PRIME Minister Julia Gillard recently warned Labor's caucus to stop leaking to journalists. Naturally, this was immediately leaked to journalists. The speed and accuracy of Labor's apparatus for leaking is truly something to behold.
There's no actual government Department of Leakage, which is probably one reason why it's so brilliantly efficient. Add the usual layers of bureaucracy and officialdom to the current system and it would be months before anyone learned about Julia's latest outburst. And the information would be wrong.
Compare Labor's world-class leakage delivery service with, say, the Department of Education. A couple of weeks ago Education Minister Peter Garrett claimed the government scheme to provide high school students with laptop computers had been "delivered on time and within budget".
As the excellent website Catallaxy Files pointed out, by "within budget" Garrett meant 957,805 laptops had been bought at a cost of $2.4 billion - or $2505 per unit, about four times as much as you'll pay at Harvey Norman.
That's Labor efficiency for you. By contrast, this government leaks like Osama bin Laden's head, and all for a taxpayer outlay of absolutely nothing. The only cost-effective unit within the ALP is the one bringing down the ALP.
Canberra sets an enviable standard for leakage, and it isn't limited to government.
Earlier this month a car was observed performing burnouts in a Canberra suburb.
Police were at a loss to track down the offender, until he obligingly leaked video of the stunt to his own Facebook page. He faces court next month. Someone give that bloke a cabinet post. He's evidently well-qualified, and his future licence-free status will be covered by the provision of a government vehicle and driver.
Leaks are a continual source of governmental problems. For the rest of us the problem is government itself. While Labor
has been in self-destruct mode for the past two years, it has also managed to pass reams of meddlesome legislation.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs, in 2012 the Gillard government passed the second-most pages of legislation in Australia's history, meaning that each and every citizen is now subject to more than 100,000 pages of federal law. Anyone who doubts the crushing effect of these rules should try opening a business.
The website of Labor's Anthony Albanese boasts: "As of December 2011 the government had passed 254 bills through the parliament compared to just 108 bills in the first year of the Howard government." The numbers are bad enough, but consider the shambolic, leak-prone, dollar-tossing outfit responsible for all of these bills. With this government, passing legislation
is a like a drunk driver surviving
the trip home. Instead of celebrating the outcome, we
should gasp at the risk. And at the smothering of initiative beneath tonnes of regulation.
Eighteenth century essayists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon once wrote: "The privileges of thinking, saying, and doing what we please, and of growing rich as we can, without any other restriction, other than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty." Bill by bill, we're losing those privileges to a government that, as John Stuart Mill said, has a "taste for making others submit to a way of life which one thinks more useful to them than they do themselves".
(Both of those quotes are from Niall Ferguson's The Great Degeneration, by the way, which in its study of European and US economic decline has more than a few warnings for us in Australia.)
If a Coalition government is elected on September 14, as seems likely, Prime Minister Tony Abbott should make it his business to make things easier for business. Labor's leakage technique could serve as his guide: minimal paperwork, no administrative complexities, quick results. For once, government is showing the private sector how to slash through the red tape.
Abbott's critics are demanding the Coalition supply costings for its various proposed policies. They're looking at the wrong side of the ledger. Abbott should instead supply the amounts his government will save by cutting existing policies and reducing our legislative load.
We'll know the next government is on the correct course when it boasts not of passing hundreds of bills through government but of striking hundreds of bills aside. Rather than look to the usual measures of how a government is performing, how about we take those 100,000 pages of Australian rules as a guide with the aim being to reduce them every year.
Should need be, the Coalition might even appoint some Labor leakers to get the job done. Those guys don't mess around.We can read about it next day with no need for a government press department.
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