Love Me Tender

few things get my motor running more than compulsory reporting of government contracts

In life, you find yourself in certain routines; little ministries of comfort.

For many, it is as simple as the crossword, or surfing. Others are more complicated and may approach solace as they would a startled deer, afraid of the animal’s essential vitality yet drawn toward it nonetheless. Some are more specific in their proclivities. They might attend circuses hoping to see a clown fail or learn a dirge. The world really does contain all sorts.

One of my favourite quasi-leisure activities is to scroll the Australian Government tender and contracting portal AusTender looking at the notices posted by a menagerie of Commonwealth departments, agencies and obscure authorities. I do this on a sort of journalistic autopilot, eyes rolled into the back of my head, a wall of sclera exposed to the world like a great white shark in attack mode. It’s a lot of scrolling for the occasional gem, like a multi-million dollar consulting contract that clues you in to an area of potential policy reform or internal work being undertaken by a department.

I tend to know exactly what I am looking for without knowing what it is I will find.

Beyond this practical reporting purpose, there is everything else on AusTender.

The weird stuff, the exceptionally ordinary stuff (of course the Department of Defence needs to buy cenotaphs, but it had never occurred to me before) or peculiar phrasings of public servants whose job it is to handle procurements and lodge requests for tender or contract notices within the required legislative timeframes. That’s to say nothing at all of the names of suppliers who win these contracts and even, on occasion, the names of the agencies themselves.

Take, for example, the Department of Defence, by far the largest contractor of anything in government. Lots of interesting things get covered in their notices: weapons system upgrades, acoustic analysis thingy-ma-bobs, secret squirrel stuff. And there’s just this:

I’m off to see a man about a dog / parts for a ship. It’s the hand-waving generality of it, for me. What ship? An Anzac class, a frigate? A destroyer? And what part of the ship? Did the front fall off, again? Is there a flange loose?

Wait.

Oh, OK then.

Obviously, most of what I find on AusTender is normal and necessary. I don’t know why it tickles me so that the Grains Research and Development Corporation is smack bang in the middle of a project of “development and extension to realise the system benefits and economic potential of mungbean in northern farming systems” but it does. I’ve become, over the years, invested in the resilience of various legumes to blight or the heat resistance of chickpea varieties.

I was on stage with the new Australian Public Service Commissioner Dr Gordon de Brouwer at a conference recently, talking about leadership lessons from the disgraceful Robodebt saga and he rightly suggested that one part of the problem was people working in siloes in the public service who knew what their tiny portion of the job was but had no greater visibility elsewhere. In the worst examples, it provided one of the most gossamer thin excuses for a fatal lack of curiosity. Anyway, because I am a deeply serious person with oceans of insight I said: “Siloes are great if you’re a grain farmer, not so great if you’re working in professional services on a massive project that affects people.”

Finger on the pulses, etc.

It is possible to come across a relatively benign entry in AusTender, like this one for artificial plants, and think nothing more of it:

Only to look at who was placing the order for $13,000 worth of fake plants and realise it’s the Australian Signals Directorate, a spy agency (they would prefer I didn’t call them that) with expertise in listening devices and intercepting foreign comms.

Fake plants. For spies. “Honey, these plastic monsteras just arrived from the Australian Signals Directorate, I’ll put them in the office where you make all your calls.”

Does it get any better? Yes, it does. This is the company that sold the plants to the ASD.

Just get in the van, there’s no time to explain.

It’s difficult to descend from the heady heights of raphis palm spycraft, or so you’d think, but then you discover the agrarian whimsy of the (then) Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment with its $29,000 “egg questionnaire”.

It is possible to guess what this is for, but that would take the fun out of it. An egg questionnaire, to me, conjures something far more interesting: an inquisition. Of eggs! Or, better, Mum following her chickens around the yard mumbling quietly to herself where the fuck have you laid.

Personally, I like it when a series of contract notices tells a short story, like Hemmingway’s ‘baby shoes’ but for goods and chattels of the Australian state. Take this extremely short novella involving a clearly broken crane:

Oh no, the crane is in need of repair! I hope everything is OK.

Oh thank God. Everything is going to be fine.

It strikes me that the Department of Defence is a lot like I was in my early 20s: very good at spending money I didn’t technically have and on the most spectacularly useless shit. I once paid $70 for a pair of fake white leather ‘dress’ shoes from Roger David while living on the Gold Coast.

And, like Defence, I was still trying to figure out who I was. I found this one while trawling for something else in May 2021 and marked it up at the time so a future version of me would understand at a glance the inherent comedy value:

A strategic narrative!? In this economy? You’d hope Defence have the strategy part covered, so the skills currently unavailable within agency must refer to their capacity to develop a narrative.

Trauma is a hell of a drug.

Clearly they didn’t get KPMG to do any work on the contract publishing side of the department because things got less strategic. The Department once advised it had purchased “war vehicles.” Points for being direct, I suppose.

While we’re still on Defence — and really, I could stay here all day — should we be concerned that it cost them $90,000 to “develop ethical behaviours”?

Also, if you look at the contract timeframe it took them six months. To be fair, a philosophy degree is longer. The Australian Research Council were looking for a (temporary) integrity officer but it would be mean to have a go at them for that based purely on how funny that sounds.

Let’s make fun of someone else now, like whoever wrote this entry for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (who feature in my work this week):

Gadgets. Would love to have seen this haul of doohickies and what-have-yous from JB HiFi. Based on the entry itself it was probably 32 gramophones.

I have put too many pictures in this newsletter which means some email clients, like Gmail, will clip the message and if you want to keep reading you’ll have to click on “view entire message” or something which will be very hard to read and well hidden at the bottom of the post. Won’t be a problem on the web. Funny how I had to write that after teasing someone for using the word ‘gadgets’. I am part of the problem.

In any case, I think I have probably made my point. AusTender is a somewhat useful transparency tool if you’re willing to wade through it as a reporter but, more than that, it’s a window into the very soul of the machinery of government, such as it is, and as Kerry Packer once said when he died and saw the other side before being brought back to life: there’s fucking nothing there.

Observations

• There is nothing new or original or even originally funny that I can add to the mugshot of Donald Trump released by authorities in Georgia this week. Or those of his criminal conspiracy pals. Trump even tweeted his own mugshot with the caption “never surrender” which shows you how pointless considered analysis is at this stage. I mean, he was literally surrendering. And, right on cue, he is now using the photo to fundraise. So what. He’s scared. Dude thought consequences was the name of one of his Florida household staff. This is the face of a man who now realises that he doesn’t, in fact, know the name of any of his Florida household staff.

  

  

  a fun game to play on this tile set is ‘which ones realise the gravity of the situation they’re in’

• While we’re on the subject of terrible men, let’s do two at once. Paramilitary army leader Yevgeny Prigozhin vs bloody-minded dictator Vladimir Putin in most compelling episode of Undercover Boss yet. As Twitter user Brooks Otterlake said: “Finally hashed things out with my buddy whose life I tried to ruin. Now to board a private plane inside his airspace.”

  

  Now someone do Putin next.

• Some context for the next two little morsels. Mum is shortly going away on a holiday with a friend of hers in a few weeks. It’s a big deal in this house because, well, this is really the first one she’s gone on under her own steam and she has been excited for half a year now. She’s going on the Ghan, the big train, and has printed off her itinerary for safekeeping. My sister Lauryn found it when she was home the other night and found a little section for “guest booking information” in which Mum had written: “I am travelling with a friend, Cathy [Last Name]. Can we please have our cabins near one another? Thank you.” It’s just about the cutest thing either of us have seen and we absolutely pissed ourselves laughing when Lauryn read it out on the couch.

• We go to trivia every Wednesday night at the local pub and one day I will write a whole book about the pulsing rivalries that emerge in small country town trivia competitions but all you need to know for this part is that one of the questions on Wednesday was “what is the residue left behind after burning coal”. The answer, soot, prompted me to go on a little journey of the mind: “That’s what I copped a face full of that time I stuck my head out the window of that steam train.” Mum, sensing a theme, lit up and declared very seriously: “We won’t have that problem on the Ghan, Cathy, it’s all digital!” Henceforth calling steam engines analogue trains.

• Our home in Boonah — already weighted heavily in favour of animals including a diabetic cat, 13yo blue heeler and several chickens — has now welcomed a temporary new member, my sister’s miniature dachshund Duke who is a cross between a cat and a charity mugger. He is an absolute divine little thing who also insists on sleeping skin-to-skin, tunnelling underneath blankets and diving head first on to your chest in the morning if you dare sleep beyond 7am. I am so tired. I love him so much and I am so tired. Is this what parenthood feels like?

• Finally (this newsletter is so long, I am so sorry) my humble little child One Hundred Years of Dirt was named in the Top 100 Best Audiobooks of All Time by Audible this week. I’ve no idea how they arrive at this list, whether it’s based on editorial discretion or listening metrics or a combination and, frankly, I do not care. Because I’m at number 92 (or 85, I can’t work out how they’ve arranged this) and I won’t be asking any questions!