No doubt you've heard the saying "context is everything". It just might be true.
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The lack of context around so much political reporting shuts most people out of any really meaningful participation in political debate.
We are forced to watch or listen to a slanging match of increasingly meaningless phrases.
We are simply not given the information that will allow us decent participation.
If we had more of it, we might be able to have genuine political participation.
The so-called common man (and woman) could take up the opportunity democracy is designed to give them.
It's meant to be a participatory exercise, not a boxing match we just watch.
With user-friendly information at hand, we could share our views and become true participants in the democratic process.
That would be a seismic shift in our system.
Democracy means so much more than simply casting a vote to choose your member of Parliament.
But if citizens are denied the information, how can they take up the role?
If a government announces a new program costing hundreds of millions of dollars, that in itself doesn't mean much.
If that department spends billions each month it might be no big deal.
But it will get a headline because, out of context, on its own, hundreds of millions of dollars seems newsworthy.
If it's a smaller portfolio, hundreds of millions would be a very big deal. Which portfolios are the biggest spenders says something about us and our priorities as a nation.
Given the chance, people may well have a view on some of those big-picture decisions.
Do we think we should spend well over double on welfare payments than we do on health?
If we wanted to change that proportion, how would we go about it?
Having that discussion is a very different thing from simply being told there's a new spending initiative in one area.
We could change those proportions if we wanted to.
But to have a debate that was meaningful, on shifting the proportions, we would need to understand in layman's terms how big chunks of each portfolio spending are allocated.
Think of them as LEGO pieces.
Parliament gets to shift them around, make some smaller, some larger. There's not only no reason why citizens shouldn't have an opinion, there's in fact every reason why they should. But we have to give them the information to form a view.
At the moment, we don't have a chance of participating in that debate.
All we get told is XYZ of new money is being spent on this initiative or that. To really participate, we'd need useful, user-friendly information on what is now being spent in each area.
User-friendly plain English is hard to find these days.
Some people stupidly think that the use of longer or industry-specific words coupled with complicated diagrams shows how smart they are. In fact, it shows the opposite.
We could go further than just understanding the big-picture distribution of spending. Within portfolios, we might like to understand and have a view on how in broad general terms money is spent?
Take defence as an example. How much is allocated to paying trained service personnel compared to back office bureaucratic support? We need both.
What proportion do we spend on people compared to equipment? With equipment purchases, how much, over its life, goes on the actual equipment and how much goes on maintenance thereof?
With the total cost of say a submarine, how much did the boat itself cost and how much went in design and consultancies and in public service time trying to manage and monitor the whole thing?
If this information and more like it were a part of standard media coverage, we as citizens would have a much better chance of understanding what was being done and of having a view about it. That's what citizens are entitled to.
With the almost unspeakably large amounts spent by governments, we should be focusing not just on a decision to spend money on this initiative or that.
That's just the start of government's work.
Spending effectively is important. Spending ineffectively is like chucking money in the gutter.
We get all excited about corruption and seem to imagine it will be found in ministers' offices.
Given the necessary (and incidentally largely effective) role of the public service, surely it's there rather than ministers' offices that corruption is more likely to be found. They run the tenders, oversee the contract reporting and are generally much much closer to the pots of gold.
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But imagining corruption is rife in the public service is just stupid. The more likely candidate to waste our money is ineffective spending.
The public service does not have an easy job.
If we understood just how hard it is we might start to focus on the importance of their work rather than on spending announcements by ministers.
Just imagine rolling out a new program across Australia. To start the thought process, imagine contracting out to get your own roof painted. It can be problematic.
Do you insist on agreeing on the details of what preparation work is to be done, how many undercoats ... and so the list goes on.
Do you check daily on what the painter is doing? How do you cope when he says he's got to go to another job and can't finish on time?
Now take on that job for hundreds and hundreds of houses around Australia that are in various conditions and locations varying from inner city to extraordinarily remote. Not easy.
Just the communication issues between people on the ground around Australia and those in Canberra would be an issue.
Then there's the job of contracting out the work to be done. Are contracts to be let nationally, across states, or can regional and local operators get a look in? Will the criteria require an applicant to have past experience?
That would cut out new operators, limit competition and be a complete windfall for the current providers.
It might also make it hard to deliver the service in rural and remote areas?
Monitoring delivery is a nightmare. Are the nurses, carers or whoever, actually going to the clients when they are meant to, delivering every service they are being paid for?
How does a departmental head have a chance of knowing if "Mary Smith" who is entitled to four shower assists a week is actually getting four rather than three?
There have been too many absolutely tragic cases of people in dire need of our help not getting it.
It's not a lack of will. It's the sheer magnitude of monitoring such huge programs.
When something does go belly up, everyone asks, "Why wasn't there a checking process?".
And that comes back to how much you want to spend on monitoring implementation of the service as opposed to the actual service itself.
Governments and ministers understandably like to focus on spending announcements. It's a small part of their job.
We need to focus much more on what shape we want our total spending to take and even more so on how to help the public service spend our money effectively.
Universities that specialise in public administration would be doing us all a favour.
- Amanda Vanstone is a former senator for South Australia, a former Howard government minister, and a former ambassador to Italy. She writes fortnightly for ACM.
