If you want to know what is going wrong in Victoria, all you need do is look at a job being advertised on Seek by the state’s Department of Justice and Community Safety. The department wishes to hire a “director, inclusion and intersectionality”, for which it is offering a generous salary of $192,800-$249,700 plus superannuation.
According to the ad, the incumbent “will be responsible for providing authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality to justice ministers, DJCS executives and other senior stakeholders”.
Furthermore, they “will be able to demonstrate an extensive knowledge of inclusion, intersectionality and society and understanding of historical and contemporary issues”.
This ad epitomises everything that is wrong with the Victorian government. In a single job description, it explains the reason the government is incapable of running a quarantine program or looking after the elderly. Instead of doing what it should be doing, which is governing, it is putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.
We are now watching as Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, fails the Australian public. This is because they have put identity politics, and the concept of diversity and inclusion, before the health of the people, with deadly consequences.
This has come to light in the past few days with revelations that the DHHS farmed out its responsibilities to the DJPR by putting it in charge of the hotel quarantine program. As revealed in The Age newspaper, the DJPR and its international trade agency, Global Victoria, were responsible for engaging private security firms for hotel quarantine. The reason for selecting Unified Security, an indigenous-owned security company that was not on the government’s preferred panel of security suppliers, was supposedly driven by an attempt to provide jobs under “social inclusion” policies.
The bureaucratic elite in Victoria clearly did not see a problem in selecting a company for hotel quarantine based on where it ranked on the intersectionality pyramid. This should have been a strict police or military operation.
According to the DJPR’s secretary, who states in the department’s Aboriginal Recruitment and Career Strategy 2020-23, “diversity in the workplace is not just a nice thing to have” . . . It is “the foundation of good business principles and will ensure the department is best placed to deliver on its purpose”.
