At 20:05 +1100 4/11/16, Karl Schaffarczyk wrote: >I recall there used to be a DAS (Dept of Administrative Services) provided >Internet services area which was dealing with many of these issues in the >late 90s and early 00s. Does anyone recall why this approach was disbanded?
The government-of-the-day had been steadily selling off saleable segments of DAS (some of them with justification). So DAS was already a bit smaller than it had been - and it was always a bit of a throw-together of miscellania anyway. Very bland descriptions are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Administrative_Services_(1987%E2%80%9393) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Administrative_Services_(1994%E2%80%9397) A government parliamentarian (I think he may have been a junior Minister) was caught out breaking the rules on gifts received, or declarations of pecuniary interests, or some such rule that the Parliament had been embarrassed into making, on account of the number of MPs and Senators who weren't even *subtle* about taking advantage of what they saw (see?) as privileges, even as entitlements. (Now we'd say 'leaners not lifters'). The relevant DAS senior executive answered a question that he was bound to answer, the way that he was bound to answer it. The government of the day didn't like the answer. The Minister, David Jull, "[had to resign] from the ministry following accusations that he had failed to prevent other MPs from abusing their parliamentary allowances": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jull It looks like it was September 1997 - early in the days of little Johnnie. So the government closed the Department and sacked basically every employee, despite very few of them having been in the Branch that ruled on such matters. I have some memories of the events, because: (a) I'd done quite a bit of work for Purchasing Australia in the preceding few years, and it disappeared in a puff of smoke (b) a mate of mine, an Exec Officer at the time, had to take the Admin Order to Government House to get it signed, disestablishing (a thousand?) jobs, including his own. (Admin Orders, the instrument that creates, renames and disestablishes agencies, were rarely signed at the time, and were usually batched up and signed once or twice p.a. when someone remembered to get it done I can vouch for that, because a few years later I investigated what the authority was for identities of government agencies). In short, classic 'shoot the messenger' stuff. And Parliament's gone downhill since then. Sorry, but you asked, and it's Friday (:-)} -- Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:[email protected] http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
