The Government and its Agencies in their infinite wisdom seem to feel that People must submit to their obnoxious surveys without hesitation. In Friday's Adelaide Advertiser there was this disturbing story:
AN 85-year-old stroke victim and his 80-year-old wife have been threatened with fines of $110 for every day they refuse to be part of an Australian Bureau of Statistics employment survey.
[HT to Peter Martin]
Yes Readers, apparently some clipboard waving goon feels quite comfortable threatening an elderly invalid couple with fines for failing to answer questions in a largely irrelevant survey. The article goes on with the officious ABS jobsworth stating:
ABS assistant director of population surveys Rod Smith told The Advertiser the Van Den Berg circumstances were still relevant to the survey because some octogenarians were still in the workforce.
Mr Smith said he would obtain more information about their circumstances and try to make the information collection less intrusive.
"The survey is one which gives us the monthly unemployment figure and it is a stocktake of people who could work," he said.
"So we go out and ask people if they are looking for work and with the ageing population the people who are past the retirement age and looking for work is growing."
Mr Smith said the questions could be answered by a family representative and he had been made more aware of the couple's medical circumstances after his letter threatening the fine.
"We are not a big-stick organisation and we don't prosecute willy nilly," he said.
No but you do seem to threaten people willy nilly, don't you Mr Smith? And I notice that there is no option to opt out of the survey all together. When exactly did the Public Service become our Masters? Did we lose a War?
And the attitude of Peter Martin, economic commentator at The Age is also noteworthy, when he entitled his post : "Meanwhile the ABS is doing its best... ...to get good statistics" and in his comments stated that: "But it is very important that the ABS gets complete co-operation, even from 80+ year olds. Otherwise the results will get even less meaningful."
For the technocratic New Elite who dominate us in our Government and in our Media - "co-operation" means unquestioning obedience to whatever mad, Utilitarian schemes they have planned for us and woe betide anyone who asks why or questions the necessity of their Great Plans and their unending Need to quantify and control all aspects of Our Lives.
Question: Readers please say to what extent you agree or disagree with the preceeding statements:
Responses: 1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neither agree nor disagree, 4=agree, 5=strongly agree.
Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.
4 comments:
FIVE! You bet I strongly agree.
These ...people (for want of a better word) have become our lords and masters.
Time for pitchforks and hemp rope, methinks.
Five also! Next we'll be hearing the thump thump thump of jackboots on the road outside! What a disgrace!
The way these things work is that the lazy little interviewer prick finds someone/anyone who lives nearby who maybe fits the profile and then annoys the hell out of them. Works the same for the Tax Dept - any business within 2 blocks of the tax office can expect to be continually annoyed with checks on their books purely because they're nearby and the pathetic little taxdweeb doesn't want to have to walk too far or it might hurt its little footsies.
Mindless box-ticking public servants, the lot of them. And has there ever been a time when 'public servant' wasn't a term of abuse?
As we all know, the ABS seems to exist for two purposes; assisting bureaucrats in formulating flawed policy based on 'damned lies and statistics' and enabling nosey old ABS data collecting women to stick their noses into other people's personal affairs. An ordinary citizen acting this way would be charged with public nuisance or being a 'common scold'.
There is only one solution to this attack on our personal freedoms; if they are not going to at least compensate us for our time in filling out endless surveys, we should ensure that the data provided is damn near unusable. Next time, I'm putting myself down as a Rastafarian lesbian preacher from Indoorpilly.
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