Bananas for sale

The Abbott government is (again) showing poor management and leadership qualities.

Those qualities would be making decisions without proper advice from subject matter experts; making decisions against advice provided and in a manner that gives the appearance of not knowing what you are doing.

Last week, Defence bureaucrats stated that military and civil service working for Defence pay was being managed as part of an existing plan.

Now we read that Abbott has stepped in and given a pay increase to the military against that advice. Note that good, strong leadership can and should go against recommendations when there are tough calls to make.

This does not seem to be that time.

It is argued that military service has higher risk than a civilian job. This is true. However pay and benefits already address this. The military is paid more when they deploy and has some tax advantages.

The other part of that is that we have an all volunteer force. No one is drafted. If one does not like the service because of the pay or working conditions, they are free to leave. Some do just that.

The civil servants that support the military and work with them side-by-side are already seeing force cuts. The uniformed service? There are always some adjustments so I don't know if you can make a comparison there.

Absent from all of this (at least in the public) is efficiency. Certainly there are parts of the civilian force that needs to be cut.

Just as there are parts of the uniformed service that need to be cut; becuase the kind of work they are doing, provides no value to our national defence. An example here would be, Australia's M-1 tank. It is a classic example of the movie 'Office Space' and the "Bobs' where one of them says, "What do you actually do here?" All the force structure and cubical bunnies that support the M-1 tank are wasted tax dollars.

Still a lot of work to do. It will be more than interesting to see how the Abbott government gets through this.

Kleptocracy government leaders in a  banana republic do sudden benefits to their military to help avoid a coup.

Sometimes, it works.

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