Monday, December 15, 2008

Vale "D'oH", or, bring back "the Department"

DH cannot stay silent any longer in the face of increasing outrage at being robbed of her prey.

She will never forgive the Department of Housing for rebadging itself as Housing NSW.

It almost smacks of misleading advertising. Housing NSW is a government department, but the slick new corporate"branding" obscures this fundamental reality.


For a start, a huge slice of the population is barely coping with the fact that the Housing Commission was renamed the NSW Dept of Housing way back in 1986. (Isn't Wikipedia wonderful!).

It means that journos now have to clutter their prose with "... Housing NSW (HNSW), formerly known as the NSW Department of Housing ...".

For housos, muttering about "the Department" somehow loses its satisfying Kafkaesque edge. Although the shiny corporate moniker "Housing NSW" could possibly qualify as Orwellian Newspeak.

And for satirists "D'oH" was a gift whose passing is deeply mourned.

Henceforth, DH is putting her foot down. She will not let go of her prey that easily! She shall continue to refer to the "entity formerly known as the Department" as "the Department".

1 comment:

Andrew Elder said...

Why not? Non-residents refer to public housing as "Housing Commission".