Slashing Public Service Jobs is a Really Dumb Idea.
When Peter Dutton recently aped Donald Trump’s policy of mass-sacking government employees in the name of "efficiency", it wasn’t just stupidity, it was weaponised stupidity, designed to benefit the rich while screwing over everyone else.
Dutton promised to cut 36,000 public service jobs to tackle financial waste. The only problem with that is the waste is not where he says it is.
There's always some inefficiency in any large organisation but saying that the Australian public service is a bloated, money-wasting monster is absolute, right-wing nonsense.
Most “waste” comes from mismanagement at the top, like dodgy government contracts. You know, like when Peter Dutton gave half a billion-dollar contract to a tiny company called Paladin, whose office was in a shack on a remote island with no phone or postal service.
If there is waste, it’s wasted on armies of consultants, corporate bailouts, privatisation failures, not from the people processing your Medicare claims.
To fully grasp the sheer, fucking idiocy of Dutton’s plan without your own brain melting to mush, you have to use “Carlo Cipolla’s Five Laws of Stupidity.”
Cipolla’s Five Laws of Stupidity
Always and inevitably, each of us underestimate how many stupid people there are in the world.
We all know that there are stupid people in the world, but have you ever thought about how many people out there are actual fucking dolts? Cipolla’s First Law warns that we always underestimate just how many stupid people are out there. If you put even the slightest thought into who thinks chopping public service jobs is a good idea, you realise that that these fuckwits are everywhere.
Every time a government has mass-cut jobs in the past, it’s ended in disaster. Public services don’t magically keep running when there’s no one there to run them. These jobs aren’t useless. They’re what keeps society functioning—healthcare workers, teachers, firefighters. Who do they think sends out your mother’s pension check? You can’t go to Bali on the piss because your passport hasn’t turned up? That’s because the person processing it was given the arse last week.
If you vote for Dutton, you’ll get Trump
2. The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other of their characteristics.
Cipolla believed stupidity was just another trait, like the colour of your hair or eyes, and that it exists in all parts of society in roughly the same proportion.
You’d think that to run a country you’d have to understand that governments are meant to serve the people, not make a profit like a business. This is the problem with neoliberal political parties like the LNP. These fuckers are all about profit so they privatise everything they can.
Billionaires like Clive Palmer or multi-multi-millionaires like Peter Dutton (latest estimate if his worth - $300 million) scream about government waste but don’t explain what’s the likely outcome of cutting some of the funding to agencies. And the stupid don’t realise they’re being played.
When Trump slashes government jobs sending out social security checks, the people he sacked need to get social security, but there’s no one to send out the checks so they have to hire people to do that. This moronic backpedalling, isn’t just a waste time and money, but it fucks the system, delays payments for vulnerable people, and makes the entire system less effective than before.
3.A stupid person is someone who harms others without gaining any benefit for themselves, and often ends up hurting themselves too.
Cutting public service jobs is the perfect example of this. It’s not just bad for workers who lose their jobs; it’s bad for everyone—even the government that made the cuts. Fire healthcare workers -there’s longer wait times, worse health outcomes, and an overburdened system. Gut social services - increased homelessness, crime, and social unrest. Slash emergency responders - we live in a country with bushfires and cyclones you fucking muppets. The people that support these kinds of cuts often think they won’t be affected. They’re not, until they are.
4.Non-Stupid People Underestimate the Power of Stupidity.
We often forget how dangerous stupid people can be. They catch us off guard, and even when they cause harm, we struggle to respond because their stupidity is so, well, stupid. The types of bogans that support people like Palmer, Dutton, and Hanson assume that after a few years of dysfunction, politicians will realise they fucked up and fix the damage. They won’t. Instead, they’ll double down. If cutting 10,000 jobs led to dysfunction, their answer won’t be, “Maybe that was a bad idea.” No, their answer will be, “Let’s cut another 10,000 and privatise everything!”
When the public service is gutted, these politicians still expect it to function flawlessly. They will complain about inefficiency while actively creating inefficiency. Then they’ll blame the remaining overworked, underpaid staff when things collapse. This lays the ground for the real play in all this- privatisation. Look at the NHS in in the UK—a once-world-class healthcare system gutted by Tory austerity, now collapsing under staff shortages, endless wait times, and preventable deaths. And yet, the same morons that voted for these pricks are outraged when they have to wait hours to be seen in the ED.
5.The Stupid Person is Stupid No Matter What
You can’t fix stupid. The only way to stop this cycle of idiocy is to stop electing people who proudly despise public services. If a politician’s big idea is to sabotage the system that keeps society running, they shouldn’t be anywhere near power. Because make no mistake—these people aren’t reforming government; they’re deliberately breaking it so they can argue for selling it off to their mates. And when things get worse, they’ll blame the very services they gutted.
