_{If this email has been forwarded to you, sign up here}

Labor’s beginning its fourth year of governing the country - but you wouldn’t necessarily know that by looking at the hordes of newcomers wandering up and down the halls of Parliament this week.

The person staring at her phone was, it turned out, just trying to find her way back to the office. With every new government there are many new people and with Labor’s new (and huge) majority the turnover’s been bigger than normal. It will still be some time before this government is comfortably in charge of what’s going on.

In the meantime, statutory authorities (like the NDIA, or the ABC) just continue.

Some, like the ABC, are left to drift. The slow loss of direction that began under Chair Ita Butrose has increased since Kim Williams took over. Audiences have abandoned the corporation which now dominates the lowest-rating slots in capital cities across the country. The rapid production of audience figures means management failures are rapidly exposed.

It’s not like that with the NDIA.

It was weeks, for example, before the Agency even announced that its CEO was on leave after a diagnosis of breast cancer. Our sympathy is very much with her at this time; but it does seem outrageous that the country had no idea who was in charge of this critical organisation, with its massive multi-billion dollar spend, for so long.

And then there was the sudden, non phased-in slashing of expenditure arbitarily imposed at the beginning of the financial year. Major reductions in allied health & travel rates, restrictions on therapy eligibility based on “Functional Capacity, a shift in autism support criteria, and abrupt plan reviews and budget reductions for participants.

Big changes; little explanation.

So parliament’s resumption provided an opportunity for questions, but here in Canberra, politics reigns supreme.