Picture the scene. In one of the retail businesses that are still known as post offices but are mostly private contractors, not Australia Post-owned-and-operated branches, a longer than usual queue is forming. Apart from people buying stamps, paying utility bills and sending registered mail, other customers are appearing.
They are not there because they are eager to buy the coffee mugs, coloured pencil sets, computer mouse mats, mobile phones, DVDs and other assorted merchandise that the privatised post offices have to tout to turn a profit. These other customers are applicants for periodical payments such as the Youth Allowance or Newstart (the unemployment benefit, which at $250 a week is now more than $100 below the poverty line).
People used to apply for these benefits and receive advice about them in the offices of Centrelink, the Federal Government's one-stop shop for clients of its services. But Centrelink has been consigned to history and Australia Post is the new shopfront for just about anything you might require from the government, from the age or invalid pension to Medicare refunds.
Medicare? Oh yes, Australia's universal health insurance system has also been deemed not to require offices and a bureaucracy of its own. A separate counter in a privatised post office will do. Except, that is, in the smallest such businesses in country towns or newly (i.e. barely) established suburbs on the fringes of major cities, where there's only space for a single counter and a couple of overworked and untrained staff who have to deal with every kind of government customer and client, from the dwindling numbers of stamp buyers to the burgeoning numbers of irate people who want to know why their Newstart payment didn't arrive on time.
Does this scenario sound far-fetched? It shouldn't, because Treasurer Joe Hockey has confirmed that the transfer of Centrelink operations to Australia Post will be one of the proposals considered by the Commission of Audit, which the Government has appointed to advise it on cutting costs and eliminating inefficiencies in the public sector.
The idea that sending all recipients of government services to a single shop — and often a single queue — could ever be considered efficient is risible. The most charitable response to this proposal would be to say that it could only have occurred to people whose experience of queues is limited to cinema box offices.
But in this context, of course, 'efficiency' has a very specific meaning. It means notionally maintaining a service while reducing the cost of providing it, even if that in fact means reducing the quality of the service. It is the cost, not the service itself, that becomes the primary consideration. And if the service then deteriorates so much that people are deterred from seeking to become its beneficiaries, so much the better. If having fewer public agencies, with fewer public employees or contractors, dispensing Newstart or the Youth Allowance results in fewer people on Newstart or the Youth Allowance, that is the preferred 'efficient' outcome.
This is a different conceptual universe from that still inhabited by most Australians, for whom the efficient operation of a program such as Newstart means the provision of adequate income support to people who are in need of paid employment, and who can prove that they actually are devoting their time and energy to finding a job. Most people still expect governments to do things. That is not, however, the premise on which the Commission of Audit is likely to make its recommendations.
Nonetheless there is a bizarre and remorseless logic to proposals such as the absorption of Centrelink by Australia Post and to some others that Hockey has floated, such as making Medibank Private responsible for delivering the services of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, if and when it is established. These changes — and the privatisation of Australia's HECS debt, which Education Minister Christopher Pyne has 'refused to rule out' — are continuous with the steady attrition of the public realm that began in the 1980s with the sale of public trading enterprises under the Hawke and Keating governments.
The debate then was couched in relatively innocuous terms, e.g. why does the government need to own an airline? The obvious answer to that question was that if we want a national carrier that not only gives Australia a tangible presence in the world's major airports but has an unrivalled safety record, too, it won't be done by an enterprise that has to generate sufficient profits to satisfy shareholders. Similar arguments could have been made about the privatisation of other government enterprises. Obvious though they may have been, however, such arguments were simply dismissed in policymaking circles, including large sections of the media.
The end result is the situation we now have, in which a federal treasurer can seriously countenance making local post offices virtually the only shopfront deliverer of government services yet the response from most mainstream media commentators is barely even a raised eyebrow. The people who potentially have to use those services, however, will be horrified. They and their government live and move in different thought-worlds.
In an ABC Lateline interview this week, ACTU president Ged Kearney described the transfer of Centrelink's operations to Australia Post as 'moving into space-cadet territory'. Well, yes, Ged. The space cadets are flying the ship now.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.
Astronaut image from Shutterstock