I've been a fan of the original BBC series for years and have often seen, from a semi-insider's perspective, how true to life the dysfunctional and self-serving decision-making process resembles real life 21st Century Australia.
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Now we have our version, called 'Utopia', a political satire mockumentary-style comedy from the Working Dog crew with a cast headed by Rob Sitch.
This episode saw a government desperate for a good news story so they seized on announcing a Very Fast Train linking Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane despite the infrastructure bureaucrats telling them the most needed project was an inland railway linking Melbourne to Brissy and passing through our neck of the woods.
Alas, there are no votes out here and freight isn't nearly as sexy to those metro voters as the prospect of human cargo cruising up and down the east coast at tomorrow's futuristic speeds, yet cossetted in ye olde world luxury.
It was a fascinating and cynical insight and must provoke some strange thoughts for those people we have charged with getting things done, who continually fail to deliver on these sorts of projects which our taxes should have funded a century ago.
These days we're solidly cemented in a 'user-pays' culture despite the fact a huge amount of taxes flow towards Canberra each year, it really makes you wonder where that money actually goes.
For all its apparent faults China just decides to do something and does it, without our insatiable lust for expensive pre-feasibility studies before spending yet more money on the actual feasibility studies.
Then we must set up a steering committee to convene an ad hoc working party to meet for discussions about what to call the interim board of the whole shebang.
The current culture seems to be making it impossible for positive and visionary change to actually happen despite the fact the rules preventing these good things from happening are just words written down by fallible mortals.
It seems the process of government is far more important than actually governing for the good of the people, us poor proletarians who actually pay for that government to exist in the first place.
We, the taxpayers, didn't seem to have any dramas stumping up $20 million in cold hard dollars for union inquiries, but try getting that off the feds for the next phase of the rebuild for Dubbo Base Hospital, a facility which 180,000 people across this region depend on as our main medical centre.
What about mental health in the bush? As one cocky said to me the other day, we've got people 'falling off the perch' all over the place yet we can't get anything like a fair share of the mental health dollar, the bulk of that's reserved for the city cousins we subsidise.
The huge rollout for last weekend's Warren Depression Day shows just how huge an impact mental health issues are having at a local level.
We can't even get this current parliament to sort out a 'direct action' policy, a move which would see extra farm-gate revenue flow into economic and social benefits our bush towns so sorely need after decades of running in reverse.
We're not even allowed to establish an industrial hemp (iHemp) industry because the pollies won't allow us to eat the beneficial crop for food, a simple change of legislation which would give a direct domestic market for farmers to sell into, the simplest of all changes.
Our local pollies are receptive to all these ideas the people are calling for yet are hamstrung by the cumbersome machinery of government which serves itself and its own ends of empire building without prioritising the poor old taxpayers as an actual priority. It's because of this state of affairs that the ABC's 'Utopia' is so vitally important.
When you're having a bad day the thing you most need is a good laugh, especially when it's at our own expense.
