Maybe we need to change our attitude. Let's stop cheering governments for allocating our money to what they think are good ideas.
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We can cheer them when they get the job done. We should also support them when they recognise dud programs and bring them to a timely demise.
Oh, that there was a magical fairy who could get into the books of the Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments and tell us all where the waste is.
When governments at any level waste money remember: it is our money going down the drain. Local government is certainly not immune from waste. Here's a small but hilariously sad example.
A resident of North Adelaide, some years ago, was enraged to find a sad-face sticker on his wheelie bin.
The council had some staff or consultants wandering around seeing if you put the wrong stuff in your bin.
If you had they gave the bin a sad-face sticker and if you hadn't a happy face one.
The resident was enraged at the waste of money highlighted by the fact that they didn't check to the bottom of the bin. Nobody but an idiot would put the bad stuff at the top so the checking system was destined to fail. It may have only been a brief, trial program back when policy "nudging" was in vogue, but what a farce.
Reducing spending for any government is hard stuff. A person or group who gets some form of benefit, be it a government grant, a service, a cash benefit, a discount, is going to squeal like a stuck pig if there's any reduction in their access.
The negativity of the political fallout is a very different question from whether the dollars spent on it are a good use of taxpayers money. We are our own worst enemy here. We have a natural tendency to sympathise with whoever is likely to lose out.
So we go doggo and let the government, our government, the one we elected, take the flack for what we may recognise as a good decision. That's neither smart nor conducive to good government.
By not supporting tough decisions governments make because they're unpopular we, in fact, promote bad government.
Co-incidentally our failure to support tough government decisions doesn't stop us complaining that governments are re-election clubs who only do what's popular. Somehow we expect governments to do what's right rather than what's popular, but at the same time to recognise that we elect them and what we think is paramount.
If we had some sort of commission of audit of government spending there should be a few nurses who have had triage experience on the team.
Being experienced at working out who might die without immediate action, who can, albeit with some discomfort, be held in a holding bay with short-term treatment and who can just wait would be ideal experience.
In my working life as a trainee with what was then Myer Stores the often-used adage was: "when the going gets tough the tough get going".
Decades later when my section of my portfolio (the junior ministers area was immune) had to find about one-quarter of the total government budget savings, the ideas for savings presented by the Finance Department in budget proposals then called "the greens" seemed horrific.
But when the finance minister looks you in the eye and says "either you find the savings, or finance will" you pretty soon come to terms with the idea of triaging various options.
Nobody welcomes spending reductions. They're hard choices to make and there's usually little support from the public for making them. However, the consequence of not cleaning up spending, whether it's disastrously wasteful, sluggishly inefficient or just no longer seriously needed, is in itself disastrous.
We've got a great public service. We should turn their skills more frequently to the identification of program reductions.
There's a disincentive for them to do that because every program needs bureaucrats to run it.
Cut the program, lose the bureaucrats. It's not immediate because of permanency in the public service but if a department loses big programs, it will need to face redundancies.
How many public servants want to be frank and fearless in suggesting staffing cuts to their departmental secretary?
If programs just keep running forever the business of government would become unmanageable.
And good new programs just couldn't be funded. The notion of "no cuts" is an impossibly stupid idea. If we want better government, we should be more supportive of the tough decisions governments all too often have to make. There might be less need for cuts if better decisions were made in the first place.
It's not just the dollars and the good intentions that matter. It's getting the implementation right, and that's a long way from the cabinet decision. I think we can, and should, demand more information on just how programs are expected to work.
We should just say "nice idea, how's that going to work?"
Getting it right in the first place is better than having a good idea but botching the implementation. In the Hawke years, when the government wanted to put an emphasis on training they announced the Priority One program to get many more students into TAFE training.
By ringing a number of TAFEs around Australia, it was easy to establish that no one had a clue how this great idea was going to work on the ground. They knew nothing about it. You can have a good idea, more training, and completely botch the implementation with no consultation.
There's basic stuff to consider: are there enough physical locations? Enough lecturers? How will we let kids know about the new options? The basics are important.
Hawke ended up with an uncomplimentary cartoon of him as I recall at a desk, casually filing his nails with a rasp and the wording was "Youth of Australia Priority Two: Don't call us, we'll call you" . The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Don't praise governments just for announcing good intentions with dollars attached. Implementation is important. Don't unthinkingly criticise governments for tough decisions. That's what you pay them for.
Amanda Vanstone is a former senator for South Australia, a former Howard government minister, and a former ambassador to Italy. She hosts Counterpoint on ABC Radio National and writes fortnightly for ACM.
Amanda Vanstone is a former senator for South Australia, a former Howard government minister, and a former ambassador to Italy. She hosts Counterpoint on ABC Radio National and writes fortnightly for ACM.
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