Leadership Quote by Jay Weatherill

It’s the sound of technocratic control trying to pass as common sense. Jay Weatherill frames the question as neutral housekeeping: “look at all of those resources” and ask if they’d be “better spent.” That bland managerial vocabulary does heavy political lifting. “Resources” flattens people, programs, and services into interchangeable line items; “better spent” implies there’s an obvious, rational answer waiting to be discovered by the grown-ups in the room.

The tell is the contrast he sets up: “advocacy and information” versus “savings.” Advocacy and information are the soft targets of modern governance: the parts of the state that talk, explain, defend, and sometimes criticize the system from within. By treating them as optional extras, Weatherill signals an intent to shrink the public-facing, accountability-adjacent functions of government, or at least to discipline them into a narrower, less politically inconvenient shape. He doesn’t say “cuts”; he says “make savings,” a euphemism that allows austerity to masquerade as efficiency.

Then comes the rhetorical loop: “redirect them into savings.” Savings aren’t a destination; they’re an accounting outcome. The phrase reveals the deeper context of budget pressure and reform politics, where demonstrating fiscal prudence can matter more than the downstream effects of what gets defunded. The subtext is a classic political maneuver: present a value-laden choice (voice vs. thrift) as mere optimization, so opposition can be painted as sentimental or wasteful rather than principled.