A short story by Peter Mac
The Department concert was organised by one of the division managers as an attempt to boost staff morale during the government’s selective retrenchment program. Some members of management sympathised with the employees because they knew that the government’s real agenda was to abolish the entire Department.
The performers were drawn from all ranks of the staff. An architect whose name I’ve long forgotten did a creditable job of “Summertime”, which he played bush-style with a bow on a long, ancient cross-cut saw! I myself sang “Reviewing the situation” from Oliver, in which Fagan muses on his meagre prospects for comfort in his old age. I got a few laughs, but the audience fell silent in the last few lines, when Fagan declares:
“Don’t want no one to rob for me,
But who will get a job for me?
I think I’d better think it out again!”
An engineer surprised us with a moving performance of “Old Man River”. Tall and thin, with a very deep voice, he always spoke quietly and courteously, and never at all about his time as an unwilling conscript in Vietnam.
But the biggest surprise came with the last item. The compere loaded into the hi-fi set one of the disks he’d provided to accompany the performers. He turned the volume up and announced laconically: “Rita’s going to give us a song about a girl who decides to write a letter to someone she loves, but can’t make up her mind to send it.”
Invariably cheerful, Rita Jones from the Plan Records section was known as “the hummer” because of her habit of humming along and brushing back her tousled hair as she worked.
As the opening bars rose to a climax, some of us guessed what she was going to sing. Someone called out: “Just hum it, Rita!”, and I heard a friend mutter: “Christ, she’ll never make it”.
But she did. Her voice, beautiful and wonderfully powerful, leapt and soared. We gasped in unison, and sat for eleven minutes dumbfounded, gripped and helpless like Kenneth Graeme’s small animals at the gates of dawn, while Rita, now a total stranger, gave a passionate interpretation of Tatyana’s “letter scene” aria from Eugene Onegin.
It had been a hard week, and I saw that some members of the audience had been caught off guard and had shed tears at Rita’s exquisite performance, with Tatiana’s uncertainty, confusion, and yearning mirroring their own emotions.
The stunning impact was magnified because it was totally unexpected. We knew relatively little about Rita. She was raising two children on her own, and there were rumours of a desperately unhappy marriage with an abusive estranged husband. Everyone had heard her hum, but no one had ever heard her sing, and no one realised she was mentally practising lines from opera while she hummed away at work.
Struggle
In the months after the concert, union members fought a dogged, often bitter campaign against the redundancy program.
We achieved a cancellation of the first stage of the program, during which mid-ranking professionals had been pressured to nominate members of their staff who were the least efficient and therefore (in management’s eyes) most deserving of consignment to the retrenchment section, nicknamed “the holding tank”.
Of the few who cooperated in this shameful exercise, some were found to have nominated people with whom they’d never worked, and in one case a person nominated someone he’d never met.
Management conducted the initial appeal interviews without union representation, but following our protests a former arbitration commissioner was recruited to take charge. He insisted that union representatives be present, and as a result we got several decisions overturned. But our triumphs were short-lived.
Those who were sent to the retrenchment section were encouraged to practice their professions by working on “pro bono” projects for non-government organisations , including the National Trust.
Needless to say, the NGOs were delighted. The free-of-charge service blossomed. The retrenched staff designed smart new logos and stationery, and word spread about the wonderful new government program which used taxpayer money to fund professional works programs for the public good. In the end the venture was so successful that the government panicked and shut it down.
The Government then decreed that the Department had to be profitable, and the Department management decided to buy computer-aided drafting (CAD) equipment.
One union delegate calculated that stand-alone CAD machines (the industry standard) could have been purchased for every professional employee nationwide for $5 million. But the managers got a loan of $50 million (according to our estimate) from the government itself, and bought a grossly complex second hand nationwide land-line CAD network from a bankrupt US architectural firm.
It was far in excess of our requirements. The government charged interest at the prevailing commercial rate, and management soon defaulted on the huge repayments. The government then claimed the Department was commercially unviable and had to be closed down. It’s often very difficult to run a business at a profit, but making it fail is a piece of cake. And we suddenly found that the leaders of our unions weren’t prepared to take on a Labor government in an attempt to save the Department. The coalition won the next election and finished off the job.
On the last day of business for what remained of the Department, the few of us who were left could have taken the day off or come in and done nothing. But we all arrived and worked hard throughout the day, tying up loose ends, struggling to deal with the last rush of requests from client departments and mourning in silence the passing of this part of our lives. Afterwards a few of us went out and got very drunk.
We fulfilled our role as public servants and I was very proud of my workmates on that day.
Losses
and lessons
The department employees were highly dedicated and had a strong sense of social responsibility. In Sydney immediately after the Granville railway disaster the Department’s office was almost deserted because the staff had walked out en masse and had gone to Sydney Hospital to donate blood.
The employees included highly talented people who until the 1990s had designed, documented and supervised the construction of most of the federal government buildings in the post-war period.
The closing down of the Department not only involved the loss of employment for a large group of Australian citizens, it also involved the loss of a valuable public asset.
The Department had won architectural and engineering awards over many years, and it played a key role in urban reconstruction in Darwin, after Cyclone Tracey.
Years after it was abolished three young workers died during the Rudd government’s well-intentioned but rushed and largely unsupervised thermal insulation program. These tragedies could almost certainly have been avoided with proper control by a federal construction authority like the Department, which had a national staff of electrical works supervisors.
After retrenchment, some professional employees with special qualifications readily found work in the private sector. But others who had dedicated their lives to public service experienced difficulty dedicating themselves to maximising profits for shareholders.
And many found themselves tarred with the brush of failure. The government had deemed the Department commercially non-viable, and by association its former employees were seen the same way. As any asylum seeker forcibly detained on a remote foreign island can tell you, if the government rejects you, others will do the same.
The worst-off were middle-aged employees with young children and mortgages, particularly those working in administration or professional support roles. Many joined the ranks of the unemployed. One of the first to be transferred to the “tank” became unbearably worried, moody and bad tempered. His wife walked out with the kids; he sank into a deep depression and was finally admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The Department had employed some people with minor mental disabilities for simple administrative tasks. Good workers, helpful and cooperative, they left quietly. Their outlook was particularly bleak.
And Rita disappeared. Her friends suggested she wanted to escape her obsessive, control-freak husband, and that she had always avoided the limelight of a vocal career in order to avoid him.
There were lessons to be learnt from our experience. If a government wants to abolish a department, its objective will undoubtedly be to rid the private sector of a competitor and convert a public asset into a source of private profit. The biggest lesson is that we can and must challenge any such move. It’s a matter of serving the public interest.
But another lesson is that workers are the nation’s greatest asset, and that working with others can be one of life’s richest experiences. Despite the bitterness of that period of retrenchment, there were good memories as well as bad for all of us, concerning the time we had spent together.
And for me, one of those outstanding memories was the night when Rita Jones from Plan Records lifted the spirits of her workmates in a moment of unexpected musical ecstasy, shining a brilliant light in a darkened hour.