whatever. The economy would break down, and then I would spend the rest of my term trying to fix it.

But not in a way that simply reversed the decision. I would try to get those 10,000 employees new jobs. Somewhere.

In other words, if the industry came to me and said 'under your plan you will put 10,000 people out of work if you don't give us money, and credits and surplusages etc.' My response would be

'Give them to me. I'll use some of our savings to support them, and then, not me personally but some people of mine will sit down and talk with them extensively about their priorities, what they want to do and what they can do, and we'll try and get that happening for them over the next 5-10 years. But I'm not handing you a bunch of fucking money to piss up the wall now so we can face the exact same problem ten years down the track.'

This in political circles would be considered very risky behaviour. For one thing, it seems that our democratic institutions have a fear based apoplexy when it comes to swearing, they seem to think that swearing is a higher priority to the voter than competency to build a future for the race, planet and nation.

So instead they pursue the avoidance of voter backlash by investing their time and effort into being an 'all rounder' supported by both public and captains of industry.

Which is exactly how we end up with a 5% emissions reduction target. A goal that is:

1. A death sentance.
2. Uninspiring.
3. Small.
4. Still likely to be resisted by industry.

Yet combatting climate change was one of the key issues for which the Rudd government was elected to address.

But it's too risky to address so they aren't.

Now the public has to look at it's recourse.

Which in a 2 party system is Malcolm Turnball.

Now in a 2 party system the only real option is to churn our leaders until a good one pops up if we want an issue to be addressed.

SO if you want climate change tackled you need to send Rudd some negative reinforcement. You let him know that his 5% target is too weak and he is out of a job because of it...

Except that you then send Malcolm Turnball some positive reinforcement that his 0% reductions target is good by electing him primeminister.

So to send him the necessary negative reinforcemen you have 2 options. You reelect rudd, or elect Turnball and wait 3 years to reelect a Labor government.

If you reelect Rudd you send the message that his climate change policy is good enough and it stays at measley 5%.

Churning through leaders to wait for a good one is on a 3 year cycle, We are looking at a minimum of 4 years before even the remote possibility that there is one that will actually put the cobra clutch on climate change.

Which is why I am thinking ideals.

You see, manager-tools.com believe that interviewing is an elaborate ruse set up to say 'no' that the default response to any question of employing a candidate is no. Until you are absolutely 100% certain that the candidate in question is the absolute best for the position in question. Then and only then do you say 'yes'.

This is captured by the matrix:

Q1: True Positive - say yes to a good candidate.
Q2: False Positive - say yes to an average or worse candidate.
Q3: False Negative - say no to a good candidate.
Q4: True Negative - say no to an average or worse candidate.

You see manager tools argues that you accept the inevitability of some Q3 false negatives to avoid the ultimate damage of Q2 false positives. That hiring a bad employee is so damaging you are better off having no employee at all.

If you have not experienced this in your workplace it means 1 of 2 things:

1. You have a truly exceptionally talented and competent manager making your staffing decisions.

or more likely:

2. You are a bad or mediocre employee and are constantly dumbfounded by how 'smart' everyone around you is how the can work their fancy 'kom-pu-tah' and cook with that magic tv in the kitchenet.

But in democracy you can see it is all reversed. We are infact forced to pick a leader. Turnball or Rudd. No third potential.

Thus instead of passing on all mediocrity, we have to say yes to the one we believe is the least mediocre and incompetent. Which sadly they interpret as people liking them by a landslide.

Even in America where the voting isn't compulsory someone will still be elected president, even if 3 people turn up to vote.

This fact makes people vote for the least incompetent out of fear that some idiot will turn up and vote for the most incompetent. But really with something like climate change, or the economic recession, it really doesn't matter much if you are regular incompetent (Obama/McCain/Rudd) or super incompetent (Turnball, Bush, Palin, Howard, Costello, Swan).

They are guarunteed to fuck it up anyway.

Now not that I'm a fan of Japan or anything, their system is quite fucked, but they do make a point of the beuracracy or administritive wing being able to competently run a country without any meaningful imput from elected officials.

This is because in Japan the beuracrats can write their own legislation. A power that is seperated in the west.

But that said, that means the administritive arm of government should actually run things in the absence of effective government. We should have a legislative government hiatus, since the government should only be legislating when they need to show some initiative, which they don't. So we should be able to have no government, until we actually need or demand the necessary reforms, in which case instead of just having to be better than Turnball or better than Rudd, a priministerial candidate would actually need to have the cajones to do what needs to be done.

It may be the reform needed to wrest back democracy from campaign 'contributers' or lobby groups that fund election advertising.