DUCKPOND

Some contracting of government services seems to work just fine. For example, our Council has contracted out the collection of the garbage and recycling we put out in roadside bins each week. I do not know the economics of this situation, but perhaps this is a win-win outcome for the local government and the contractor. Presumably one side saves money and the other able to invest in the relevant equipment. Contracts such as this work on the basis of a long term relationship.

No doubt there are other services in which a contractual relationship between a private provider and a government can work out well, but governments here, and especially in the US, seemed to have pushed the idea to the point at which governments are financing business in such areas which were never previously envisaged as prisons and war. The reports of waste associated with the private war contractors, typically favoured firms such as Haliburton and Bechtel has been extraordinary. My sense is that the private contractors who run the Immigration Detention Centres are less accountable than would be public servants.

Now comes the news, via James Carroll at The Boston Globe, that the intelligence services, data gathering and analysis, are going to be run by contractors. Of course, this should make it a lot easier for the intelligence to fit the policy – or whatever the phrase was. Intelligence requires, I suppose, independent assessment and a collegiate environment where different assessments and evidence can be debated, requiring the level of intellectual leadership that somebody like G W Bush could never provide.

James Carrol provides a family history and makes the point about public service as one of the truly important forms of citizenship. He observes:

Readers of this column may know that the Defense Intelligence Agency was founded by my father in 1961. Not long before, he had declined an offer from the Ford Motor Company to take a big job in Detroit, a chance at true affluence. My parents were typical products of immigrant culture, people who so loved America for its welcome that the highest privilege they could imagine was to spend their lives in its service. In this, newcomers were like the “best and brightest” of the establishment — the patriots who first stamped the culture of American intelligence. I know for certain that, in setting out the ethos of the DIA, my father assumed love of country, and sacrifice for it, as foundational. He would not have entrusted the difficult and, perhaps, dirty work for which he found himself responsible to people who thought differently. Profit-driven contractors for core functions of the agency? My father would not have understood what you were talking about.

As the Post suggests, the Bush administration has replaced officials with contractors throughout government, outsourcing run amok. But Bush did not begin this. Since Ronald Reagan, conservatives have preached the doctrine that the nation’s basic needs can best be met by private enterprise. The profit motive trumps any public ideal. Consequently, government has been in slow motion collapse, with the ineptitudes of Iraq as final proof of its untrustworthiness.

But what the antigovernment movement missed is that attacks on the public sector equal assaults on the public. When the high calling of public service yields to the highest bid, the corruption is total: the heart of government — the military — becomes mercenary; the mind of the military — intelligence — becomes privatized. Citizenship itself is universally gutted, yet another source of our malaise.

Where the US leads, we usually blindly follow. So this reminds me of my questions, perhaps not properly formulated:

1. How is democratic quality to be intrinsic to government?

2. What is the essential difference for a country such as Australia of international political leadership and fellowship. I think the point here is that our national issues, for example reconciliation with the first nations, as the foundation for our international stance.