[Peetwo]

The New Bureaucratic Brazenness
Official arrogance is the source of public cynicism.

 ENLARGE
 Martin Kozlowski

By
Peggy Noonan

Wall Street Journal
Updated Oct. 3, 2014 6:51 p.m. ET 648 COMMENTS

We’re all used to a certain amount of doublespeak and bureaucratese in government hearings. That’s as old as forever. But in the past year of listening to testimony from government officials, there is something different about the boredom and indifference with which government testifiers skirt, dodge and withhold the truth. They don’t seem furtive or defensive; they are not in the least afraid. They speak always with a certain carefulness—they are lawyered up—but they have no evident fear of looking evasive.

They really don’t care what you think of them. They’re running the show and if you don’t like it, too bad.

In context with the part in bold, a classic example from the PelAir cover-up inquiry was Beaker's 'shall' or 'should' bollocks with amended versions of Annex 13:

Unfortunately for Beaker Karma can be a bitch and this pathetic episode came back to bite and eventually led to Beaker having to admit that his administration got it wrong and the ATSB would be reinvestigating the ditching of VH-NGA:

However the swagger and arrogant 'don't give a rats' attitude was still evident and I have not seen anywhere that this Muppet has shown any remorse or compassion for the victims of PelAir -

And all this is a new bureaucratic style on the national level. During Watergate those hauled in and grilled by Congress were nervous. In Iran-Contra, Olllie North was in turn stoic, defiant and unafraid to make an appeal to the public. But commissioners and department heads now—they really think they’re in charge. They don’t bother to fake anxiety about public opinion. They care only about personal legal exposure. They do not fear public wrath.

Classic from recent Senate Estimates:

All this became apparent in the past year’s IRS hearings, and was pronounced in Tuesday’s Secret Service hearings.

Julia Pierson,the director, did not seem at all preoccupied with what you thought of her. She was impassive, generally unresponsive and unforthcoming. She didn’t bother to show spirit or fiery commitment. She was the lifeless expression of consultant-guided anti-truth.

No question was answered straight and simple. Everything was convoluted and involved extraneous data, so that listeners couldn’t follow the answer and by the end couldn’t remember the question. I am certain government witnesses do this deliberately—the rounded words, long sentences that collapse, the bureaucratic drone—so reporters will fall asleep and fail to file. An hour in Tuesday I expected the TV camera to slowly slide toward the ceiling, with the screen covered in a cameraman’s drool. “Mistakes were made.” “Our security plan was not properly executed.” Yes, you could say that of a story in which a nut with a knife burst into the White House and ran around the ceremonial rooms. Ms. Pierson neglected to mention in her testimony the story that would break shortly after she finished: Secret Service agents in Atlanta a few weeks before had allowed on to an elevator carrying the president a private security man, who reportedly jumped around taking pictures and was later found to be carrying a gun.

Ms. Pierson resigned after bad reviews of her performance. That’s a tragedy in the sense it’s tragic she wasn’t fired.

But does anybody in the government feel it is necessary to be truthful about anything anymore? Does anyone in the federal government ever think about concepts like “taxpayers” and “citizens” and their “right to know”?

Everything sounds like propaganda. That will happen when government becomes too huge, too present and all-encompassing. Everything almost every level of government says now has the terrible, insincere, lying sound of The Official Line, which no one on the inside, or outside, believes. The other day, during the big Centers for Disease Control news conference on the Dallas Ebola case, a man from one of the health agencies insisted in burly (and somehow self-satisfied) tones that the nation’s health is his group’s No. 1 priority. And I thought, just like a normal person, “No, your No. 1 priority is to forestall a sense of panic. To do that you’ll say what you need to say. Your second priority, connected to the first, is to assert the excellence and competence of the agency with which you are associated. Your third priority is to keep the public safe.”

Classic for that statement was Skidmore's laissez-faire attitude in the CASA segment of last Estimates:

Everyone who spoke was very smooth. “I think ‘handful’ is the right characterization,” said the CDC director to a Wall Street Journal reporter who asked if the sick man had contact with others before he was hospitalized. (That became “up to 100” the next day.)

The officials were relentlessly modern-bureaucratic in their language. They have involved all “stakeholders.”

Was the sick man an American or a foreign national? “The individual was here to visit family.” Oh. The speaker’s tone implied he’ll tell us more down the road if he decides we can handle it.

What about those who traveled on the same plane as the man, and which flight was it? “Ebola is a virus. It’s easy to kill if you wash your hands,” said CDC chiefThomas Frieden.You are only infectious once you are sick, not before.

Ebola will not, all agreed, produce a full-fledged American epidemic. “We are stopping it in its tracks in this country,” Dr. Frieden said.

That may be true. But nobody thinks it because government doctors and professionals said it. Americans do not have confidence in what The Officials tell them anymore.
This is not only because we live in a cynical age. In this case it’s because people know the truth always contains uncomfortable elements, and in the CDC news conference very few uncomfortable elements were allowed.

They say the only thing you have to fear is personal contact, but they shy away from clearly defining personal contact. They suggest it has to do with bodily fluids, so you immediately think of the man sneezing next to you on the train. They do not want to discuss the man sneezing next to you on the train.

They did not want to discuss who the sick man was, his nationality, exactly what flight he came in on. They are good to their global masters! Sorry, just reacting like a normal person. There was a persistent sense the professionals had agreed to be chary with information that might alarm America’s peasants and make them violent.

We are locked in some loop where the public figure knows what he must pronounce to achieve his agenda, and the public knows what he must pronounce to achieve his agenda, and we all accept what is being said while at the same time everyone sees right through it. The public figure literally says, “Prepare my talking points,” and the public says, “He’s just reading talking points.” It leaves everyone feeling compromised. Public officials gripe they can’t break through the cynicism. They cause the cynicism.
The only people who seem to tell the truth now are the people inside the agencies who become whistleblowers. They call a news organization, get on the phone with a congressman’s staff. That’s basically how the Veterans Affairs and Secret Service scandals broke: Desperate people who couldn’t take the corruption dropped a dime. What does it say about a great nation when its most reliable truth tellers are desperate people?

Sometimes it looks as if everyone in public life is in showbiz, only showbiz with impermeable employee protections. Lois Lernerof IRS fame planted the question, told the lie, took the Fifth, lost the emails and stonewalled. Her punishment for all this was a $100,000-a-year pension for the rest of her life. Imagine how frightened she was. I wonder what the Secret Service head’s pension will be?

A nation can’t continue to be vibrant and healthy when the government controls more and more, and yet no one trusts a thing the government says. It’s hard to keep going that way. - Ain't that the ducking truth -

   

Continued from off the UP -  

Lead Balloon - That's because they're now part of 'the protected'.

Here's a fine example of the government spending taxpayer's money in the public interest. The 'protected' sending out a warning. Don't ever embarrass the Pollie Protection Service - sorry - the Australian Public Service:
Quote:

Fraud investigator wrote helpful guide, found himself in court

An expert public service fraud investigator who published a helpful guide to government departments was charged with disclosing sensitive information, despite basing the book entirely on publicly available content.

The bizarre case came before Magistrate Peter Dingwall for sentencing on Thursday, and he had no hesitation in making a non-conviction order for the long-serving senior public servant.

"This is one of the clearest cases for [a non-conviction order] that I've seen in my 26 years being here," Mr Dingwall said.

The man had considerable experience in fraud investigation, studying it at length, working in the private sector and in government departments and at the Fair Work Ombudsman.

He had also served the community significantly in other ways. He was with the State Emergency Service during its response to the Thredbo landslide, and has spent 11 years in the Rural Fire Service.

The book, Australian Public Service Fraud Investigation, was written with the aim of recording his considerable experience and helping government departments prevent and investigate fraud.

He used information from his employment, but the entirety of the book's contents were based on publicly available information.

Strangely, he was charged and prosecuted for using a government database to help format and distil the material for the book.

His barrister Ken Archer said the allegations against his client were effectively that he breached intellectual property of the department.

"Your Honour will see from the documents that they are documents that are essentially, in my respectful submission, distilled from publicly available documents," he said.

The book sold 27 copies, before the department issued an objection.

The public servant immediately stopped publishing, and then cooperated fully with police.

"He did not commit the offence believing that it was wrong to have done so," Mr Archer said.

He was then charged with disclosing sensitive Commonwealth information, which carries a two-year maximum penalty.

The proceedings forced him to resign from his job, and he has had to seek psychological counselling and medication due to the stress.

The Commonwealth prosecution argued that the man should be convicted, saying it was necessary to deter others in the community from acting in the same way.

The prosecutor did not dispute the defendant's excellent character, but said that was common for public servants.

He conceded there was no harm flowing from the book to the department, but said the offence was not trivial.

Mr Dingwall rejected the prosecution's push for a conviction, finding it was a case that warranted a non-conviction order.

"The defendant was entirely motivated to pass on what he learnt in his extensive study to others who may benefit from it," Mr Dingwall said.

"In my view, the criminality is very low indeed."

&..

aroa - Those at the trough know only too well the way things work.
As they have said...' Ministers and pollies come and go...we go on forever.'

Case . Minister Truss, his ASRR He's gone. Its gone. Job done.

Public servants, my arsk...Self servants.

&..

CoodaShooda - I was talking to a public sectorite (note...not servant) yesterday when she mentioned that a particular decision had been made by the Acting Chief Executive of her department.

Having known the incumbent Chief Executive for nearly 40 years and not being aware that someone else was acting in his place, I asked the obvious question "Who's the acting CE?".

Her answer? "I can't tell you that!" - and she was serious.

(It took me five minutes to find its a chap I've only known for thirty years. Our next conversation will be interesting. )

I've been in the interesting position of being able to watch the establishment and growth of a new government and public service and then to mourn its creeping demise after the administrators changed its name from Public Service to Public Sector. It has long lost touch with the community it was established to serve and is a law unto itself.

& finally..

Lead Balloon - It is disturbing to watch the fabric of government slowly weakening and fraying. The SES (Senior Executive Service) should be renamed the PPS (politician protection service). They effectively work for the advisers and Chiefs of Staff in the various Ministers' offices - increasingly, just political hacks and wannabes.

The politicians' interest is now conflated for the public interest.

Most everyone below the PPS level is so afraid of doing something "unpopular" that they've lost touch with reality (e.g. your friend who was afraid to nominate the acting CE, as if it were some kind of state secret) or just keep their heads down for fear of being noticed.

Utopia and Hollowmen are documentaries.

MTF...