Welcome to ‘Onomatopoeia’, one of those tongue-twisting words most of us meet in high school but don’t expect to see again in the real world.
Startling and stunning a surprise as it is to find onomatopoeia on duty in a staid and serious public service report, Australia’s national Auditor-General, Grant Hehir, has bitten the challenge and let the monster loose.
Formally reporting on the administration of the Federal Government’s COVID-related JobKeeper scheme which aided Australian businesses survive the pandemic a year or so ago, Mr Hehir reported the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) found the scheme mostly successful.
Making the point that the ANAO investigation was one of an ongoing series of audits, Mr Hehir took to onomatopoeia in place of the more common dry and dull audit reports
“This audit was conducted under phase two of the ANAO’s multi-year strategy,” Mr Hehir reported clearly, “that focuses on the effective, efficient, economical and ethical delivery of the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Effective, Efficient, Economical and Ethical!
Brilliant!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge could hardly have done better!
As for the Auditor-General’s clever composition: That’s E-zee for him to say!
The paper caper
And while on the subject of the Australian Auditor-General’s office, it is one of a very small number of agencies whose published reports are accurately published in exactly the number of pages they report they have in them.
PS News readers may be aware of the “PS News links’ at the end of many stories pointing readers to the original sources online to judge the story for themselves, most of the so linked resources are linked to documents published with blank pages, covers, indexes and other unnecessary screens – except when the link is to the Australian National Audit Office.
If the computer calculates that an ANAO report has 100 pages, it has 100 pages – not 101, not 99 or any other number than the promised 100.
There’s an office that knows the cost of wastage!
A spicy tale
To the Department of Defence now where the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has announced it’s to embark on the biggest recruitment drive in its 75-year history.
Aimed at boosting the Directorate’s capabilities to detect and respond to cyber-attacks and other on-line threats, the search is on for more than 1,900 new staff members to join in a new project for which a fancy new acronym has been created to attract the right people.
According to the Minister for Defence, ADS’s Project REDSPICE has been developed in the Directorate to help attract the right type of candidate(s) to show an interest in signing on.
And what, we hear you ask, does ‘REDSPICE’ stand for?
Good question but not so good an answer.
In what could have been an almost classic acronym, REDSPICE is the name created from the letters of each of the issues the project will deal with, to wit: Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers.
Spot the stumble?
Eight letters in REDSPICE but only seven issues in the project
The ‘P’ is silent!
Close – but the spice could do with some Piquancy!
Golden giveaway
Prize time at PS News now with Rama Gaind’s weekly giveaway taking its place to offer another freebie for ready readers with an eye for rewards.
Rama’s selection this week is the acclaimed novel The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe, free to win by simply playing Rama’s giveaway game and naming the exclusive school for women that novel star character Anita Hemmings longed to attend.
The answer is Vassar College and the lucky players whose correct entries were first to greet the judges were from Dana T from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Donata L from the Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety.
Congratulations to Dana and Donata and a big ‘ThankYou’ to all the readers who played Rama’s game. The winners’ books will be on their way very soon.
To join Rama’s Army of well-done winners, simply visit her latest reviews of the DVD Pressure Point at this PS News link and/or her Book The Opera House at this link and follow her instructions.
Good luck to all who do!
Growing again!
And finally, another month, another race for readership of PS News among Australia’s highly competitive Public Services with two energetic jurisdictions recording new reaches of readership in March.
Of particular performance was the Queensland Public Service which skipped past the 15,000 subscriber list for the first time, ending the month with 15,062 very happy readers realising a record to be proud of.
And while the sun shines in Queensland, the workers of the west in Western Australia went to work to set up their own record of 17,708 readers in March, a noticeably new number reached and reported for the first time.
Well done to our two record-makers and to everyone else who helped push the national number of PS News subscribers to its biggest monthly audience ever – 175,901!
As always, PS News is honoured and embarrassed by the support it receives from its readers and can only say ‘ThankYou’ to each and every one who invests their valuable time sharing our stories.
So this is for you: ‘Thank You!’
Till next week…..
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