deryans

Clan Mac,

I am so sorry to hear that about your son, that is one of my fears about my children, I'm as tough as old boots, but even I found adelaide hard, read on and maybe you can explain to your son that it's not him, it's adelaide. I hope that my story below can somehow encourage him to stay tenacious and that everyone has problems here, not just him.

3 years ago, I left a very well paid job in HK with a just fab airline, to come back to a faux job in adelaide that went belly up, in a few months took me 6 months to land a role in the justice system (previously I ran a program in NSW so I had form ) In adelaide I ran and facilitated a number of digital evidence trials (i.e. criminal trials in the district jurisdiction using digital evidence - not paper) liaison across Police, DPP , Judiciary and defence counsel, (no sign of public servants in all this, far far far too risky for them to appear at something so radical, they all hid) I worked with a fantastic number of outstanding judicial officers in adelaide ( yes I know that some are a bit off, but the ones I met were outstanding operators) , developed a strong reputation for integrity and playing with a straight bat , I am compassionate and fair, I believe in training and nurturing young people to get the most out of them and I'm certainly not afraid to take it on the chin if I or my team make a mistake. This is actually what counts. I speak my mind and I stand by what I say and do because if you trust yourself and play an honest game it will pay off (except perhaps in adelaide)

I resigned from my job at courts after two years because lack of movement & understanding (they actually have no idea, but that's not their fault, they've never been trained, imagine trying to explain how an aircraft works to remote tribe who have never seen one, you get the idea) and organisation in the administration area was depressing me and underutilising and diluting my skills (I was lowering my game to meet the same level he public servants I worked with , that's the courts admin authority and the attorney generals ), I simply cannot drop my game and forfeit over 20 years of experience to be led by a fool, it is just not in my makeup, I ran a program of work in NSW attorney generals and was coached and mentored by the top judicial officers in the state, I met and worked with the then inspirational chief justice who was both at once, sharp ad a tack and wonderful delight and fun to work with, I similarly performed a role (underpaid and referred to as a "analyst" at courts SA) and knocked their socks off (yes I was good), the public servants could not get rid of me because by then I had a good reputation and was referred to as impressive by certain senior officers in both the Police and Judiciary but I have high standards and expectations for my self and my family, so I kicked it it to touch after two years and left.

I could have stayed, diminished myself and played the I have friends game (trust me , I do have friends), but I could just not respect the public servants I worked with, the are clowns to a man, myopic, lazy, arrogant, deceitful, untrustworthy and dishonest. These are not people I respect nor do I seek their company socially or professionally, nor do I wish nor suffer my children to become friends with their children as in general, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

By the time I resigned (to the relief of the public servants who hilariously just did not know what to do with me, no skills there to deal with it lol ) ,I was earning over 140K a year and doing about 4 hours work a week which is about the same amount of hours a director at the DPC, or AG does for their 250-300K pay packet.

That’s where your tax payers money is going, In faith I could not stand it as I felt I was underpaid!

Yes, rush hour in the tube this morning was absolute hell, god what have I left myself in for !!

We're all in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars.

 

I'll take the gutters and stars over London any day.

If by that you mean that we all have goals to better ourselves and the lot of our children, I agree with you.

But one question ? If I have goals and I want to better my position, why would I stay in a place that offers relatively few and discard the opportunity to move to a place that has more ?

i'll throw one right back at you " when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" .....

we are 1/2 way through raising our family, a 13, 11 and 7 year old, and I believe that they will have better , fairer and more opportunities elsewhere, i.e. London.

The work available for me professionally personally(without joining the boys club and compromising my integrity - and unfortunately for me, that seems to be my personality type) is either non existent or underemployed or so far underpaid for what I do , I may as well stack shelves, which I'm a bit young for ?

I know plenty overseas adelaide people who won't or can't come back to the place, because they are expected to drop the two decades experience and start again at a much lower level and report to a clown who got the job through nepotism . This simply an efficient economic model, does not make ?.

It's all moot, if you can't work, your options decrease and you can't live and you can kiss any hopes you had for your children goodbye. I am certainly not going to place my childrens' future in the hands of a bunch of nepotistic under performers who are both at once incompetent and incapable of driving the place forward.

Snifter, you mention "safety net" of the job, well, the general job market in Adelaide is quite thin, if I was a betting man (and guess what I'm always looking at options) the job market would make me very nervous, excluding specialisations in the engineering and defence industries, the Landry report addresses the lack of thickness in the job market as a distinct attribute which makes people like me a little nervous.

Nice post LC, well put.

I wished so much for our family and indeed adelaide that ad-dull-ade would become something better, but in the end cumulative sloth, nepotism, secretive mates club and a risk adverse nature brought about by a very thin job market makes people nervous, so there will be no great departure, no great projects and no new vision. I assessed this and chose to move on.

Often, Instead, small quick wins (which often hide a multitude of sins) of myopic vision will be preferred over a lasting strategy, everything seems temporary in adelaide, TDU, clipsal, festivals here and there, there seems to be a disengagement pre-requisite first, and this is a death sentence for the state.

I worked in Justice, I saw first hand what the deconstruction of the social and economic framework does to that segment of society that we call "frequent flyers" at magistrates and district courts, you speak of ICE, it's real and it's overwhelming, it's incredibly cheap to produce and it is readily available to bored youth, youth who will live in those ready made suburbs along the southern expressway with nothing to do and no jobs, a symmetry of the norther suburbs if you like, I can't see that the vision of adelaide was that well planned if this is the case ?

The landry report was in 2003, surely it can't take that long to do something..........

No no, not at all, you misunderstood, I'm certainly not equating capabilities on the basis of age, most of my immediate contemporaries are in their 50's and I'm mid 40's but if I were to be more to the point, I would have good reason to question the numerous executive directorship posts that festoon various government departments , and I'll start with 0, The attorney generals department, 1. Department of Education, 2. Dept of Infrastructure, 3. Department of Premier and cabinet, Office of state records etc etc.

looks like a rort........ and the taxpayer is paying for this poor leadership.........shame shame shame

No apologies, Can't help it if you find it insulting, my role is often to play with a straight bat as my stakeholders deserve it, since you work for a Uni, I was a mentor for the Uni SA masters program at one certain employer in the city and all the good students left as they were overseas cash cows , one local got a job with E&Y, one aussie dropped out and one brilliant (american) was offered a job by Deloite in adelaide in october 13 and was dropped in the following January because Deloite had no work - sloppy and poor pipeline management and a poor short term excuse by Deloite. Disgraceful, that student now works in government. A waste of a brilliant resource.

I worked as a director with a SAPOL team for a new mobile app product venture startup and the chosen development company looked all bells and whistles, but when actually asked to deliver something cringed and failed, all smoke, all talk no capability, nice offices tho' ......... in norwood,

I've also seen and also tried to recruit capable teams here in adelaide, you know, mid 20's m early 30's professionals, who come across as being capable, take notes, attend meetings and are otherwise trustworthy .......... bit hard to find them...... and that speaks volumes..... I can't use accountants in my role, I need clever all rounders who are capable and not afraid to ask questions and make mistakes.

So how do you think the commoditisation of education is working in adelaide, I seemed to trip over a uni everytime I walked across Vic SQ ?

Adelaide is just not up to our standard.

moved here because wife is from here, mistake. I have observed a significant amount of the dunning-kruger effect manifest here in adelaide, which along with Landrys' http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/thinkers/landry/report.aspx on the city makes for a grim prognosis, I simply will not and cannot allow my children to be crushed in a nepotistic society, it is the opposite of meritocracy and gives rise to sub standard performance, everywhere I have looked I have experienced it, from local council who are just not up to the job, to government departments with a significant responsibility to the public, just simply not making the grade, for our family and our future intent it's just not good enough.

There are also significant pointers that indicate a poor socio-economic and sub-standard social health of the place, there is to my mind a disgraceful attitude to poorer and less fortunate people I have observed in the eastern suburbs, and also, do we really have to ask, if it is such a fantastic place to live, why are all the young people leaving, and why do you think I would swap a 11 room house with garden, cellar, garage and& pool for a semi detached in and around the surrey,kent/biggin hill/oxted area of london ?

for the good of my children, simple really.

Freelance management consultant - specialising process improvement in aviation, finance and justice/law , to be honest I have over 2 decades of experience across london, hong kong and sydney, adelaide just did not pay nor did it excite me, the nepotism and mates club gives rise to mediocre performance and a lack of risk taking so nothing gets done, the public sector has the place ruined and that will take years to fix, I think a decade or more.

They should be performance managed.

We're out, I left three weeks ago after being out of work since october last year, sold house and picked up a job in less than 6 working days in London, doubled what was on in adelaide also. Now i can afford to send my kids to private school here in the Uk , but not in adelaide, I think the place is dying to be honest

This should be the norm...unfortunately it is not. I know a lot of expat families at the moment who are extemely worried they are going to lose their,jobs...i know of a few families leaving sa because the jobmarket is so poor...such a shame as they have so much to give. I feel very sorry for anyone coming over to sa from the uk. They are in for a shock.

before you decide to come here, read this report from 2003 over 12 years ago!!!, little’s changed, infact I believe it’s worse.

http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/lib/pdf/Landry_Report.pdf

“An Adelaide talent strategy is required because

Adelaide has just over 1 million inhabitants and

perhaps 250,000 are underachieving – some

desperately so, leading a life that both drains

them and Adelaide. Some may have merely

missed out, others don’t quite reach the next

step of aspiration, and others again are just

waiting for the challenge to achieve more. If

just 1% of these people became transformed

they would represent 2500 qualified migrants. “

be very careful believing that sugar coated Adelaide is for us!! marketing and selling that tourism and immigration do, Australia is reaching the end of an unprecedented boom time, this is manifest in Sydney , Melbourne and the eastern states, It is clear from a simple walk around adelaide, that the boom did not reach here, that is a shame, because it's now too late.

Landry's report above has a minimum lead time of 1/2 to 1 decade, that is 10 years to commence fixing this place, I'm not sure about you, but we've already decided to have a family and with young children under the age of 10 (just about) Adelaide offers us nothing in terms of future planning, it's too late if you already have young children, you may not wish to take the risk.

Similiarly , there are no quick fixes, there are no quick wins on this, the state government is replete with mates and "unflushables", who are to a man , wholly unsuitable and unprofessional in the discharge of their duties as public servants, they are in a word, a disgrace. Some are barely able to hold a pen:

I have personally witnessed this appalling paralysis of thinking at all levels in the number of organisations I've worked for, I won't be subject, nor will my children....

More from Landry:

This lack of confidence was confirmed through other interviews that showed people in leadership roles lacked confidence.

Interestingly this lack of confidence expresseditself in smaller things such as how to do apresentation, how to run an interview, or howto challenge someone else.

This focus on detailshrouded and clogged up their capacity to lookat the bigger picture issues such as the healthof the organisation or where Adelaide is going.

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Hi All,

First post here, a Happy one, and a warning: we've just left Adelaide for the UK, family of 5, young kids still at primary school and 1 just in high school.

We were living in Sydney (for 8 years) and moved to adelaide 3 years ago and to be honest it was a real mistake, I specialise in Process Improvement/Business Consultancy, as a program director and just could not find work that paid anywhere near enough or find work for long enough to run our family, there really are no significant growth projects in any of the public sectors which make up the lions share of the work in adelaide, besides it's a closed system in Adelaide where mates look after mates and nothing gets done as they've looked after themselves, SA Health are trying to run the new hospital on a shoestring which is bad news, The attorney generals office made a huge hilarious mess of the reform program and now won't come out of their box, SAPOL are three years behind project "shield" and finger pointing has begun, Santos just left 800 go, Department of Education (yes that's families SA) are in hiding and are simply full of people who have given up on themselves decades ago and their work (may go somewhat to explain the mess they are in) , Courts SA have lost the new building program which leaves poor Chief justice nowhere to go, Th Universities are simply flogging expensive courses to Asian and overseas Students (I now mentored at one of the Uni's) I tried to recruit and build a team at a major govt department and just could not find the calibre of people to place, most young professionals and indeed professionals of my age (early 40's) have actually left the state, this is a sobering issue, there are no people to run and advocate programs of work, as the locals will simply play it safe , watch their mates and not take risks, this at best means doldrums, and worst a floundering on the rocks. Bendigo Bank, which should be a somewhat largish employer are still struggling with Basel III, which puts them 2-3 years behind comparable banks. I have built teams in Sydney and It's not that easy I'll admit, but at leas the people are out there, Adelaide has not only a deficit of jobs, but also a deficit of good experienced and motivated people, I think one organisation I recently worked at had spent zero on training it's staff (thats public facing staff) for the last 10 years, now that is building a dysfunctional organisation if ever there was one.

You can't rely on tourism , it's a finite and low paid entry level job for migrants, Same with the Wineries, they are constrained by their size, Skilled Migration here has got to be as a Trade or a Vocation, this simply put means that you have to be a Tradie, Police, Ambulance, Nurse or at a push health care professional, otherwise you are risking a significant amount of your capital taking a punt on a state that is clearly poorly run, and poorly run by people who are happy to take their pensions and 300K salaries and do nothing. Teachers will be put (if you get a job at all) on the TRT roundabout (TRT = Temporary replacement teacher), lets follow this logic through, lots of TRT at a school ???, indicates either a problem with the school population, the leadership or the staff, any of which you don't want to be part of.

If you have a child with a disability (as we do) or a child with a talent/skill (yes a different one), then I have to report that our experience of Adelaide Education has been quite unimpressive, the lack of professionalism and failure to provide simple direction by leadership is astonishing to observe, since we (as parents) and i am trained in advocacy, it was annoying but we managed, I shudder to think how non native english speakers or parents who "trust" the system could fare.

The state is frankly almost bankrupt, there are too many public servants drawing down salaries for doing quite an appallingly bad job, so there is no innovation nor movement, and the government simply can't reform them, the colloquial word I've often heard is "unflushable" .

I know this may sound odd, but all things being equal, we see better options opportunities in the UK/Europe or indeed Sydney for our family. Besides I want my children to have integrity and work in a meritocracy, not a matey matey place that under performs and discriminates against poorer citizens.