Lawyers have given up hope of getting sense out of acts of parliament, but you rarely see bullshit of the quality on display in the CFA Act in Victoria.

s. 6A Accountability of Authority

(1) The Authority is subject to the general direction and control of the Minister in the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers.

(2) The Minister may from time to time give written directions to the Authority.

The net result is that the heading is misleading.  The Authority is not accountable at all.  The Minister is.  Well we know that.  If the Board doesn’t toe the government line, the Minister fires it.  Why bother to have a board?

Now cop this

s.6B Objective

The objective of the Authority in performing its functions and exercising its powers under this Act is to—

(a) contribute to a whole of sector approach to emergency management;

(b) promote a culture within the emergency management sector of community focus, interoperability and public value.

That is Grange quality bullshit – world class.  They nearly used the word ‘holistic’ in a statute.  It gets picked up in the EBA that may be the final monument to the bullshit of the IR Club.  It is more than 400 pages long.  How would you like to run a business under that kind of diktat?

3.1.5. A joint approach on “productivity policies” that embrace the drivers

and enablers of performance and are consistently applied.

3.1.6. recognising that a productivity model recognises the changing

knowledge requirements of employees covered by this agreement

in all phases of the enterprise activity and also caters for:

(a) increasing requirement for innovation

(b) accelerating adoption of technology

(c) management of risk

(d) motivation of a diverse workforce

(e) working conditions as a work value differentiator

‘Drivers’ and ‘enablers’!  That is premier grand cru bullshit.

But there is a part of the CFA Act that is intelligible.

s. 6F Recognition of Authority as a volunteer-based organisation

The Parliament recognises that the Authority is first and foremost a volunteer-based organisation, in which volunteer officers and members are supported by employees in a fully integrated manner.

How does Danny Boy square that with handing control over the CFA to those who are not volunteers?  Don’t ask Danny Boy.  Ask the Premier of Victoria.  A tiny minority gets a veto over the parliament preferred volunteers.  Danny Boy must have some kind of dispensing power – like James II.

That king got run out of town.

 

Ali again

For the first time I can recall, The Economist obituary ran to two pages.  It contained the following.

Denied entry to diners on a southern tour, he made one of his raps of it: ‘Man, it was really a let-down drag.  For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.’  Told in a Louisville hamburger joint, when he went in wearing his Olympic gold medal, that they still didn’t serve niggers, he said that was fine; he didn’t eat them.  But under the joshing lay depth upon depth of furious resentment…..Black heavyweights who were not new men like him, still managed by white mobsters and dutifully silent about politics, he called Uncle Toms and ‘great white hopes’, and mimicked their grunts and shuffles…like bears or apes.  It became a habit, turned most viciously against Frazier and Foreman, funny and appalling both at once.

Ali was not a saint.  (Does Islam have them?)  He was just the greatest.

 

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

6

Lightly the weeks are flying,

What has happened, I can’t take in.

Just as, my dearest, the white

Nights first watched you in prison,

So they gaze down

With their warm aquiline eyes and

Of your cross transcendent

And of death I hear them speak.