Remember how Senate estimates revealed the Morrison government had paid consultants almost $200,000 of taxpayer money to teach them how to empathise with drought-affected communities?
The Department of Infrastructure’s Inland Rail project hired the firm FutureEye to smooth over relations with landowners in northern Victoria, central New South Wales, and southern Queensland, where its controversial rail line will be built.
Well, it turns out that one of FutureEye’s advisers is former Australian Bankers’ Association CEO, Steven Münchenberg — the man best known for telling us we didn’t need a royal commission into the banks.
Other FutureEye team members include the former senior policy adviser to Water Resources Minister (and known climate-change sceptic) David Littleproud, and Rio Tinto’s former manager of environmental policy.
The joke was originally about sincerity, but I think it still works – if you can fake empathy you have it made.
I really feel for them.
There seems to be no end to the queue of sluts for money, notice, position, networking, insider only networks, pose. Conservatives have all that as policy, the self entrenched, drenched policy of self only.
Oh! so true paradise..
All very nice Justine but a lot more useful would be a primer of how to land some of these gigs – and most importantly how to charge.
Any old buzz word abstract term will do. Empathy is good. Nice and current with a definition very hard to pin down. And if you run the course and people complain they don’t get it – well they’re just not empathising are they.
Oh! so true paradise..