The obvious example to explain this is the National Children's Hospital, where contractors under priced a project and the State had to keep throwing money at it for fear of looking even more stupid and calling a halt to the project. The same think has happened over and over again all over the world for the last 100 years; fanfares and back slapping (of themselves) by politicians greet the start of X project which will cost Y amount of money and be completed in Z amount of time. Sometimes it actually happens as planned but that's usually down to luck rather than design. More often than not the project runs over budget and takes longer than expected to deliver.
Bad and all as it is when this happens with capital projects it is far worse when it happens with current projects as those costs recurs year after year
forever.
So, should be as voters be looking at governments and expecting them to highlight their failures before we reelect them? Should a list of failures and what they have learned from them, how they fixed them and what they have done to prevent them from reoccurring be seen by us as a good thing, a requirement before we vote for them again?
The Charity industry is beset by this problem; they can't admit they got it wrong and wasted the money that they received in donations so they don't share best practice with each other and so are doomed to repeat each others mistakes over and over again.
I think a reasonable question to ask a government is what they have learned in the last few years and because of that how have they collectively got better at their job.
In most businesses the management asks themselves, at least on an annual basis, what they have learned over the last year, what they did wrong, what they changed that made things better and what they changed that made things worse and needs to be changed in the future. Do governments do this? Do Government departments?
Bad and all as it is when this happens with capital projects it is far worse when it happens with current projects as those costs recurs year after year
forever.
So, should be as voters be looking at governments and expecting them to highlight their failures before we reelect them? Should a list of failures and what they have learned from them, how they fixed them and what they have done to prevent them from reoccurring be seen by us as a good thing, a requirement before we vote for them again?
The Charity industry is beset by this problem; they can't admit they got it wrong and wasted the money that they received in donations so they don't share best practice with each other and so are doomed to repeat each others mistakes over and over again.
I think a reasonable question to ask a government is what they have learned in the last few years and because of that how have they collectively got better at their job.
In most businesses the management asks themselves, at least on an annual basis, what they have learned over the last year, what they did wrong, what they changed that made things better and what they changed that made things worse and needs to be changed in the future. Do governments do this? Do Government departments?