Latest Podcast: The rise and fall of the professions with Hannah Forsyth
My latest Burning Archive podcast is episode 116. Professions vs. Managers. The rise and fall of…
Day Four of 13 Days of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Governing the Drunken Commons
For 7 years between 2006 and 2013 I was directly responsible for alcohol and drug policy in Victoria (Australia). It is a contentious field, and it was a personally rewarding field. But it is a field in which many common problems of governing are revealed.
Day Three of Thirteen Days of Looking at a Bureaucrat
The third chapter of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat is the title essay, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat’. It plays with Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and seeks to open up the reader’s mind to the many unexpected, even poetic ways you can look at this plain, humble, even despised personality, the bureaucrat.
Day Two of Thirteen Days of Looking at a Bureaucrat
The second chapter of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat is Silenced Voice of the…
NEW BOOK! Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat
My new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, is now out! Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing, is both memoir and essay collection. I think it breaks new ground because bureaucrats don’t publish memoirs. It will change how you see government, politics, working life, and bureaucrats.
New article – “The parasite state of consultants”
John Menadue and the team at Pearls and Irritations has published an article of mine on the public service today and the problems of the overuse of consultants.
Come and See a Real History of War
As it happened, I had watched on the weekend the earlier Soviet film, Come and See (1985). Perhaps next Victory Day, Michael Pezzulo should write to his staff, and urge them to watch Come and See.
The poet, the bureaucrat and the émigré
During the week I have been finalising my next book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and reading some essays and poems of Marina Tvetaeva (1892-1941), the great Russian poet, collected in Art and the Light of Conscience. A strange mix, true, but that is the life of my strange mind.
Money is the root of all collapse today
‘Money/, So they say,’ sing Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon, ‘Is the root of all evil today.’ And money makes the roots of the multipolar world, the power of great states, and the grand illusions of Western dominance in the world.
Statecraft and the Indian tradition of democracy
The story of Arthshastra is similarly fit for the Burning Archive. It was composed some time between the 2rd century BC and 3rd century CE. It was known to be influential until the 12th century, but then was lost or went underground, perhaps due to the Persian, Mughal or Muslim rule over India. It was known of, but considered lost by colonial era scholars. Then in in 1905 a Tamil Brahmin from Tanjore walked into the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library with a copy of the Arthashastra in Sanskrit, written on palm leaves.