peteg's blog - noise - books - 2024 12 23 RickMorton MeanStreak

Kindle. Pre-ordered for 12.99 AUD from Amazon way back in October. I see they've jacked the price to 16.99 AUD for the stragglers. I felt I owed Morton a read after One Hundred Years of Dirt and for avoiding his week-to-week coverage of this epic fiasco which I didn't have the stomach for; I still don't but Morton commands respect for busting his guts. I read elsewhere that the actual report is about 1k pages, barely twice the length of this book. I wonder how many people will actually read either.

There's a lot going on and it's difficult to summarise in a way that incorporates all the smelly bits, so instead of digging where angels have already trod I'll just focus on what I wanted from this text. Most egregiously absent is an easy-to-follow timeline of who knew what when (as Morton understood it) and an org chart, or at least a commitment to attach a position to every name. An evaluation of the plausibility of all dollar figures would've helped immensely. There's not enough (could never be enough) of what Morton does best: capsule bios of humans as humans, of how the public servants fitted with their positions in the machinery of government, the lives of the individuals who had debts raised and the leaf-node Centrelink operatives like Colleen Taylor. I wanted things situated in the greater context of an increasingly robotised-without-the-robots society. ("Robo" connotes the lack of human discretion and not the means of implementation, but note that scalability was a core requisite; this commodified debt scheme was inconceivable in the 1980s and even into the 1990s.)

I think I could reasonably ask that of Morton. Other things require a broader view and another book. Just how big a deal was robodebt within the Department of Human Services while it was chugging along on the sly? Why did people just let it go? (I suspect that the essence of some middle management positions, like the one occupied by "didn't even try" Serena Wilson, is to smooth things between the political and the operational; what else did she smooth?) What does accountability look like in the Australian Public Service? Has anyone, you know, ever been held accountable for anything?

Having dispensed with the human element I can focus on what I'm really interested in: the systemic issues. The manoeuvring recounted by Morton suggests these tactics have worked in the past; perhaps some enterprising journalist can dig into reports ordered by the APS but not delivered for instance. I see it as inevitable that people will not write things down given the risks of a litigious society: witness the entire purpose of using Snapchat in finance. It also helps to mitigate the risk of data theft, and is a common strategy for gaining competitive advantage over workplace frenemies, especially when knowledge (domain specific, useless outside the organisation) is all the power available. I think Morton is being too naive here by chaffing against something so thoroughly incentive compatible. Perhaps he didn't spend much time in the office when he was with The Australian and yet he shows awareness of this issue by recounting some advice he got from a mentor (a senior reporter) about saying little to his editors until an article was ready to go.

He's also asking too much of the great unwashed masses of bureaucrats. I doubt many chose to work at the DHS (leaving Centrelink aside) except for careerist reasons and I expect it would take many a blind eye to survive long enough to progress. This also means that few remained there long enough to get a sense of how things really work, with those who experienced moral repugnance likely to have bombed out or moved on ASAP. People have mortgages, fearfully large mortgages, and we all know what a great motivator that is. Institutional knowledge was therefore unlikely to thrive.

Returning to the book: it seems amazingly, improbably fortunate that some aspect of the scheme proved to be illegal. The mind boggles at how it may have gone otherwise. The included responses boil down to: don't blame me, I would have stopped it if I'd known it was illegal. Long live the great Australian incuriosity! Along related lines, I had to wonder why the Victorian coroner enquiring into a robdebt-related suicide did not simply request the entirety of his data from Centrelink. I guess one of the key features of robodebt was the enforced amnesia: throughout this book I kept thinking that if I was to receive a notification of such a debt then I would assume with high confidence that it was based on all the data I had ever provided to Centrelink. Anything else simply does not make sense. Similarly the fact that debts were raised but nobody got any moneys owing to them puts the lie to it being about the integrity of the system. What a farce.

Perhaps perversely I came away with some sympathy for John Howard's sack-them-all policy towards Commonwealth mandarins in 1996. Back when I read Quarterly Essays I only considered the subject matter experts in the public service (people like Glyn Fiveash in this instance) and not the crazy politicking that occurs at the top end. But without a culture of documentation this leads only to amnesia and more politicking and here we are.

Overall the book sits uncomfortably between journalism and a permanent record: a premature second cut at history? The ebook needed another round of proofing and editing to eradicate a few too many typos and inscrutable locutions. It is occasionally discursive and overly repetitive; at some points there is an almost fog-of-war muddying of the waters, a looseness of language that obscures meaning. Separating this from my usual serious fare is the lack of citations and references for further pursuit.

Morton is now digging into the reshaping of NDIS. I hope he left enough gas in the tank for that one. There is also the enduring scandal of the NACC that requires his continuing attention. Eventually he'll learn that good work is it's own punishment but hopefully not before time.

Widely reviewed in the local press. Goodreads has some less polished and therefore probably more valuable opinions.