Meanwhile, may I please say that I do like the staggeringly frank way in which things are expressed here, since I am all for calling a spade a spade.

Nicholas, I congratulate you for so graciously saying

“….having read my share of ‘innovation in government’ manifestos, I hunger for the acknowledgement that successful innovation in government – like successful innovation in most places – is hard, really hard.”

I also appreciate your remarks about politicians “campaigning in poetry” whilst “governing in prose” in prose.”

I tend also to agree that consultants and others get away with a lot on the basis of “on the other hand this… and “on the other hand that” as you have put it.

Having plowed my way through a good many dozen commissione4d consultants reports I have gained the distinct feeling that if disclaimers as to access to “adequate date” or other qualifiers were removed, many reports would become meaningless in terms of policy guidance. This is not to say that the skills of presenting what the client wishes to hear have not been perfected in these arenas.

I will return to this topic as I really do feel that the time has come to get to the heart of things in determining why things may not have been working so that some solutions can be devised that are sustainable., Tall order of course, and easy for those providing armchair comment to those ruling the country representing the “Faceless Bureaucrat” of Mia Garlick’s wordless article. Will Gov2 ever live down that title – or more to the point, will I ever let them?

I have just posted the following comments on Gov2 directly since I am not sure if the exclusive team at Club Troppo will go there to read everyday stuff. Since I enjoy a bit of directness with minimal moderation, I am hoping I can be more myself here.

Within the constraints of respect and so on I do believe moderation policies should be liberally interpreted if there is a genuine wish to obtain real time feedback from stakeholders.

Some like me can be direct but still courteous. If policies are not working they need to be highlighted in a timely manner.

The ACCC use naming and shaming techniques to deter unacceptable behaviour. It often works.

A good part of the public service is privatized through incorporation. Despite this many of these bodies are acting in a public role. They have accountabilities that they do not always recognize understand or admit to. Frequently decisions that are complex and inter-related are made in vacuum conditions without intra-body and inter-body collaboration, let alone effective collaboration with the stakeholders to whom services are being provided.

Where effective dialogue or other problems are identified they should be transparently highlighted.

As someone who has, despite all efforts, phenomenal stamina and persistence endeavouring to communicate withy government services in formal consultative dialogue over the last four years, I have been more than disappointed with outcomes. I should be able to say this openly, even naming the agencies where improvement is required, or for that matter where policies are seen to be harmful.

Waiting to respond to the often inadequately cushioned narrow Terms of Reference of many consultative processes may mean waiting till it is too late.

Finally how about something more concrete for community-based bloggers as stakeholders to provide better guidance about moderation policies. I often just do not know why a post is moderated or delayed when posting publicly. If a post is rejected something beyond an auto no-reply message without explanation should be provided in order that the poster, who may be a regular like me can better understand what to avoid on a future occasion.

May I suggest a more secure posting site on matters that are sensitive and should remain confidential but would nevertheless be useful information for top governance bodies or personnel to have? If for example a post is rejected for such reasons, perhaps it does belong somewhere else, and the poster should have the option of re-posting to a more secure part of the arena.

This of course does raise the question of transparency and accountability.

My view is that if something is worth attending to, it is worth being stated publicly. If you were to examine as many public submissions as I have in the past four years you will see that some stakeholders are unrestrained in terms of frank inputs about poor policies and decision-making by bodies that need to address those deficiencies in the public interest.

At the end of the day balancing public interests can be a delicate and challenging matter but leaning towards too soft an approach may be hampering the central goals of addressing policies in a timely manner and encouraging frank input from stakeholders so that community expectations of service delivery can be examined and addressed.

Elsewhere on the AGIMO linked to Gov2 (Where are we at with the WPG Review? #comment-205 17 April), and on other Gov pages I have mentioned the issue of “toughening-up” those who feel vulnerable and insecure over negative feedback.

After all it is the negative experience from which we learn most. Searching questions, challenge to policies and decisions are part of the process of developing optimal service delivery.

Learning to deal with the challenges presented by transparency and honesty in open consultation is part of the process of becoming a better service-provider.

How does that sound? Too harsh? Too scary? Should we be looking at dealing with how best misgivings about these issues can be addressed rather than limiting the quality and frankness of inputs?”

This is really just to enforce a stakeholder’s perspective that the chance to spell things out in direct terms is terrific. Judging from the frankness with which views are expressed here, this seems just the right place to be.

Just chanced on this as I was flitting past, so haven’t digested or read earlier parts, but will return when things are quieter and I can just enjoy reading without the threat of formal consultation deadlines looming over me. This is more fun of course.

Must dash for now

Cheers

Madeleine

Yes, agreed.

You call Christopher Hill a fine historian as do many. I read quite a lot of Hill and gradually came to the conclusion that this was wrong. He was supposed to be one of the New Left historians who moved beyond crude Marxist stereotyping and economic determinism. But when you read carefully you found – or I found – that really waht he did was ‘soften’ the analysis, put in lots of caveats, but didn’t really change it. So it remained the same old Procrustean Marxist materialist stuff. So in The World Turned Upside Down he contrasted the economic motives of the puritans with their “mere irrational bibliolatry”. That’s a direct quote. Now if you’re doing a study of puritan ideology, I don’t think you can do that. What looks to Hill as “mere irrational bibliolatry” is the language in which they were reasoning about their world. We might think their quotations from The Book of Revelation are pretty strange – but the bible gives you lots to talk about, lots to choose from in working out what you want to argue. A good historian would enter into that with some sympathy, not to end up endorsing that form of reasoning, but to present it to the reader, help them understand how those people were thinking. Hill doesn’t really do that. He can’t and he keeps defaulting back to the (old) Marxist categories of the history a generation before him.

And yes, the silly bastards have not got past Rousseau, agreed. Sad really. Since the most exciting thing about being alive is getting past Rousseau – there’s a lot not to like about civilisation, but it’s the best thing we’ve got going for us.

Winstanley was made popular in modern times by Christopher Hill. Hill was very much an old-fashioned orthodox pro-soviet Commo (I’ll not use the term “Stalinist” because it has become a fairly meaningless term of abuse), as well as being a fine historian (“The World Turned Upside Down” influenced me in my youthful Marxism). He naturally read quite different things into Winstanley than the “New Levellers” do – though given the radically different context of Winstanley’s age I’d be willing to bet that both are pretty tendentious readings.

At least the old-syle Commos understood some economics – especially that a “labour intensive” economy is not a good but a very, very bad thing for human happiness.

What is it with these soft lefties – why do they want us all to become peasants again? The silly bastards have never got past Rousseau.

“…campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”

I couldn’t resist this. Hilary Clinton borrowed this from New York Governor Mario Cuomo:

We campaign in poetry. But when we’re elected we’re forced to govern in prose. And when we govern – as distinguished from when we campiagn – we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It’s here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality.

Mario Cuomo, Chubb Fellowship Lecture, Yale University, Feb. 1, 1985