Who
takes care of the caretaker, when the caretaker’s busy taking care?
Like me, you may have been a mite surprised to
read on the front page of the latest edition of ‘York and Districts Community
Matters’ (YDCM) that our Commissioner, James Best, is here as ‘caretaker’ of
the suspended York Shire Council.
For me, the word ‘caretaker’ evokes nostalgic memories
of my distant English childhood. In
those days, every state school had someone called a caretaker. I particularly
remember from primary school a seedy old chap with a mop and bucket, who reeked
of tobacco and disinfectant and could often be discerned crouching outside the
boys’ toilets rolling cigarettes.
Commissioner Best is nothing like him, as the
photo accompanying the article makes clear.
It’s a pleasant photo, cleverly posed and composed, taken by local
photographer Lisa Astle. It shows the
Commissioner to his best advantage, sitting on a conference table with a pen at
the ready in his right hand. Maybe
copies are available from Lisa at a reasonable price. I’m sure he would be happy to sign them.
I have a few ideas, or perhaps I should say ‘ideations’,
I’d like to share with you arising from the article, but first I want to give my
namesake a well-deserved pat on the back.
Turn to page 12 of YDCM, and read the
‘infotorial’ (sic) from AVRA entitled ‘The Missing Bits’. James has assured AVRA that he supports the
Shire’s position on SITA’s proposed landfill and is keen to represent York as
its JDAP representative at the SAT hearings.
In that capacity he will stand in for Matthew
Reid, our ruler-in-exile, or in the words of the Jacobite toast, ‘the king over
the water’.
This should dispel once and for all persistent
rumours that Mr Best’s appointment reflected government support for SITA’s
proposal. It is good news for York.
So come on, Hon. Mia Davies, our very own
parliamentary representative and ‘passionate’ lover of the Wheatbelt, don’t be
shy, take a leaf from James Best’s book and tell us, before Colin calls an
election, where you stand on the
landfill issue.
The New
Oregon Model
In four short pages, Mr Ames, a management
consultant, managed to convince me that I had no idea what he was going on
about. Not even Stephen Hawking was able
to do that.
Then I looked more carefully, and on the third
page found a series of questions underpinning the tripartite ‘Community
Visioning Process’ on which the model is based (‘Envision, Plan, Achieve’). I felt as Alan Turing must have felt when he
and his team found the key to Enigma, or like Ventris and Chadwick when they
deciphered the logo-phonetic Mycenaean script known as Linear B. (Stop showing off, James P. Signed, your wife.)
These were the questions, all in the plainest
of plain English:
·
Where are we now?
·
Where are we going?
·
Where do we want to be?
·
How do we get there?
·
Are we getting there?
·
Are we having fun yet?
(I added the last one myself.)
More nostalgia, as my mind drifted back to the
ubiquitous ‘workshops’ of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when earnest ‘consultants’ *
exhorted lethargic public servants and NGO staff and volunteers to cover acres
of butchers’ paper with answers to questions that were pretty well identical
with the ones quoted above. (Confucius
say: ‘consultant’ means someone who
borrows your watch in order to tell you the time.)
Then it struck me: people have been doing that kind of stuff for
millennia, probably since the dawn of civilization. In those days Gilgamesh and
his mates must have used clay tablets instead of butchers’ paper, which I
suppose would have slowed things down a bit—or maybe it was sticks making lines
and squiggles in the sand.
Translated into everyday language, the process
makes sense. The first three questions
relate to something akin to brainstorming, the fourth to planning, and the
fifth to monitoring and evaluating progress.
The last question, the one I added, is not as silly as it sounds. It’s well attested that humour assists (sorry,
‘facilitates’) creative thinking in any field.
So the New Oregon Model boils down to getting
people together to talk about their wants, needs and ideas for the future and to
form a common purpose regarding important aspects of the life of their community. Hang on a tick—isn’t that what Matthew Reid,
our elected Shire President, was trying to do before the Minister gave him the
shove?
*Confession:
Bless me, comrades, for I have
sinned. I was a consultant myself once, way
back in the dark ages. I never really
succeeded in walking the walk or talking the talk. Honesty and common sense
kept breaking through.
Infamy,
infamy, they’ve all got it infamy!
(apologies to the late Kenneth Williams and Carry on
Cleo)
As a frequent contributor to this blog, I was quite
deflated to see it described as ‘infamous’ in the YDCM. Shame on you, Mark Lloyd.
It isn’t infamous. It is famous throughout Australia and apparently even further afield, and
becoming increasingly so. I suppose that
if you line up with the Dark Side, meaning Minister Simpson (‘go, winged
thought, widen his brow’) and his mutant gaggle of senior bureaucrats (‘may
their hair fall out, their teeth turn green, their bowels dissolve and their
feet blister’, ancient Hittite malediction), you might prefer to say
‘notorious’, and for some inexplicable reason I would find that perfectly
acceptable.
Commissioner Best says the blog is bringing a
kind of publicity that ‘isn’t doing York any good at all, most locals and
visitors want to see a vibrant, active place’.
Even though I was only a visitor then, I remember York when it was vibrant
and active, many years ago, before it fell victim to the Curse of the House of
Hooper. There were trees along Avon
Terrace, no empty shops, smiling faces everywhere and you had a wide choice of
places to eat and drink.
Paradise Lost, you might say (but as you’d
expect, not without the occasional serpent).
The Commissioner has spent only a month in the
town. How would he know what ‘most locals and visitors want’ and what is or
isn’t doing us any good? The blog is certainly
raising the morale of its readers by giving the town a voice. Ask around.
No, James B, my dear fellow, you are
wrong. This blog has put York firmly on
the map. Unfettered, the blog will remind York people of their shire’s pristine
glory. It will inspire them to rise up against their oppressors and restore
their rightful king to his throne. I
dream of the day when tourists will come from the four corners of the earth to
visit York, home of that rare humanoid species, the ‘passionate extremist’…
Oh, crikey, I’m envisioning again. Nurse, fetch my pills.
Another
pat on the back for Commissioner Best
I was delighted to read that James B ‘will
commit to investigating the issues [raised] in the Fitz Gerald Report and
pursue the necessary action to resolve the situation as far as possible under
the office of Commissioner’.
I’m baffled, though, by his next sentence: ‘Of course we wish to minimize any damage it
may cause in trying to pursue it’.
What kind of damage? Damage to what or whom? What’s the ‘it’ that may cause it? How will
it be minimized? Who is he reassuring? Commissioner,
pray tell us more!
It’s good to see James begin to build bridges,
but I remind him that he has a lot of bridges to build following his unpopular usurpation
of Matthew Reid’s authority, and his socially awkward speech on Australia Day. Let’s see you do much better, Mr Best.
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