"The myth of governmental competence"
“Competence” has proven to be a potent tool for conservatives here and elsewhere recently. Republicans have assailed Barack Obama as incompetent, particularly in the oleaginous wake of his handling of the BP oil spill. David Cameron hammered Gordon Brown, whose economic competence was once his principal claim to the Prime Ministership, over it in the lead-up to the UK election. And it was the central theme of Tony Abbott’s campaign against Labor that has him on the cusp of minority government.
The Howard Government is conventionally viewed as a competent government — fiscally lax in its last term, true, and it left us with a structural budget deficit, but it was solidly reformist in at least its first two terms.
But as I pointed out back in March, if the same standards that were applied to the Rudd Government by the Press Gallery in the context of the insulation saga had been applied to the Howard Government, a different perception might have emerged. There was a direct link between IR decisions by Howard Government ministers and the deaths of building workers. There was a direct link between the failure of the Howard Government to remedy the military justice system despite repeated warnings, and the deaths of ADF personnel. These deaths are far greater in number than those attributed to problems in the insulation program for which Peter Garrett was so unfairly pilloried.
But the Howard Government was repeatedly criticised for mismanagement on a much greater scale. The first tranche of the Telstra sale was badly underpriced, and it cost taxpayers $12b in 1997 dollars (the best part of $18b now). And the sale agency, the Office of Asset Sales and IT Outsourcing, didn’t even bother checking the invoices it got from high-priced sale consultants, and simply paid them, adding a huge premium to sale costs.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/09/03/kea ... ompetence/