Beginning in soaked NSW now where the State’s State Emergency Operations Centre (SEOC) has been reactivated to cope with the disastrous flood crisis currently torturing the community.
A tried and proven practice, the SEOC brings together the NSW State Emergency Service, Police, Fire and Rescue, Resilience NSW, Health, Planning, Rural Fire Service, Service NSW and more with its most recent challenges responses to bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic
“The SEOC is a central hub that brings officers from all the NSW Government response agencies under one roof to ensure a coordinated, emergency response to the extreme wet weather impacting many parts of the State,” the Emergency Services Minister explained.
“State-of-the-art technology enables them to monitor the situation in real time and
coordinate a whole of Government response with on-the-ground responders to
organise effective flood relief efforts,” she said.
All very wise and an excellent example of expert public service expertise at work and everyone is to be congratulated.
PS-sssst! wonders therefore why the official announcement was: A State Emergency Operations Centre (SEOC) has been stood up at Homebush…..”
Teachers pest
To the national capital now where the city’s teachers are required to join their ACT Teacher Quality Institute each year to help make their profession more professional and “enhance the community’s confidence in the teaching profession”.
At a cost of $115 a year, the teachers expect nothing but the best from their institute, but they didn’t expect the spelling creativity the institute went to this year – see above!
PS-sssst! wonders if the institute is taking a spell from quality?
Bussy business
Staying in Canberra where we find the city’s public transport service going places by launching a new campaign to drum up more business.
Inviting the public to ‘Get on board with transport’ Transport Canberra has invited its travellers to share their favourite bus or tram stories among their friends to ‘inspire others” to “join the commute and use public transport”.
“If you are passionate about clean transport, combining exercise and commuting or just like saving on parking, we’d love to chat and share your journey,” Transport Canberra promised.
It even has an online form for the bus-bugs to fill in and lodge.
Great idea and one to be supported.
Only pothole PS-sssst! could see was the online form’s absence of access for the travellers’ friends to find out what their friends want to tell them.
Instead, Transport Canberra warns: “Tell us a bit about you and what your commute looks like, and we’ll be in touch.”
Ouch!
Could it be the call to ‘inspire others’ is a dead end?
Beware of the language
To the mischievous mind of the Victorian Department of Families, Fairness and Housing’s Philomena S now who has been putting the English language through its paces and finding it ‘impaceable!’.
“English is the only language where we can recite a play and play in a recital,” the thespianistic Philomena recited.
“But it’s also the language where ‘jail’ and ‘prison’ are synonyms but ‘jailer’ and ‘prisoner’ are antonyms!
How ‘celly’ of her!
Maybe we shouldn’t mix our Syns and Ants!
A mountain of giveaway
Opening our weekly giveaway now when the inimitable Rama Gaind inimitably makes readers winners all over the nation by giving away books and/or DVDs to some of us who enjoy a little fun.
This week, Rama’s reward for rivalry is a DVD of the film East of the Mountains starring 88-year-old Tom Skerritt and Academy Award-winner Mira Sorvino, in the story of a retired doctor who gets cancer and goes bush to deal with it.
To be among Rama’s three winners, all we had to do was tell her how old Mr Skerritt is (i.e. 88) and then be first to emerge from the PS News Barrel of Booty.
And the winners who managed that this week are Delma L from the Queensland Department of Education, Johnathon N from the Western Australian Department of Justice, and Judith G from the federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part. The DVDs will be on their way to their new owners very soon.
For another chance to join Rama’s Army of worthy winners simply try your hand at winning her giveaway Book Daughter of the River Country at this PS News link and/or put your good luck to work on her other giveaway question to win this Book Managing Your Career at this link.
Good luck to everyone who does.
Records broken
And finally, another burst of wise and wary readers joined the PS News family last month with more than a thousand new subscribers signing onto the long list, electing to become well-informed as well as well-versed, well-read and well-educated.
While the Australian Public Service led the way skipping past the 62,000 subscribers for the first time, the Western Australia Public Sector and Queensland Public Service also excelled with each reaching new heights: WA 17,664 and QLD 14,997, just three readers short of 15,000.
Overall the full family flipped past 175,000 for the first time, settling at 175,405, making news in PS News themselves and proving the public service is alive and active.
Welcome to all our new readers and a continued thanks for the ongoing support of the old.
As we’ve said many times in the past: If you keep reading PS News, we’ll keep writing it.
Till next week…..
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