The Faceless Bureau

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Unrequitable requirement

By attentive reader
A Consumer
3 Min read
U

We wanted to add a second director to the ASIC Registry for our company.  Having just one director means no backup in an emergency, so adding a second would reduce our company’s risk profile. The company has a bank loan secured by a mortgage on our office, and has been making the required payments for over a year.  The loan documents say that the bank must approve in writing any change to the directors of the company. So I rang the bank to find out the process. Sam at the call centre agrees that an additional director will reduce the loan’s risk.  She says I will need to go to local branch to...

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three car shuffle

By Gridlocked
A Consumer
2 Min read
t

How annoying are overland easements! And neighbours! And local planning politics! My house shares a driveway with another house.  My house is at the back, and theirs is at the front, so I have to drive past their house to park on my property. The driveway was built after  the subdivision of our two blocks by the previous owners of the other house, who were lovely people and excellent neighbours, but who sold their home late last year. To make things extra complicated, the land the driveway was built on was not originally privately owned. It was public land, which I guess belongs to the local...

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do it for your country

By Virtual Retirement Inspector
A Bureaucrat
2 Min read
d

I recently participated in a virtual public administration conference hosted from the South Pacific. I wouldn’t normally be funded to travel to an event like this, so the COVID-safe format was a real advantage for me, and I found the event very interesting. I “met” many likeminded civil servants from all around the world and, especially, the Pacific Islands, some of whom had been attending the annual conference face to face for years. One thing I noticed very quickly is that, while there was a lot of age and experience in the virtual room, the public servants from one of the participating...

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dishonest brokering

By Broker Rage
A Consumer
3 Min read
d

My wife and I just bought a new apartment and sold our old one. We sold our old home just one month after buying the new one. We used a mortgage broker who was supposed to organise everything. As I understand it, the main purpose of mortgage brokers is to help people navigate complicated processes and multiple providers to: find the best loan to meet their client’s needs make getting a loan easier and more painless by helping with paperwork and liaising with the lender provide good service, especially since all of their business comes from referrals! We had our loans set up, but when we...

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communi-que?

By Dazed and Confused
A Bureaucrat
2 Min read
c

I haven’t been working in government departments for long (recent graduate here!), but I’d like to think I’m doing my best, which is usually pretty good, to follow directions from up on high. Our new team leader has just rolled in, joining us at a time when many different pieces of work are ongoing. He’s a bit vocal, but his growl is more confusing than it is frightening. He seems nice enough, and he can be quite entertaining, but his instructions are always unnecessarily verbose and so incoherent that no one knows what to make of them or him. All his communications—and there are a lot of...

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rubbish policy

By rubbish protester
A Consumer
2 Min read
r

Get a load of this garbage: I own and run a company – a small business with about 20 staff – and we work out of a huge office building in a big city. We’ve been based here for a few years now, and we’ve always used the cleaning and rubbish collection service run by building management. My part-time Office Manager forwarded me an email from building management on Thursday, which had arrived the previous day when the Office Manager was out of the office. The email said they’d be cutting off the rubbish collection service the following week. So our final collection would be the following day...

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doctor doctor

By Patient Patient
A Consumer
3 Min read
d

I’m a Medicare user with no private health insurance, and was referred to a specialist by my doctor. The specialist sent me for a series of scans and tests. The results were not good, and this specialist referred me another specialist. The second specialist scheduled immediate surgery. At this point my total out of pocket expenses were less than $1000, between specialist consultations and scans. I considered myself lucky to live in a country with a good public health system. The surgery went well. As part of managing my recovery, the second specialist prepared a schedule of regular medical...

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a tale of two email addresses

By Your Call is Important to Us
A Bureaucrat
2 Min read
a

I work as a call-taker for a government agency and I’m fed up with the number of calls I get complaining about our website. All my colleagues feel the same way. Anyone who has worked in a support call centre like ours probably does too. Normally my job is fine, but I – in fact, all of us in the call centre – keep getting stuck on calls with people who are angry that there aren’t email addresses listed on our website to contact about their problems. Customers often don’t want to call us with their problems because, even though we do our best, there can be a long wait-time on hold and sometimes...

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upward delegation

By Director of Administrivia
A Bureaucrat
2 Min read
u

I’m fed up with being bombarded by trivial requests for authorisation that are continually thrust uphill to me. So much of my work is just signing off on miniscule decisions that really could, and should, have been authorised by one of my staff. Lots of my time and effort – which ultimately means the public’s money – gets chewed up approving small-scale requests that should never have made their way to me. No matter how many times I explain that staff should exercise their delegated authority for routine decisions, I find myself in the same position over and over again. Case in point: today I...

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three strikes and you’re out

By responsible student
A Consumer
3 Min read
t

Once I was asked to do a 25-slide presentation for a uni project. All us students were advised to follow a generic assessment policy and submit our presentations onto a plagiarism detection website. I was aiming to get this assignment done early to allow myself some time to deal with any potential issues. Excited, I came up with a creative high-quality presentation ready to be submitted before the deadline. I attempted to upload my work to the system to get it checked for plagiarism as per instructions provided by the university. The website showed the remaining time for the file to be...

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