I’m just back from appearing before yet another Senate inquiry into the sale of Telstra. I’ve been doing this for so many years, I’ve outlasted all the original members of the Committee, and most of the government’s policy position (in 1996, for example, they were arguing strenuously that partial privatisation was a good idea). I’ll post my submission soon, but this Evatt piece gives you a summary of my position.
I’ve also outlasted Communications Minister Richard Alston, described in this political obituary by Tex as “One of the worst ministers of his generation”. What was even more striking than Alston’s incompetence was the arrogance that went with it. I think Alston would be aptly memorialised by a scale measuring the ratio of arrogance to the amount one has to be arrogant about. Richard himself would set the upper bound of 10.
Assuming a log scale, I’d give Costello a 6 on the Alston scale, Keating a 5 and Whitlam a 4. They’re about equally arrogant, but Keating has 10 times as much to be arrogant about than Costello, and similarly for Whitlam v Keating (common sense is another matter).
John Quiggin 
Alston was a pig and a bully alright.
He seemed to be a sucker for every fad and fallacy trotted out be new eCONomy boosters.
And he ingnored the economists conventional wisdom when ever it suited his political purposes.
This led to industrial inefficiency and the waste of resources, with the short-changing of tax payers on Telstra I sales and the duplicated cable TV network.
Aslton shortcomings were purportedly in the failure to privatise telcoms, digitise TV and terrorise the ABC. If that would have represented success, then about the best one can say for him is what Milton Friedman said about government service in general:
Can we also give Howard a 4? Would his being one tenth as arrogant as Keating but with one-hundredth as much to be arrogant about? Does that work?
Two things come to mind:-
– Costello’s particular strength/skill comes from his barrister experience; he can take a brief. This doesn’t help if he listens to the wrong people, or if shrouded in groupthink, but consider what it does to the measure. What “he” is being arrogant about is not a product of himself alone but is a sort of institutional artefact. What difference, if any, does this make to the relevance of the measure, either to Costello-the-man or to Costello-the-minister?
– To calibrate the scale (and with just a hint of malice), where would, say, Professor John Quiggin appear on this scale? (Let’s be fair and ask the same question of “Henry Thornton” too).
By the bye, JS’s end paragraph reminds me of something that was said of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From memory, it was described as “tyranny redeemed by inefficiency”. (A variation on Czarist Russia’s “absolutism tempered by assassination”, perhaps?)