Quote Originally Posted by queenslandpie View Post
I can pretty much guarantee you that coal and steel would be no longer no matter who ran them unless there was a level of state subsidy that would probably be more than what is being injected to fight the virus! The Post Office should easily be self sustaining and as for the rest they are basic necessities and I cant see any problem with how they are run currently that would have bettered them with state intervention. As for the NHS you have a valid point.
I was recruited from the UK to work for what what then the PostMaster General's Department in Perth WA. So being a good government concern and being a public servant, even though on the first rung of my professional career. travel was FIRST CLASS, I was given the option to fly or sail and pay commenced on the date of embarkation. 25days later (the Suez was closed so had to go the long way round) I arrived in Fremantle to be met by the Head of the Telephone side plus my immediate boss. Everything was done in typical government fashion though I had a knack of finding loopholes and expediting things and other engineers didn't understand how I got away with it.

Then the big split and I was in Telecom Australia and my god did the ethos change. Customer was king and we had to adopt a "can do" approach rather than "this is what the regulations are". People got phones, phone lines, trenches were dug all the way North, South and East and where trenches couldn't be dug Microwave was put in. OK, some of this was going on anyway but with none of the energy that followed. We all went on management courses, we all had work projects to complete or supervise to give workers confidence in taking on new tasks. And the only hint of Union troubles I encountered (bearing in mind the news from the UK was power shortages, strikes, 3 day weeks ah ah glad I'm out of there!) were resolved before they started by including staff and Unions in any change decisions. Amazing how much support there was once "they" (really "we") gave when they were part of the ideas. Of course some of that might just be because Australia was young and more dynamic, but they had before then embraced the British Civil Service way of working. Oh - and no more First Class travel except for those at the very top.