The big beasts brawl

Ian Watt has no idea.

Lynelle Briggs is the only one who has complained cos she is the only one who understands how these things work.

The bulk of the smaller agencies are run by fairly low level people (non-SES, or lowest level SES), who often come from outside the public service, and often from overseask, with expertise in Film, or in Science etc – not lobbying ministers. They have probably never met their minister, and have no idea that they could turn up and demand more money.

I’m really talking about the cultural institutions here, which are far smaller than CSIRO, and have under 100 employees. Taking a 3.5% cut from them really bites, and jobs are lost and the remaining staff are stressed out of their brains trying to keep the places going. And their budgets are pretty minimal anyway – how much is really being saved here. They may as well just shut the places down – 3.5% budget cuts for a couple of years will result in the places having to close down anyway.

Ian Watt needs to pop out of his ivory tower and check out the state of some of the agencies.

I originally thought the thread must have been about that other CT story today – about Canberra women being fatter than the men…

I originally read the title of this thread as something else.

Upon reading the story, I was very disappointed.

they are a very lazy budget mechanism, really.

At DEEWR (where i used to work), all they had to do was slow recruiting to meeting the dividend because their turnover of staff was so great, especially with the change to their structure.

At CSIRO, where my partner works, it means people losing jobs, projects not getting done because they dont have the same simple ways of getting costs down.

It was a bad idea when Howard did it, and it is still a bad bit of lazy governing when Rudd does it.

our small department has had its budget absolutely decimated but we are expected to deliver the same outcomes with less staff and resources. it is @#&^@(#^ BS.

dofa budget group are a bunch of *@#&@* – but they are mostly forced to be like that by upper management – i used to work there, it is an awful awful work culture, i would never go back again.