There was an apt, if unfortunate, metaphor that Premier Jay Weatherill employed this week as child protection once again became his government’s Achilles heel.

“How can you be a policeman and a social worker at the same time?”

Perhaps he was attempting to answer that very question when he appointed a policeman, Tony Harrison, to run the state’s education and child protection bureaucracy.

If there was any doubt the Government was projecting urgency in the wake of the scathing findings of the Coroner’s inquest into Chloe Valentine’s death, it was the haste with which the cabinet adopted all but one of his recommendations as policy.

In 2003, Robyn Layton suggested the establishment of an independent Children’s Commissioner; the Government only got around to getting a bill for that together this year, and then pulled it “while it awaits the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Child Protection Systems”.

According to the corresponding media release from Minister Susan Close: “It is reasonable to receive the commission’s findings before moving forward with new legislation.”

Um … yep. Unless of course that legislation was recommended by the state Coroner after investigating the death of a neglected four-year-old.

Then the Royal Commission is neither here nor there.

The Coroner presented his findings on Thursday last week; the following Monday, cabinet accepted them.

Perhaps he should have recommended a dedicated Children’s Commissioner too, just to see what happened?

It was, then, a very political response from the Government to a very human tragedy.

Urgency, it seems, is a very fluid concept in bureaucratic circles.

When a little girl is being bundled into taxis to be returned to a drunk, drug-addled mother, urgency is lacking. But in the face of political damage from a damning coronial report, a policy response can’t come quick enough.

We saw in recent months the Premier enunciate his “bold vision” for South Australia.

Bold, but not urgent.

There will be forensic consultation before contentious items such as tax reform can be countenanced.

Indeed, so thorough is the consultation that the Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis this week granted an extension for submissions, after which “my department will be undertaking modelling on some of the ideas raised in the submissions to provide further insight into the economic and budget impacts of such reforms”.

Interesting.

Because there was no extension for submissions during the recent consultation on Transforming Health, despite fervent requests from the likes of the Australian Medical Association, who argued having “only three and a half weeks to respond to the complex changes proposed is insulting”.

Health reform, it seems, is too urgent to extend consultation deadlines.

Tax reform, however, is evidently important enough to take the time to do properly.

Which the Government is certainly doing. In fact, so thorough is its consultation that it’s doing it for the second time.

Koutsantonis this week made a show of meeting with the SA Council of Social Service, whose submission to the tax review suggested reform of payroll and property taxes and, controversially, a disused building tax, which seeks to whack developers who sit on run-down properties rather than doing them up and tenanting them.

The media were particularly taken with that one.

Of course, they could have had the scoop some two years earlier if they’d read SACOSS’s January 2013 submission to the Economic and Finance Committee’s almost identical inquiry into the state’s taxation regime, which called for … yep, you guessed it … reform of payroll and property taxes and a disused building tax seeking to whack developers who sit on run-down properties rather than doing them up and tenanting them!

Indeed, the whole EFC inquiry, tabled in November 2013, pretty much went over the very ground the Treasurer is now treading.

Significantly, the committee’s 2013-14 annual report notes that its inquiry was only stymied by “the lack of access to requested financial modelling information” – of the type the Treasurer is now committed to providing.

Because it’s urgent.

Nonetheless, the EFC inquiry still identified the inherently inefficient nature of conveyance duties, the relative efficiency of land taxes and the compliance headaches that accompany payroll tax.

It considered motor vehicle taxes, gambling taxes, insurance taxes, compliance costs and business impacts; it took submissions from Business SA, the AHA, the LGA, the MTA and every other rhyming acronym under the sun. None of which, presumably, has dramatically changed its stance in the intervening months.

The conclusion one can’t help but draw, of course, is that the current, but far more public, consultation is a Clayton’s exercise – an elaborate and expensive sales pitch rigmarole preceding the inevitable policy remedy.

And if that’s the case, the impetus for reform can be neither bold nor urgent.

The farce of consultation is really more of a conjuring trick: we may be free to pick whichever card we choose, but we’ll still end up with the one the conjurer meant us to take.

There is an old Spike Milligan poem, Winds Light To Disastrous, in which the narrator’s day is progressively interrupted by increasingly violent gales; first his breakfast, then his wife, is whisked out the door, as he ponders which he’ll miss more.

At length, he sits down to dine, when: “A gale (force nine), Blew away my chips and Spam.

“But! A gale (force ten) Blew them back again,

“What a lucky man I am!”

The Government may undertake policy reviews light to disastrous, but the end result is always the same.

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist at InDaily.