Connections

In April 2025, she texted her aunt, then-council boss Gail Connolly, asking for “any connections or direction” to look into for finding PA work. Six minutes later, Connolly responded: “Want to work with my team at Parra? We have a vacancy – PA to the Lord Mayor.”

Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 2026

Nepotism is one of the oldest forms of corruption and, we being modern, it offends our sense of public virtue. In the nineteenth century, liberals of all strains reformed or threw off older cultures of nobility and aristocracy, the systems that linked your birth to the value of your humanity, since those were totally made-up qualities and stupid. That's not wrong; titles of birth really are very silly. In their place, utilitarians, socialists, Rawlsians, or at any rate merit-oriented idealists, we substituted ideals of fairness and objectivity, and most of all, measurement. The goal, this being ideology, you can best see in our fiction, and in a franchise like Star Trek, where officers really are the best available, where the utopia is a society of meritorious talent, where the commanders are wise, and all the leaders are above average.

Scoring things by way of numbers, which we can compare to others, is what we do, whether it's playing football or doing the daily NYT puzzle. Or doing job applications, and assessing applicants; there is a reason organisations try to do whatever they can to make the process rigorous. Human organisations really do want the members who'll be best for particular roles, rather than the nieces or nephews or drinking friends of the hiring manager. The old aristocracies of the ancien regime lost because, frankly, job preferment, inheriting roles, and traditions like purchases of military commissions are a terrible way of doing things. In this Napoleon was right.

But we can take it too far, as rigorous objective analysis goes. There's a difference between measuring for the purpose of refining your own judgement as a manager and measuring for the sake of measuring, which as anyone will tell you just leads to using targets as outcomes, and every kind of perversity; as I've argued, rewarding the ability to pass tests just promotes test-passers. As Pope Leo most recently observed in Magnifica Humanitas:

Indeed, entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities...

We can't get away from that tension; human judgement on the one side and objective measurement on the other. One person's fair test is another's barrier. One person's corruption is another's art of politics. There are a lot of human organisations that have endured and reproduced their own values and traditions over very long periods of time without the kind of rigorous meritocracy we've come to value, and they're not all bad. Take any old public service culture, where you get taken in as a young person under the wing of a mentor, who, if you can fit in, lets you know 'how things are done'. At the same time they also teach the mistakes and the errors you should avoid, and the kinds of lessons that get written only by experience. Not pretty, sure, but human, and it does work if what you want to do is pass on important parts of a culture. As the saying goes about one of NSW's most enduring public agencies: there's the right way, the wrong way, and the Rail way.

But back to Parramatta, where the jobs-for-the-girls team certainly don't seem to have been observing the strict requirements of the law, and now have to answer sharp questions to the ICAC. It must be one of the most unpleasant things in the world to have your emails and text messages read archly into proceedings by a barrister, and to be asked questions to which the investigators already know the answers. A proper answer, though, honest in terms of being true rather than honest in terms of compliance, might be to say that promoting on loyalty has its own virtue. Creating relationships has a value too, and in many ways as valuable as letting everyone attend to their own 'interests', atomised measurable individuals on a meritocratic playing field, always out for maximising their own score. Didn't Machiavelli say so?

On the other hand, to keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more, many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him dread chances. When, therefore, servants, and princes towards servants, are thus disposed, they can trust each other, but when it is otherwise, the end will always be disastrous for either one or the other.