Is Government administration in a mess?
Who is calling the shots?
Is it the Minister in charge of Departments, or is it the Officials who are in these Departments and in many cases, have been there before the Ministers, and will be there after the Ministers move on?
We are all watching the episodes of the Cancer (Cameron) inquiry.
There were certainly problems in the Department of Health. Information did not always get to the Minister. It was blocked at some point in Officialdom.
We now have the officials from the Premier's Office testifying. They all seem to have no memories! Why would officials with no memories be hired in the Premier's Office? Certainly, one would think that an Official in that capacity would have a sense of what is significant and what is not significant and would deal with the significant information differently from the insignificant information, and would remember the significant information later or would have earmarked it at the time so that it could be recalled later.
Now we have the Department of Municipal Affairs. A Town Councilor wrote a letter to the Minister on a rather serious topic in the Town. Later he received a record of an e-mail which showed that an Official had sent this correspondence to the Deputy Minister with a note: "For your reading enjoyment!" We can only assume the Minister never saw the correspondence. Whether or not the Deputy Minister enjoyed it, is not known!
The Deputy Chief of Staff in the Premier's Office wrote a Town Councilor regarding correspondence the Councilor was forwarding to the Premier's Office. The Official wrote: "... all further correspondence from you to the Premier's Office on these matters will be forwarded unopened to the Department of Municipal Affairs. Please be advised that no further responses will be forthcoming from this office." One piece of correspondence the Councilor sent to the Premier was a request to investigate the Department of Municipal Affairs on a number of matters. Imagine, the Official is not going to let the Premier see this but forward this to the Department of Municipal Affairs? Official-dum! Official-dee?
And now an MHA says of the Department of Transportation that at least two Officials should go. He says they are ignorant.
Is there enough evidence here to raise questions about the role and power of Officials in Government? Are these Officials creating a bottleneck in Government Departments in terms of the people trying to get to the Government Ministers and Premier? Are Government Departments becoming dysfunctional in terms of lines of communication?
Do we need Ministers at all? Perhaps all we need is a Chief Official in each Department (the Land of Official-dum). At least that person at the top, the Chief Official, will likely be the informed one!
RLE/2008
