Opening up in Queensland this week where the competing world of sharp and blunt acronyms has been seen showing one with great skill and another that kills a great show.
First to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) which has dramatically declared to publicly embarrass embarrassing companies who take advantage of vulnerable consumers.
“Dodgy online advertising, unlicensed motor dealers, unregistered charities, and dangerous products will come under the spotlight,” Queensland’s OFT promises.
“The OFT’s Proactive Regulation of Industry and Marketplace Entities program involves compliance checks,” it announced.
And what did the announcement announce?
A close look at OFT’s comment will reveal the sentence goes acronymical to disclose the clever abbreviation: PRIME!
Congratulations to the PRIME designer. Almost had us tricked!
To secondly where the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council has announced it has changed its name to The National Council for Fire and Emergency Services.
PS-sssst! of course wishes the ex-Council, now-Service, every success in its very important fire-fighting endeavours but, we wonder if the ex-Council, now-Service shares the same wishing for its readers.
Bearing a new name or not, the freshly christened National Council for Fire and Emergency Services has chosen to keep its old acronym in place and be abbreviated as AFAC.
As an acronym-admirer, PS-sssst! wonders what the new National Council for Fire and Emergency Services has done to be nick-named AFAC when its friends and colleagues are more likely to recognise It as NCFES or even NCFFAES.
Or is there something we have missed?
Going to water
Over to Western Australian now where they call a day a day, a week a week and an annual a year.
Announcing the progress of a much-needed groundwater replenishing scheme (GRS) for WA’s water-challenged capital city, the Minister for Water has announced it has been working on how much it might be able to save by replenishing the much valued water.
“The GRS was Australia’s first full-scale groundwater replenishment strategy and had an annual capacity of 14 billion litres per year,” the Minister for Water announced.
PS-sssst! firmly agrees with the Minister.
If you’re going to have an annual capacity, you might as well have it in a year!
In trees we trust
DPIRD’s Dr McCauley (right) and plant epidemiologist Peter Scott practicing their TREEmendousness.
Staying in the world of cleverness in Western Australia now where the State’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development has invited members of the WA community to help protect the State’s trees.
Launching an annual program known as the ‘Biosecurity Blitz’ the delightfully abbreviated DPIRD said the ‘Blitz’ was aimed at “protecting trees from an increasing number of exotic threats across horticultural and forest industries as well as urban and bushland environments”.
A very worthwhile cause, of course, but what allured PS-sssst’s interest was the cleverness with which DPIRD’s Senior Development Officer, Rosalie McCauley, caught the attention of her audience.
“This year the TREEmendous Biosecurity Blitz runs from 24 September to 24 October 2022,” Dr McCauley announced.
‘TREEmendous’ indeed!
A TREEmendous announcement in itself and great use of the acrobatic English language!
Quizing question
Another week, another marvelous giveaway now with who’s better book prize to win by answering a quiz question than that of a national quiz master ‘the Shark’ in TV’s ‘The Chase’, Brydon Coverdale’s whose tell-all book The Quiz Masters.
To win one of two copies of the book for free, all we had to do was tell PS News’s own bookmistress, Rama Gaind the profession Brydon ‘Shark’ Coverdale practiced before becoming a full-time quizmaster.
The answer is Mr Covedale was a cricket journalist and the first two readers the judges found with the right answer were those from John V of the Federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water, and Dana T from the Australian Institute of Criminology.
Congratulations to John and Dana, and thanks to everyone who tried their luck. The books will be on their way to their new homes very shortly.
To join Rama’s Army of quizzey quizkids all we need to do is send in our answers to one or both of her weekly reviews of the Book Lonely Planet’s Experience Guides: Scotland at this PS News link and/or her other review of Book at this link.
Good luck to everyone who join in the fun.
Secretaries behaving creatively
And finally, the national Public Service has been blessed with a “Charter of Leadership Behaviours” developed by the Service’s most senior Secretaries, setting out the skills and abilities hopeful leaders should aim to have if they hope to reach the highest levels in the Australian Public Service as it begins a Service-wide ‘reclassification’ program.
Proving that Secretaries are just as inventive as young advertisers, the Charter comes in five specifications: Dynamic, Respectful, Integrity, Value and Empower.
And for those of us who might have missed the inner meaning: they all add up to spell DRIVE!
Congratulations to the Secretaries for their creative Public Service-ism.
Till next week……
Something to share?
Send to [email protected]
(And, yes, it can be anonymous!)
