verging_on_random

Double exposure

January 24, 2007 on 8:02 pm | In Uncategorized |

The whingers have been out in force over the last few days, all over the interruptions to their comfortable lives caused by bushfires and water shortages. Yeah these inconveniences have something to do with the worst drought since European settlement but that’s immaterial, The Authorities have screwed up again.

Exhibit 1: electricity supply to Melbourne failed just because the worst fire in memory cut the transmission lines. Proof positive that the Victorian government are a mob of slackarses.  They should have two transmission lines, just in case one fails. And a few more power stations would be a good idea too, on standby in case some of the others break down.

Exhibit 2: Sydney faces chronic water shortages, due to an unprecedented drought that nobody predicted. Doesn’t matter, the government should have built more dams 20 years ago, to hold water that no-one in those days ever thought would be needed, just to ensure that people today would be guaranteed the right to wash the 4WD whenever they damn well felt like it.
Exhibit 3: The F3 was cut by another bushfire on Sunday, meaning that some people’s travel arrangements were so disrupted they were a whole 12 hours late in getting to their destination. Once again, people are calling for the government’s blood. Why, they ask, aren’t there two freeways heading north from Sydney so that if one is cut people can just switch to the other one?

I’ll refrain from making the obvious comments that if these are the worst hardships people ever have to put up with in their lives, they’d rightly be envied by 90% of the world’s population (and by a significant number of Australians living in poverty). The point I want to make is that these complaints signify something comparatively new in Australian society … something which is also rather repellent. It’s the assumption that people have an entitlement for things to work perfectly, all the time, and if it doesn’t happen then by god, somebody must pay.

Two things about this. Number one, it’s totally unrealistic and completely divorced from the way rational people organise their own  lives. Not many of us run two cars, fridges, washing machines and so on just so we’ll be able to soldier on if one breaks down. Sensible people run one, knowing that occasionally it will stop working, giving us an excuse to use bad language and whine about the problems of getting a repairman these days.

Second observation: expecting a faultless level of performance from public infrastructure is completely incompatible with the lust for efficiency that is a hallmark of the great god privatisation. If people seriously want competition - by which they almost always mean price competition - then they have to accept compromises in quality. No sane power supplier is going to incur the huge costs of a duplicate power grid just to overcome the once-every-20-year risk of the first one going down. Or even a once-every-six months risk. It’s much more rational to accept a certain level of unreliability in the service and keep prices to the levels that customers expect.

Unfortunately this expectation of perfection can lead to very anti-social behaviour. Who hasn’t observed road rage from people subjected to trivial delays? Watch some customers in a supermarket checkout - their body language screams pure homicidal fury if they have to queue. It all creates an unpleasant atmosphere in communal spaces, marked by anger and impatience and the urge to find fault with others.

I’m glad I live in the bush, where my candles and gas lamp are ready to hand and if my car breaks down, I know the neighbours will be happy to give me a lift.