Catriona Thoolen 🐱

Here's an interesting question or two. 1. Allowing back office government workers to work from home inarguably saves them money 2. Allowing back office government workers to work from home should - per their assertions - have lead to substantial productivity gains. here's the rationale. I for example have a $30pd parking fee, $20 in tolls, and circa $30 in fuel. That's $80pd, before considering reduced vehicle maintenance and insurance costs. Add to that coffee is cheaper at home, etc etc. I am essentially $100 pd, $500 pw, $25K pa better off WFH. So can someone please explain why public servants have been given *above CPI* pay rises (often multiples of) - when in all seriousness they should have been assigned pay cuts or pay freezes? I repeat - the savings are substantial, and employers should have shared some of this benefit. So now to the productivity issue. They'll tell you they are so much more efficient at home..... and yet .... remarkably, public service headcount has blown own, by multiples of the underlying service demand. Again, here's the rationale - it takes me 90 minutes door to door each way. Times that by 10, and I save *15 hours* a week by working from home. So I should be **inordinately** more productive right? Wrong? I am forced to wait and wait, either for executive level decisions, or operational level task completion. Now allow me to explain in one paragraph what has happened to the Australian economy: By allowing work from home, public servants have significantly more disposable income, which they spend on e-commerce, thereby boosting inflation. But there has been no commensurate increase in productivity - moreover, this has actually gone backwards, requiring EVEN MORE public servants, at the higher salaries, just to get the work done. There is no better immediate solution this country can implement other than 'all public servants back to the office'

Yet more for the Friday funnies file. This is a job opening for a power systems research engineer at CSIRO. It's about the 4th I have seen this year. So either the prior versions were promoted to 'indigenous transgender science' roles or were totally useless. As will be candidate 4. Ladies and gents - I ask you to consider "why is a research organisation hiring someone who ought sit either within AEMO, or within a utility" Power systems engineering is not a theoretical challenge. It is a well-known issue that is riven with political and corporate interference. There is no need for research in this space - just for less political ideology to constrain progress. I expect CSIRO to spend your money where real invention is warranted. Such as my aforementioned challenge on data centre water usage - that's a cooling problem needing someone with a doctorate in thermal dynamics. Sadly - this role is only being filled to load the decks with more activists. Someone to falsify statistics and write more garbage - like the CSIRO gencost report @ShackelWill @FootnotesGuy