Ve have Vays of Making You Talk

Dear Readers,

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.