When your streaming service is called “Fetch” and you drop the ball during the World Cup, there’s probably only one appropriate response by management. Put the CEO’s basket in the back of the car, for the trip to the vet, and then chuck the basket out the window on the way back. Fetch, fetch, one last time.
Most likely no one will suffer for it, a kludge that is simultaneously minor and major; no tragedy, it is nevertheless a basic failure in an arrangement that millions were relying on — and an arrangement of the sort once ruled out precisely because of the risk of that failure. Sport and major events were assigned to public broadcasters, because they were the only ones with the capacity to run multiple fail-safe broadcast systems. The anti-siphoning laws in part recognised the same.
Now, with the purported benefits of competition, maybe Arrivederci Phone Home Phone Cards will get the footy, and run it on Telecom Niue spare capacity. Except it won’t of course. The fiction of privatised competition was simply so diverse functions could be handed over to cartelised oligopolies. When they screw up, there is no disabling penalty; the PM rings up — as does the generalissimo in any banana republic to tell the radio station to keep playing his favourite song. What was purported to be a rule-governed small government framework becomes one where state action is ad-hoc and executive, to keep things going.
You can see this everywhere, in Australia and the world. Look at the train and light-rail debacle in Sydney. Not once but twice, a failure of integration — one track system not matching another, ordered rolling stock not matching the track — has occurred. Governments should resign for billion-dollar screw-ups like this, ministers resign. Not one, five, but 10, 15 senior public servants should be sacked. Nothing like that will happen. The only thing that will roll on is the system.
In the UK, rail again: the prime East Coast (London-Edinburgh) line has now failed under private management for a third time. It was run, competently and well, as a standalone public corporation for years after the last collapse. Then the Cameron government handed it, and a pile of subsidies and tax breaks to Virgin Rail. Now after years of more subsidies, they’ve handed it back.
Simultaneously, Carillion, the UK’s second-largest construction form, and the largest contractor to government, went into liquidation at the start of the year, a billion pounds in debt, half of it owed to 30,000 subcontractors working on major hospitals, roads, the HS2 rail system — and the corporation’s services arm, which runs schools and prisons. The firm was Ponzi-ing — underbidding on major contracts, and using new contracts to back pay on underbid old ones.
The UK government kept giving them contracts because it was Ponzi-ing too, as all western governments are: desperate to plug the hole in demand with anything that hums, and unfussed about the ever-higher proportions of it raked off to dividends, ever lower amounts going to wages. For the most part they know, or hope, that people won’t notice that in major projects. Cost blow out? Who can count in billions, really? Sudden collapse of progress? Who knows why things stop and start?
That hits the buffers when this process — the slow collapse of the decades-long Ponzi of post-Keynesian capitalism — starts to hit things like being able to watch the footy at the pub. When the front of the house is falling off, as the back verandah is collapsing, people start to notice, and they’re able to put it together in some sort of systemic explanation. The world game, indeed.
Guy, the failure of rolling stock to match the track (or rather the platforms on the Blue Mountains Line) was not a stuff-up nor was it unanticipated. The platforms are old and need to be upgraded – that upgrade is going ahead. It would make no sense for new train purchases to be constrained in perpetuity by the design of a one-hundred year old train line and its stations.
Yeah, those damned tunnels, which have suited containers & coal trains for decades, needed renewing so very far sighted of the NSW “government” to purchase too wide carriages with seats that are fixed so half the passengers are always facing the rear. Very clever.
It certainly does make sense to be constrained if those rails and stations are what you have and it’s going to cost a fortune that you needn’t have spent to change them for no particular benefit. I could buy trousers to fit my thick legs, which is a constraint, or have massive surgery to fit my legs to different trousers.
Well put GR. “Game of Mates” continues. Health, aged care, education and training, Land Titles Office and on and on. The bloody ALP are complicit too. It needs to get a lot worse before enough people realise they are being rogered up the back passage with a large root vegetable; apologies to Ben Elton.
Yeah, the collapse of large scale, essential infrastructure seems close indeed.
The NBN, what a beauty we have there. Outsourced IT services that fail to work leaving tens of thousands of person-hours lost, per day, in one large company. NBN rubbish service, meaning whole industries can’t get started. Thanks Malcolm.
The trains were a beauty, among others, the line that can only carry single-decker trains because making bigger tunnels would have cost more, so that line can’t sync up with the rest of the circuit and has to involve change of trains scenarios. All these we had a transport Minister who has since been relegated to, ummm, Premier! Well done Gladys.
But in her defence she was given a turd sandwich – get the line up and running and bring it in on budget, which made sensible decision making impossible (perhaps the budget was wrong, but the accountants never cop the fall-out). Or the light rail which had a schedule imposed on it which was simply to have it open during the next election period. Nothing about feasibility, possibility, just political timetables. We have both paid over the odds to get it done to a political schedule, and it won’t be done by then, lose both ways.
But as an overall statement on how so many essential services which were supposedly run so poorly in the public sector, but now can’t be run by the private sector, it’s a pretty good example.
Hold on, plenty more to come.
Perhaps a hugely popular item that hundreds of thousands of people want to watch simultaneously would be better suited to a broadcast medium. Hmm?
Indeed, this. I’m constantly amazed that a unicast communication technology is seen as appropriate for these events when we have established broadcast technologies far better suited.
Of course, there’s no pay-per-view model available for broadcast…
There’s little anyone can add to this except – yes, exactly. Privatization is an international debacle. It’s just that we in Australia seem particularly adept at adopting the stupidest and least justified. All done so governments can be seen as fiscally responsible (money out of thin air, in the short term) without doing any work, whilst appeasing their mates and ensuring financial support (for the party, not the people) at the same time. It’s gotta be stop – more than that, it’s gotta be reversed.