In case you haven’t guessed, I read a lot…
Of course, this probably disqualifies me from holding a cabinet post in the United States and various people will attack me as being one of those out of touch academics who has no experience in the real world… which would be fine if only I’d been more successful at school and didn’t waste so much time doing things in the real world in my final year of schooling… or when I did tertiary studies, come to think of it.
In fact, when I moved from secondary to tertiary studies, I couldn’t work out how I didn’t score as well as those “mature age” students who were seven or eight years older than me… It was in my final year that I realised it was partially because they went and did the recommended reading and didn’t try to whip something up based on a lecture and a couple of tutorials…
Anyway, one of the books I’ve started reading lately is Rick Morton’s “Mean Streak”, and I’d strongly advise you all to go out and buy a copy, even if you’re not a reader. I mean, Christmas is approaching and you could give it to that relative who spoils Christmas by telling everyone how Labor is ruining the country by spending billions on renewables but won’t accept that Peter Dutton should reveal the cost of nuclear and the whole argument gets sidetracked just as you were about to say something about the problem with the duopoly of Australian politics because pudding is served and Auntie Flo asks everyone not to spoil her last Christmas…
While I haven’t finished the book yet, it’s the sort of book that shouldn’t need to have been written. I mean that in the same way that we shouldn’t have books written on the rise of Hitler, Trump’s victory and any biography about Kim Kardashian and her importance. Basically, the fact that these and Robodebt were even a thing is part of the whole failure of the system…
As to whether it’s the Westminster System, the capitalist system, the public service or the whole idea of Karma, I’m not sure. However, one thing is certain, when you give some people a job to do, robodebt demonstrates that some people do the task at hand without looking at the bigger picture. And, by bigger picture I mean such things as ethics, morality and legality.
It’s a bit like the Reserve Bank at the moment where the subtext is: We can’t lower interest rates because not enough people have lost their houses and/or their jobs because if do and inflation goes up, we’ll have made a mistake and we’ll look sillier than our predictions about interest rates not going up until 2024 or the one where we said that inflation wouldn’t fall below 3% for a long time and Treasury’s Budget assumption is wrong...
At one point, Rick Morton compares the whole thing to the Milgram experiment. This is the famous experiment where subjects were instructed to give another person electric shocks by an authority figure and a surprisingly high number (a majority) were prepared to keep going even though it was supposed to cause the death of the person being shocked. Of course, in the Milgram experiment, the person being shocked was a confederate who was only pretending to be in pain. While the Milgram experiment is widely regarded as being unethical, robodebt hasn’t caused as much controversy because the people being shocked were actually given real pain by people who were more concerned with their own advancement than…
I should pause and consider something I read from “Humankind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman. At one point he pointed out that the problem with looking at Nazi Germany through contemporary eyes is that we overlook the fact that the people doing horrible things all believed that they were doing the right thing, the moral thing, so it’s not completely fair to judge them because if they did anything but what everyone around them thought was right then…
Mm, I may be sounding unfair to Rutger Brennan, because he actually raised some good points. It’s just that when I summarise them they sound like the sort of justification that went so badly at the Nuremberg trials… although it seems to have gone over a treat at the Royal Commission… Oh wait, no it didn’t. Apparently, there was a whole sealed section that was larger than the ones in Cleo which were all about effectively fucking people. While the whole robodebt fiasco was all about that very thing, the point of their sealed section – as I understand it – was to ensure that criminal prosecutions could take place and not to allow the NACC to ask certain people if they felt that S & M would be too painful for people who’d indulged in SM activities…
All of which brings me to Scott Morrison and his role…
From what I remember at the Royal Commission, Scotty was badly let down by his department and he threw them all under the bus… which is ironic because – as the man who didn’t hold a hose – that’s the most manual labour he’s done!
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