Picture the scene. In one of the retail businesses that are still known as post offices but are mostly private contractors, not Australia Post-owned-and-operated branches, a longer than usual queue is forming. Apart from people buying stamps, paying utility bills and sending registered mail, other customers are appearing.
They are not there because they are eager to buy the coffee mugs, coloured pencil sets, computer mouse mats, mobile phones, DVDs and other assorted merchandise that the privatised post offices have to tout to turn a profit. These other customers are applicants for periodical payments such as the Youth Allowance or Newstart (the unemployment benefit, which at $250 a week is now more than $100 below the poverty line).
People used to apply for these benefits and receive advice about them in the offices of Centrelink, the Federal Government's one-stop shop for clients of its services. But Centrelink has been consigned to history and Australia Post is the new shopfront for just about anything you might require from the government, from the age or invalid pension to Medicare refunds.
Medicare? Oh yes, Australia's universal health insurance system has also been deemed not to require offices and a bureaucracy of its own. A separate counter in a privatised post office will do. Except, that is, in the smallest such businesses in country towns or newly (i.e. barely) established suburbs on the fringes of major cities, where there's only space for a single counter and a couple of overworked and untrained staff who have to deal with every kind of government customer and client, from the dwindling numbers of stamp buyers to the burgeoning numbers of irate people who want to know why their Newstart payment didn't arrive on time.
Does this scenario sound far-fetched? It shouldn't, because Treasurer Joe Hockey has confirmed that the transfer of Centrelink operations to Australia Post will be one of the proposals considered by the Commission of Audit, which the Government has appointed to advise it on cutting costs and eliminating inefficiencies in the public sector.
The idea that sending all recipients of government services to a single shop — and often a single queue — could ever be considered efficient is risible. The most charitable response to this proposal would be to say that it could only have occurred to people whose experience of queues is limited to cinema box offices.
But in this context, of course, 'efficiency' has a very specific