TRY, just try, to come up with an interpretation of last week’s attempt to get rid of the Treasury Minister that doesn’t end with him coming out of it ahead on points.
TRY, just try, to come up with an interpretation of last week’s attempt to get rid of the Treasury Minister that doesn’t end with him coming out of it ahead on points.

Go ahead, take a minute. I’ll wait here.

Doesn’t work, does it? If the end result of the vote against Senator Philip Ozouf staying in the job is 37 against and four in favour, then he’s done pretty well out of it – better, in fact, than the 38-13 margin that got him the job in the first place back in December 2008.

You might say that it was a bad day in the office for Deputy Geoff Southern – the unlucky 13 in the 2008 vote, and the still less lucky four in the 2011 version.

You might even say that an effective margin of almost ten-to-one in favour of the Treasury Minister left him better placed, and more secure, than when he started the week.

And then you might ask yourself: self, surely the Deputy must have known? I mean, ten-to-one is a pretty serious margin…

And then you’d say: good question, self, you’ve really nailed that.

Anyways, the question – did he know it was going to fail? There’s no answer to this that reflects well on Deputy Southern, either. If he did, it was a pointless waste of time, an act of doomed and meaningless grandstanding. If he didn’t, then, well, that’s a worrying lack of judgment right there.

It’s not as if Deputy Southern is alone in this. There are backbencher proposals, questions and speeches that go absolutely nowhere, and do nothing to help anyone, at every single States sitting. It’s almost as if the entire strategy of some Members is to make as much noise as possible, as often as possible, in the hope that someone will remember their names come election time.

All that happens with no impact on actual results, of course – there are more than a few Members who might struggle to point to actual, tangible achievements when they hit the hustings trail in September, but hey, as long as you can give it a bit of ‘covert political party blah blah blah the establishment blah blah blah what about democracy blah blah blah’ you’re at least doing something, which can so easily be confused with achieving something…

Fortunately, last week also provided at least one backbencher who doesn’t seem the least bit confused about doing or achieving. In fact, the sitting had something that most lack – a backbencher proposition that worked.

Senator Francis Le Gresley hasn’t been in the States long, but he’s got a pretty good judgment on what’s going to get somewhere and what isn’t.

Last week’s amendment to extend the winter fuel payment to over-65s who qualify for the GST bonus – effectively those who fall into the middle ground between the tax and benefit thresholds – was a good example of a well-placed and well-directed backbencher proposition, one in which he managed to put the Council of Ministers on the losing side.

It showed that the art of the backbencher is not entirely lost, and that from time to time, the States can look past the rhetoric, the name-calling and the navel-gazing and actually get something done.

There’s been a strange response to the news of States chief executive Bill Ogley’s departure.

There have been reports of champagne corks popping here and there – sometimes in the strangest of places – but it seems a little off to me. There are some people who don’t like his salary, and there are some who don’t like the idea of an English bloke doing his job – all of which is fair enough, if only to a given value of ‘fair enough’.

But they might be better off putting the champagne back on ice – whoever replaces Mr Ogley is going to be on the same cash, is extremely unlikely to come from here, and is going to be doing the same job, with the same resources (minus whatever the chief executive is getting as a payout).

Having only met Mr Ogley a couple of times, I find it pretty hard to imagine that anyone can have taken against him personally – despite the fairly widely put about claim that he’s a bit of a control freak.

In my limited dealings with him, he came across as knowledgeable and serious about his job, and with a far more enlightened attitude about the public’s right to know about what’s going on within the States than some departmental chief officers.

And in any case, isn’t he in exactly the right job for a control freak to have?