It was fanfares galore across the planet last weekend when nature’s most lovable swimming reptile came to the surface to mark World Turtle Day.
Emerging from their own deep and shallow habitat, public services the nation over unveiled their mutant ninja underside to shellebrate the occasion which was marked equally enthusiastically around the globe.
High on the list of shellebrants was the NSW Department of Environment which went out of its way to make a scene for its State’s own esteemed member of turtledom, hailing the local Manning River Turtle as the godfather of Australian short-necks, with an estimated ancestry reaching back more than 55 million years.
“This is a living fossil” the official announcement of the Day said, but not before heading the statement with a headline worth fossilising itself: “Eggs-ellent outcome for World Turtle Day.”
Well done to all concerned.
Hospital hospitality
And while on the subject of wise public servants acting wisely with words, the NSW Department of Health is no slouch when it comes to clever creativeness.
Announcing that 86 new staffmembers were to be recruited for 50 hospitals around the State to join the Department’s program of welcoming patients and their families to hospital and then ensuring they are given directions and information about what to expect at each stage of their care and treatment.
And what does the Department call this positive, creative, helpful, kind and sociable program?
It’s their ‘Patient Experience Program’ which can be brilliantly abbreviated to the positive, excellent and perceptive ‘PEP’.
And in these days of stress and distress, the congratulations can’t be big enough!
Not easy as ABC
And a word from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) now that the managing director has taken a 5% pay cut in light of the economic situation and senior ABC staff can forget bonuses this year.
While the move might be sentimental it’s a long way from past eras when the tried and proven policy for kickstarting uncooperative economies was to grant the nation’s public servants a couple of payrises in advance and let them loose on the shops.
With more than a million on the payroll at the national, state and local government levels, the impacts were almost immediate, effective and a great deal less expensive than today’s solutions.
Indeed it’s hard to see how cutting anyone’s pay can help any economy grow any time!
To Rama’s ever popular giveaway for this week now in which two lucky readers become lucky winners taking home the complete series of the psychological thriller The Enemy Within on DVD starring Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter.
To wrest the prize from Rama, all we needed to do was tell her the Public Service position the series character Erica Shepherd held at the time of her arrest and then be one of the first two correct entrants to emerge from the PS News Barrel of Booty.
The answer was CIA Deputy Director of Operations (played by Jennifer Carpenter) and the lucky winners were Vivienne M from the Australian Taxation Office, and Shirley A from Services Australia, Brisbane.
Congratulations to Vivienne and Shirley and thanks to everyone for taking part. The DVDs will be on their way to their new owners shortly
For another chance to chance your luck, check out Rama’s latest offerings of the thrilling DVD Safe Spaces at this link and for her latest free book Beat Gender Bias at this link.
Good luck to all who do.
Mind numbing numbers
And finally, an almost news item now that yet another collection of Public Service job vacancies has reared its ambitious head as if PS News’s super popular Careers section – and half a dozen others – aren’t enough.
Offering what must be the umpteenth version of an already well-run system, the new baby has aimed its target at ‘senior leaders in the public sector’ – yep, the exact same leaders who’ve been loyally subscribing to PS News for 15 years – but with an intriguingly creative approach to the number of ‘senior leaders’ the public sector employs.
It may be in nappies but the new baby reckons it already reaches “1.5 million public sector leaders”, setting aside the fact that the States and Territories it hopes to work with only claim a combined 13,620 or so staffmembers in their senior or leadership numbers.
Either everyone in the public sector has been promoted to leadership or the eager new job finder has burst out of the blocks a bit ahead of its time because its reach is more than 100 times the total number of PS senior and leader staff in the country.
For the record: APS claims 2,750; NSW 3,100; Victoria 2,370; Queensland 2,880; South Australia 1,320; Western Australia 380; Tasmania 180; and Northern Territory 640.
Until next week……
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