Opinion:

It is easy to assume that if you criticise government decisions, you are taking a side.

I am not. What I am challenging is the process, not the party.

A perfect example is the Labor government in NSW.

When they came to power, they swiftly shut down a raft of vital programs funded by the former Department of Regional NSW, programs that were quietly changing lives for young people in rural and regional areas.

Mentoring schemes, skills development, and youth leadership initiatives were scrapped almost overnight.

Not because they were failing, but because they had been set up under a different political banner.

That is not reform, that is vandalism.

And before anyone thinks this is an attack on Labor, let us be clear. The Liberal and National parties have been just as guilty.

Remember Barnaby Joyce’s push to decentralise government agencies by relocating them into his own electorate?

The idea was sold as supporting the regions, but the outcome was a hollowed-out public service.

Staff refused to relocate, expertise was lost, and millions were wasted on temporary contractors and consultants.

The agencies involved became weaker, not stronger, and the real losers were the farmers and rural communities who needed skilled, experienced support - not a shell of an agency run from a half-empty office hundreds of kilometres away from Parliament House.

There are career public servants still trying to work out what job title they are supposed to have.

The bigger the change looks on paper, the more it feels like 'something is happening'.

In reality, the actual work on the ground grinds to a halt.

Energy that should go towards delivering better services is instead wasted on finding new logos and rewriting organisational charts.

This is not about blue or red. It is about the chronic addiction to 'optics over outcomes'.

It is about a political culture where dismantling the past is valued more than building the future.

And the real losers are the people who rely on services that do not make headlines.

Young people in country towns who were finally getting a leg up.

Farmers trying to deal with biosecurity risks. Local communities fighting to hold onto their hospitals, their schools, their chances.

Every time a government wastes millions rearranging the deckchairs, it is our lives, not theirs, that are made harder.

The challenge for all of us is to stop falling for it.

Let's stop cheering when our team gets into power and starts tearing down everything built by the last one.

Ask instead, who benefits? Who loses?

And what good work might we be throwing away, just because it came from the 'wrong' side?

The answer, too often, is that the work we need most is the first to go.