So…today would’ve marked thirty-one years of service for, in, at, with, to, on behalf of and because of the ATO. It’s reasonable to suggest that eleven of those would have been without promotion, because it was eleven years before I actually got one. Now, some of that is due to not applying for any promotions, first because I only had the job on a temporary basis until I could get a job in what I was trained to do (computer operaitng0 and then because five years or so at the ATO had made me virtually unemployable in that capacity. Secondly, because, as was observe d by someone in a meeting of people who hadn’t applied for a promotion in five years or more, the ATO was making a concerted effort to destroy all career paths that didn’t lead to call centre work or team leaders’ positrons, and who wanted to take on a significantly worse job for four dollars more a week?
Around 1997 I also found out that that first promotion I applied for, as a computer operator surprisingly enough, I didn’t get because the head of the department only promoted people he was friends with. That was in the 1980’s when such nepotism was not only frowned upon, it was cause for disciplinary action within the Public Service – of course you had to prove it.
I got my first promotion after eleven years and left the ATO six years later. In that time, I had applied for two other promotions, neither of which I got. The first was for a team leader’s position, as we had been railroaded into by the change in the office’s organisation, because I’m simply not that big an arsehole. The person who did get the job was unpleasant and unpopular. The second promotion was to a technical level, and the person who beat me to it had already been given higher duties acting in the position, so what hope did I have?
So, it’s likely I would’ve just lived out the days under immense stress until I snapped, vainly and hopelessly trying to get the jell out of the section but of course being too good at the actual job to risk losing me. It warms the cockles of my heart, and I still say it when questions of job performance come up, that when I came back to the office for my last medical assessment as to whether I could still do my current job, the four man team had grown to eight. It took four people to replace the guy that ‘did no work’.
Not that I could last five minutes in the modern ATO. Promotion of team leaders whose ostensible job is to mentor you but in actuality to monitor you; obsession with procedure over outcome; blatant nepotism of a style and frequency that would’ve seen people prosecuted under the old Public Service Act and of course the modern idea of removing appointment by merit in favour of a quota system.
Most of which was predictable given the look and feel of the office in 2003. Almost everything thag I said would happen has come to pass, though I admit I didn’t pick the appointment of Chris Jordan from outside the ATO mainstream to be Commissioner. That’s supportable in hindsight, once you realised that he came to the appointment process with the idea that he could cut the ATO’s budget by 10% by ‘re-inventing’ it. So far that reinvention has been the ridiculous pursuit of a dress code, and the support of the very much government approved idea that private enterprise is efficient. Thus, we have seen the ATO’s budget go up, because efficient private enterprise requires large numbers of management staff running their bailiwicks like small businesses with unlimited budgets and nothing to do.
The combination of senior staff wanting to aggrandise themselves ahs led to massive promotions and appointments so that important people can surround themselves with semi-important people. Thus, the office model that was proposed, with a small senior executive cluster and a large bulge of people doing the work and lower and cheaper levels, is now hugely overstaffed at the top level with people there thinking that policy driving is the main thrust of the ATO ‘business’ and the actual administration of the law will all be done by Facebook and Twitter, ‘AI’ and spasmodically intelligible operatives in the Philippines.
The requirement to provide upward mobility to people on the basis of gender equality has, of course, led to more women in senior management roles than there are competent women to fill them. This is partly the result of ‘dumbing down’ the levels of the work itself – even back in 2003 there were APS 6 position being offered what duty statement that would’ve been an APS 4 in the late 90’s. The ability to run a bluff in new areas of development is, of course, useful. The gaggle of complete idiots appointed to IT positions in the 90’s proves this, and then of course the advent of the Internet meant that more morons were put in charge of preparing the Internet site and the Intranet site for everyone else’s’ use, because they were being appointed by people who hadn’t a clue what websites were, the Intent was, what an Intranet was or, in some cases, how to operate computer well enough to even access the web. It’s interesting to note that now the ATO wants to move to training people via podcasts, and will almost certainly appoint complete morons to that position too. The problem here is that is a government department who should be spending money responsibly. It isn’t a private enterprise operation that can just raise its fees when it expensively fucks something up.
But I digress…
The upshot of an explosively growing managerial sector in the ATO, coupled with the truism that any woman is as good as any man at anything, has meant that a huge number of women have been promoted well above their level of competence or responsibility. This in itself is not a problem. You can have a hell of a lot of people n management who do nothing at all and thus cause no harm, but this is not the case when incompetent women are placed in these positions. Incompetent men in senior positions stop whatever they’re doing a let the functional people get the job done – incompetent women flounder. They flounder noisily. They blame everyone around them, they blame male supremacy, they even blame events twenty to forty years ago, and while they’re doing this blaming they don’t get their job done and the functional underlings or people at the same level can’t get anything done either.
Time was when an incompetent woman manager could be demoted, or if that wasn’t possible – it’s not an easy thing to do at the best of times and even in the days when merit was protected and reward and there were no reprisal s for doing it, nobody wanted to be that much of an arsehole, she could be moved sideways to a support role. One of the most incompetent managers I’ve ever heard of was sidewaysed (I didn’t invent that verb) to being a personal assistant, at a level far higher than other PA’s, and she wasn’t very good at that, but at least she did no harm. That isn’t possible anymore.
Vindictiveness also comes in here, and this is what happened to a very competent woman of my acquaintance who was systematically worn down with constant criticism and poor reviews of a type that, had a man done it, he would’ve been castigated unmercifully. She got performance reviews on a quarterly basis that were perilously close to defamatory, and would’ve been has they been published. Remember, that up until conflict with her incompetent superior, she was highly regarded as a competent technical expert. The signs of a floundering superior are all there.
While in hindsight the sings that this sort of behaviour was going to happen in the future as a former ‘cop’ – ie, executive in the AFP – took the reins at the ATO and steered if on a course of hybridisation between a police force and some mythical paradigm of the private sector that exist only in his head and wouldn’t last long in real life. The women thing is a related part of the problem but not an automatic consequence of it. After all, if the ATO really were run like a corporation, only about half a dozen women would make the cut.
So glad I’m out of there.
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