Great news escaping from the State of Victoria this week with the local branch of the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) setting the scene for its third festival of public service, its ‘Public Sector Week’ scheduled for Melbourne in mid-August.
While IPAA Victoria is to be congratulated for hosting such a PS-friendly event and PS-sssst! is positive it will do another great job running it, the BIG question is ‘Why is there only one PS week in the whole of Australia?” Is the Victorian public sector the only one worthy of celebration, support or recognition?
Public Service Weeks (and months) are commonplace around the world with the public services of Great Britain, Canada, Singapore, Kenya, the Philippines to name just a few honoured and recognised with great fanfare and compliment as their people’s way of saying thanks for the lifelong sacrifices and commitments public service employees make to make their communities better places to live in.
Even Donald Trump’s USA manages a ‘Public Service Recognition Week’ between all the controversies, chaos and confusion it’s been saddled with in recent years.
So the PS ball is in the PS leaders-that-be courts to see which Aussie jurisdiction will be the first to follow the Victorian example and do something publicly positive to promote their public sector.
For our part, PS News will promise free media coverage for all who take up the cudgel of commitment. Over to you!
For information about Victoria’s PS Week, follow this PS News link.
Bark to the future
To our newly ongoing and inspiring series of creativity above and beyond the call of cleverness now in which a PS-sssst! HOTWA award is awarded to the hottest headline to emerge from the collective brilliances of the public sector’s army of PR prodigies and media magicians.
The HOTWA (Headline Of The Week Award) for this week has been scooped up by the NSW Department of Finance, Services and Innovation for its cheeky headline: ‘Greyhound racing welcomes new top dogs’.
What gives this headline the inside running is not so much the Department’s punny play on words but the hidden compliment that the ‘top dogs’ it recognises are in fact new appointments to the State’s revamped Greyhound Racing Board.
Woof!
Interest shown
Great work by the Reserve Bank of Australia shaving a few interest points off the interest rate that lenders like the Big Banks have to pay to borrow the money they use to lend to their customers.
At last reading the RBA had set the cost of cash to the banks at just 1%.
PS-sssst! was less than amused therefore to find a letter from its credit card banker, Westpac from as recent as April this year, advising that the interest rate on cash advanced to the card had been increased to 21.49%.
Now few people, and PS-sssst! is one of them, would begrudge a service supplier making a few dollars profit on the service they provide but a margin of 2,049%, or more than 20 times the cost price, is way beyond reasonable and well worth begrudging.
One wonders if we need another Royal Commission into the banks.
Giveaways given away
Opening the wonders of Rama Gaind‘s treasure trove of giveaways now with more lucky readers joining her circle of success and scoring a free addition to their library or DVD collection.
This week Rama is re-housing copies of futurist Gihan Perera’s thought-provoking exposè Disruption by Design to the first two readers to emerge from the famous PS News Barrel of Booty citing the quote Perera used to describe the phenomenon ‘innovation disruption’.
The two successful readers who correctly quoted the quote as “ innovation is disruption, but with you in control it’s disruption by design” were Tamara L from the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Ric P from the Federal Department of Social Services.
Congratulations to Tamara and Ric, your free books will be on their way soon in a PS-sssst! Pack of book, pen/light and winner’s T-shirt, A very big thank you to everyone who took part.
For another chance to join up in Rama’s Army as a weekly winner, simply follow this link to this week’s giveaway (there are two!!!) and give it a go.
Good luck to all who do.
First again
Unable to resist the irresistible, we stay with the irresistible Rama who has announced yet another world first for PS News which will see her giving away not one, but two, giveaways at the same time, contemporaneously.
Our multi-talented Rama is juggling both a thriller DVD (Galveston ) and Comedy DVD (Swimming with Men) on her giveaway unicycle this week, courtesy of Icon Film Distribution, and has allowed DVD lovers until 22 July to pick, answer her quiz question and enter.
Full details at this PS News link.
Subs reaching high ground
And finally, hot on the news of our unintentional, unplanned and unfortunate understatement of the PS News subscriber list surge last week comes this week’s news that six of the nine editions of PS News around the country are recording record numbers of subscribers for the year.
Leading the field at the end of June was the Victorian Public Service which has 24,134 subscribers in its midst, followed by the Queensland PS with 15,141; WA with 13,358; ACT 12,681; SA 9,413; and NT 988.
Well done to all the PSs for continuing to support PS News. We remain very humbled by your endorsement.
Till next week…….
