In a telling passage he contended that:
Australian appetites have merely been in a general way larger and coarser than the
average, and much more concentratedly political. It is on the supply, rather than
the demand, side that Australia has really scored: in particular by the construction
in [the twentieth century] of a national government machine, which, thoroughly
professional at the core, is nevertheless neither invidiously recruited, nor authori-
tarian in outlook, but even able, in an odd way, to draw nourishment from its
envelope of representative democracy. (Davies 1958, p. 3)Davies has by no means been the only scholar to detect these tendencies in
Australian society. The historian, John Hirst, said a decade ago, that, when he
addresses new students from abroad about Australian society, there is one
thing he tells them that they should keep secret from Australians whom
they meet:
I tell them that Australians are a very obedient people. I advise them to keep this
secret because Australians imagine themselves to be the opposite of obedient. They
think of themselves as anti-authority. They love a larrikin. Their most revered
national hero is a criminal outlaw, the bushranger Ned Kelly. Their unofficial
national anthem honours an unemployed vagrant who commits suicide rather
than be taken by the police troopers for stealing a sheep. (Hirst 2004, p. 113)The appeal of bureaucracy to government (elected and career officials alike)
may be found in a range of properties, summed up by Max Weber as‘Preci-
sion, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion,
unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal
costs...’(Weber 1948, p. 214).
There are two other properties of bureaucracy of considerable significance
for this chapter: bureaucracy is inextricably associated with uniformity and
standardization.
But before passing on from Weber, there is another passage of direct
relevance:
Bureaucratic organization has usually come into power on the basis ofa levelling of
economic and social differences. This levelling has been at least relative, and has
concerned the significance of social and economic differences for the assumption
of administrative functions.
Bureaucracy inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy in contrast to the
democratic self-government of small homogenous units.
This results from the characteristic principle of bureaucracy: the abstract regu-
larity of the execution of authority, which is a result of the demand for‘equality
before the law’in the personal and functional sense—hence, of the horror of
‘privilege’, and the principled rejection of doing business‘from case to case’.
(Weber 1948, p. 224; emphasis added)Australia’s‘Talent for Bureaucracy’