Our politicians seem to pursue outsourcing and economic rationalisation as if these ideals represent the be all and end all of good governance, writes SA Jones.

The news that the election has been called has given me a curious feeling that I've struggled to identify.

It's too numb for despair and too sad for apathy.

Let's call it 'sigh-full' - an emotion best expressed by a sigh.

I have a dim memory of entering an election booth, taking my pencil in hand and definitively marking '1' in a box. The object of my decisiveness was Paul Keating. I often disagreed with him, and felt he lacked humility. But I never doubted the keenness of his intellect or his statesmanship.

I'm nostalgic for a time when I did otherwise than work backwards from the most to the least baleful option on the ballot box.

Is this what democracy is supposed to be? A contest between gag reflexes?

All of which has started me thinking about what it would take to go out on polling day without throwing up a little bit in my mouth.

You know what I'd love to see? A serious discussion about what government is and should be. We've seen a lot of outsourcing of functions that were once considered government's 'core business'. Aspects of 'public' transport, justice, immigration and welfare are now outsourced to the private sector because it represents better 'value for money'. This has become a truth by dint of repetition, but it's surprisingly resistant to proof.

Can we talk about what we're really buying when we outsource prison management to the private sector? I'm happy to be corrected on this point, but what possible motivation would a private prison have to invest in rehabilitation? Private enterprises are there to make profit. It's their raison d'être, the source of their much vaunted efficiency over the public sector. Wouldn't their business model encourage, indeed demand, recidivism?

And if this logic is sound, where are the 'savings' we the public are promised?

Offshore processing of asylum seekers is another head-scratcher. Why would a private enterprise run a well-ordered, well-staffed detention centre when government sensitivity to any crisis (read: hunger-strike/riot/break-out) will generate more pieces of silver for them to 'fix it'. Until the next time.

The public has every right to demand value from its public administrators, but I suspect that too often the 'value for money' mantra is a Trojan horse for something else: denial of accountability.

We talk about the obfuscation of responsibility between Metro and the government or Serco and the government as if this is an unfortunate by-product of the outsourcing model. I call bullshit on this. The obfuscation is the point. Handballing between governments and service providers means getting at the guts of responsibility for any issue is mightily difficult (I've been trying to get some performance data out of a public transport provider for months. It is sapping my will to live).

The buck doesn't stop anywhere. It just rolls between in-trays and media releases with the occasional foray into freedom of information processes.

I'm not suggesting that the public sector has nothing to learn from the private sector or that the private sector cannot meaningfully contribute to government. But we need to think very carefully about where the mantra of 'private sector efficiency' is taking us when a customs department (admittedly not in this country) has a serious discussion about whether drug smugglers should be considered 'customers' (yes really).

I've spent a good deal of my working life analysing regulation impact statements, the lofty sounding documents that spell out how a law will impact on the people governed by it. Perhaps it's my training as a historian but I remain troubled by the idea that something as indefinable and unique as a life can be reduced to a metric. (Its $3.5 million if you want to know).

And if everything must be quantified so we can measure it against its costs and thereby determine its value, how do we shoehorn concepts like well-being, peace of mind, security and amenity into numbers? This isn't to say that economics is not important. It manifestly is. But it is not the full story and in pretending that it is we elide or bastardise the things that get left out. Perhaps we could learn something from Bhutan and its survey of 'gross national happiness' as a key indicator of performance.

To give economics its due, it has at least recognised that regulatory benefits from significant reform are realised over a longer-term than an electoral cycle. Benefits from legal reform are often measured over 20- and even 30-year cycles through the concept of 'net present value'.

Perhaps it is we as voters that have failed to keep up. We let governments get away with strategic plans that fit neatly into a three- or four-year electoral cycle despite the fact that the truly meaningful 'nation building' infrastructure projects take 10 years or longer to be delivered. What politician wants to leave the ribbon cutting to the chance that the opposition may be in power when the goodies are harvested?

I wonder if we, as voters, are capable of the political memory required to reward foresight. Do we have the imagination to lobby for the bipartisanship that could deliver 'nation-building'?

Or is it true that people get the government they deserve?

SA Jones is a writer and recognised expert in regulatory compliance. View her full profile here.

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