My day job is as a policy public servant in the state government of Victoria, in the south-eastern corner of Australia. Despite the discouragement to public servants to speak their mind openly in public words, I have written a number of reflections and short essays on the topic of governing. In this blog I have moved from posting these thoughts on a previous pseudonymous blog, to writing in my own name. Publish or be damned?

I have posted two conference papers I have given over the years on issues I have dealt with at work:

• Why is alcohol policy difficult?, and
• From Flashbacks to Testimony, on the approach to emotions and trauma in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

These essays include:

• Free speech and the public service
• My series: 13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat.  You can find all mini-essays, prompted by Wallace Stevens poem by clicking on the governing, bureaucracy or politics tags.
• Republics in distress
• Democracy’s discontents
• Myths of power: merchant, soldier, sage…?
• A song of sorries
• Behaviour anecdotes teams
• The return of the venal office holder and tax farmer
• Political order and political decay in Australia
• Millennial predictions: big states will continue to fragment
• An interlude on disaffection and living in truth
• Collapsing new buildings of government
• Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies
• The end of history revisited
• Cultural decay and political institutions
• A multi-polar world
• The return of sacred violence
• On tyranny or terror
• The unravelling of empires
• Political emotions
• Donald Trump and America’s wounded pride
• “Citizenship is a spiritual experience”
• The tragedy of the modern university
• On the renunciation of the political world
• Do we repair our republics with big ideas or ordinary virtues?

I believe in what I call the ordinary virtues of governing well. It is a kind of philosophy of my second vocation. Like Confucius and Machiavelli, I preach the virtues of this tradition, despite the difficulties I encounter when I try to enact these virtues in the institutions of our time.