Bureaucrats striving for their benchmarks leave a trail of gibber IN the bad old days before bureaucrats wrote mission statements, the job of the Victorian Education Department was to run schools. Today the department manages "a high-quality, coherent, birth-through-adulthood learning and development system" that costs $11.1 billion a year to run. The department's job used to be to dispense education; today it exists "to support Victorians to build prosperous, socially engaged, happy and healthy lives."