I have just revisited Utopia on iView, and I’m increasingly convinced it was never satire — it was an observational documentary with better writers and better lighting.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation — government department, university, school system, corporation, council, union, or even community organisation — knows this instinctively. You watch an episode and laugh for about thirty seconds before realising with growing horror that you sat through that exact meeting last Tuesday.
The genius of Utopia is not exaggeration. It is recognition.
Every organisation eventually develops the same strange ecosystem: endless strategic plans no one reads, working groups about other working groups, consultants explaining things staff already know, and managers who measure success by how many coloured arrows appear in a PowerPoint.
The real work — the thing the organisation supposedly exists to do — often becomes secondary to the performance of appearing busy. And everyone knows it.
Teachers know it when they spend more time documenting learning than delivering it. Nurses know it when paperwork overtakes patient care. Public servants know it when months are spent preparing “stakeholder engagement frameworks” for decisions already made. Workers everywhere know the ritual of the meeting before the meeting to prepare for the meeting.
And let’s not forget compliance. Modern organisations are absolutely obsessed with it.
Not sensible accountability — nobody objects to genuine standards or proper safeguards — but the endless culture of proving you have complied with something, usually to satisfy another layer of bureaucracy that itself exists to prove compliance to somebody else.
Entire days disappear into mandatory online modules, risk assessments, procedural acknowledgements, privacy declarations, workplace learning certificates, security audits of offices that are not used, annual attestations and policy updates that somehow multiply like rabbits.
At some point, many organisations stopped trusting professional judgement altogether. Everything now requires a form, a workflow, a sign-off, a duplicate sign-off, and preferably a spreadsheet proving the sign-off occurred.
The irony, of course, is that the people drowning in compliance are usually the very people actually doing the work.
I have a name for it: ‘working under the dome’.
The dome of bullshit.
From the outside everything appears polished, strategic and under control. There are vision statements, branded lanyards, glossy annual reports, colour-coded dashboards and executives congratulating each other on “driving reform”.
But underneath the dome often sits organised chaos — people stumbling from crisis to crisis hoping the cracks do not become visible.
Entire systems operate on institutional memory, exhausted staff and quiet favours from competent people holding things together with sticky tape and goodwill.
Around it all swirls a fog of indecipherable language and relentless self-congratulation designed to disguise how fragile much of it actually is.
Everyone senses it. Few are allowed to say it out loud.
The dome is not confined to workplaces either. Politics operates under it too. In fact, some political movements survive almost entirely because of it.
The performance becomes more important than outcomes. Anger replaces policy. Repetition replaces evidence. Identity replaces achievement.
It is why figures like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce can continue presenting themselves as champions of ordinary Australians while repeatedly opposing or undermining many of the very policies that would materially improve people’s lives — stronger public services, better wages, investment in education, climate transition planning, or workplace protections.
Yet under the dome, appearance matters more than record.
People are encouraged to feel perpetually angry, perpetually ignored and perpetually betrayed, while the same personalities recycle the same grievances decade after decade with remarkably little to show for it.
The performance of fighting the system becomes more important than actually changing it.
Then comes the language.
No organisation speaks English anymore. Everything is “capacity building”, “future-focused”, “leveraging opportunities”, or “moving forward collaboratively”. Problems are never solved — they are “being progressed through an ongoing consultative framework”.
Translation: nothing is happening.
Utopia captures another uncomfortable truth too: most organisations are not run by evil people. They are run by people terrified of risk.
That is what makes the machine so powerful. Nobody wants to make the wrong decision, so instead they make no decision at all. Layers of approvals emerge. Accountability disappears into committees. Innovation dies beneath procedure manuals and “communications strategies”.
And somewhere in every organisation sits the person actually trying to do the job — the Tony Woodford character from Utopia — slowly losing the will to live while everyone around them debates font choices in briefing papers.
The truly frightening thing is how universal it has become.
Technology was supposed to make work simpler. Instead, we have dashboards tracking metrics nobody understands, online compliance modules everyone clicks through half-asleep, and email chains so long they qualify as historical records.
We have become masters of process and amateurs at outcomes.
And perhaps that is why Utopia resonates so deeply with Australians. Beneath the comedy sits a very real frustration: the sense that modern institutions increasingly struggle to distinguish between activity and achievement.
Because somewhere along the way, too many organisations forgot their purpose. Schools exist to educate children. Hospitals exist to care for patients. Governments exist to govern. Businesses exist to produce something useful.
Yet increasingly the internal machinery becomes the purpose itself. The report becomes more important than the result. The media strategy matters more than the policy. The optics matter more than the outcome.
And still the meetings continue.
Somewhere in Australia right now, a committee is drafting a framework for reviewing a discussion paper about a future strategy consultation.
And Rob Sitch probably wrote the script a decade ago.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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