So Tender And Wild

2 AusTender 2 Curious

In times of trouble and distress I retreat to my happy place, the Commonwealth contracting and procurement hub AusTender.

Loyal readers of this pamphlet will understand the ritual scroll of comfort that can be found in its vertical, Babylonian hallways. It’s a bit like bird-watching but instead of a wren you’re hoping to find some kind of fucked up tit. Something aggressively ordinary or ridiculous and upsetting but nothing in between. The comfort, then, is not in the content but in the act of scrolling to find it; the thrill of discovering the procurement equivalent of a cross-eyed finch.

If this says something about me, I won’t hear of it.

Treasures can be found but one must truly seek. I saw a contract posted the other day for what I thought said horse assembly¹ and almost had a stroke but, alas, it was hose assembly and I lost interest immediately. It was for the Department of Defence, of course, because those camo cowboys are always buying something. If it’s not parts for a war vehicle or lubricating oil, it’s stamps.

I always get a little shiver when I see them purchase stationery. You chose the sword, back off. Maybe they’re collecting barcodes from a war periodical and sending them off to redeem one (1) AUKUS submarine in 2055.

Normal can be unsettling in the right circumstance.

There is something troublesome to be found in the spiritual uncertainty of whether to be alarmed or reassured that the Department of Defence needs batteries, for instance. I mean, of course they do, but so do I. We’re the same, really. And that is concerning to me. But also good.

As ever, my affections for the Grains Research and Development Corporation are absolute. How industrious they are, always scheming on some kind of bean breeding program; finger on the pulses.

a grains corp procurment director

Lately the Grainiacs have started a search for fresh ideas to protect canola from sensitivity to frost and I’m over here pumping my fist in the air for some reason and shouting yes, YES, protect my sweetlings and their cold little feet.

I love this for them.

And I find myself thinking, if the grains boffins are doing kindly and noble grain stuff, what are the coastal waters folk up to in the salty broth of the Pacific? Not a legume for days, as far as I know, but the coral are getting a bit hot. Might be something in that for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Let’s see what they’re up to!

God fucking damn it.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess the reef is dying and that’s hard to talk about. This contract description is very funny to me because it actually sounds like they have booked ‘difficult conversation training’ and now they’re spending $22,000 to mitigate it. Some guy called Greg has reserved a conference room and is making everyone who wants to talk hold a crown of thorns star fish until their hands bleed. And management are like he’s doing it again. I’m just spitballin’.

I looked up the company that offers this course and now I’m getting targeted ads on Instagram in case I wanted to learn how to manage difficult conversations which I do not. I want to lean into them.

One of the perennial AusTender favourites that show up every now and again like a shooting star — appropriately just celestial ejecta burning up in the atmosphere — is the temporary personnel hire for [insert humourously opposed job title here]. You could have a temporary labour hire contract for a lion tamer, par example, which implies the last guy [or girl!] was not very good at the job and little is expected of the new one. Or you could have this:

Same same.

And who better to manage labour hire contracts in your agency than a person you found on labour hire?

The call’s coming from outside the house.

I like these ones the most because they appeal to my deeply held belief that the absurd is right next to horror². Last week I wrote about a national audit of the Bureau of Meteorology’s asset management and maintenance of its weather observation system and it was, uh, not good. Like, it was really bad. And there were so many examples throughout this report where the BoM said it would have some process or plan or even money in place only to report back three, four or five years later that they just didn’t bother or forgot. That’s my excuse. You’re an agency. Of government!

There was one line in the audit report which made me chuckle and chuckle even though it was not ideal. It was about a key Strategic Asset Management Plan, or SAMP, developed in 2018 and last updated in 2020 and then sort of, just, not touched again. Like the rest of us during Covid, come to think of it.

Without further ado:

The Bureau has not reported on progress against the initiatives of the SAMP, including the initiative to regularly review progress

I wrote ‘LOL’ in my research notes next to this line when I clipped it for my bower (this is what I call my nest of curios and trinkets I collect for my stories) which is very restrained of me, just so you know.

AusTender is a great friend of the bower. I scan it like a factory worker on the line sorting produce into one bucket for serious journalism and a second bucket for a little chuckle. To wit:

Hard two words to say right next to each other, you’ll note. Try it now.

I vote for a shortened form: dogstacles. I don’t know how many dog obstacles they planned on buying — the turreted spreadsheetists at DoD never do say — but imagine the kinds of hurdles you could put in front of a dog for $13,400. You could start young, at puppy school, and fund a career counsellor to give them shady advice and mangle their professional trajectory. Or build a wall of vacuum cleaners 3m high.

Somebody funnier than me on the internet once said ‘you just don’t see dogs running out of butcher shops with three links of sausages in their mouths anymore’ and I think I know why: dogstacles.

What else aren’t they telling us?

I came across an agency looking for this the other week:

And I wanted to email and let them know there is a 14-year-old kid called Jayden at the Boonah skate park who would absolutely do this for at least half the asking price of the best bid. And he’d do it in grapefruit!

Look, I know there are, 98 per cent of the time, perfectly reasonable uses for all of these things that get put out to tender. Like, I know the Royal Australian Mint uses a die to create hobs to strike coins out of blanks but when I come across an entry like this:

I still think it’s the funniest thing in the world because it’s one-third German for ‘the failure investigation’.

To be fair to me, I never claimed to be sophisticated.

Which brings me to the last of our Defence contracts about which it is very important I say nothing at all.

Nothing. At. All.

Observations

USA, Home of the Knave

For once there is too much to say and, as a result, I feel incapable of saying anything. I suspect this is one of the stratagems of the fascist fucks in power right now. Use the sclerotic and emaciated state of the institutions — that they helped erode! — against the people when the time comes to move fast and break things. How can anyone possibly keep up? Accountability loves a slow moving target and my God is it unprepared for any of this. It’s like watching a tortoise with emphysema try and run down a cigarette truck.

Every four hours on every day it felt like reading a new thing had happened in the USA that in any other moment in history would be front page news and a political scandal for weeks but it’s gone and something new and as disturbing takes its place four hours later, rinse and repeat. The Overton Window is on a bullet train and we’re still on the platform.

There is very little good (zero good) to come out this shitshow so I am going to have to settle for the name given to the prepubescent interns working for Elon Musk’s omnishambolic DOGE outfit who have raided various US government agencies and tried to hijack sensitive systems and tried to (did?) fire workers.

Some crafty guy, Professor of Law at the University of Kansas Corey Rayburn Yung, called them Musk’s incel clown posse.

Amen.

There’s a Nous in the House

Speaking of AusTender consultants, one of the companies that gets a lot of work is a firm called Nous. They pop up everywhere and have apparently been doing some work for the embattled Australian National University on how to save money by firing people, a mainstay of the management consulting toolkit. Now that I think of it, management consultants are like that unsubtle friend who always has the exact same advice for your relationship no matter the circumstances. You could tell them your partner leaves your toast in a breath too long and they’d command you to dump his ass.

Hardly news in itself except, perhaps, but then those same consultants advising on the dumping at ANU have lunch in an ANU staffroom and and then forget to take the plans for that restructure with them. The slide deck was just sitting there so of course a helpful member of actual staff there found it and gave it to veteran higher education reporter Julie Hare.

Let us give thanks to the management consultants; for it is right to give them thanks and praise.

The Accidental FBI Director

The most gossamer-thin ray of light from the Trump White House is the mistakes they will make. Most of them will end up hurting a lot of people, so I don’t mean those. But take the accidental FBI director Brian Driscoll, aka ‘The Drizz’, who was appointed to the top job because the White House put the wrong name on its list of agency officials and then just decided to leave it.

Except Driscoll was having none of their bullshit. When the Department of Justice demanded a list of every FBI agent name who worked on prosecuting the January 6 insurrectionists, since pardoned by Trump, The Drizz refused. His resistance was so forceful colleagues thought he had been fired.

He has since been accused of ‘insubordination’. Good. May every human of sound principle find the courage of such defiance. They’re all going to need it.

ABC Doesn’t Do Race

Look, when you have to send emails like this to your entire staff I can assure you things are not going well.

On Monday, Ms Lattouf's legal team made submissions that may have been interpreted, by some staff and commentators, as suggesting that the ABC denies that certain races exist. I want to assure you that the ABC is not of that view. To ensure clarity, the ABC's lawyers have also confirmed to the Court that the ABC does not deny the existence of any race.

That’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in damage control after they fired a radio presenter for posting an Instagram story from Human Rights Watch describing Israel’s weaponisation of starvation against the people in Gaza, itself a war crime. Latouff added the one line summary: ‘HRW reporting starvation as a tool of war.’ It was a development reported by the ABC.

In any event, the ABC’s case has always been that they didn’t fire Latouff because of any of this and it certainly had nothing to do with her ‘political’ views or the fact that she was Lebanese Australian. In fact, Aunty lawyers said, what even is a Lebanese? As they state in submissions:

Whether there is a Lebanese, Arab, or Middle Eastern "race" is a complex multi-faceted question of fact. The facts must be proved. Ms Lattouf has led no evidence of any relevant fact: cf Foot & Thai Massage at [719], [726); Jones v Ekermavi (EOD) |2012] NSWADTAP 50 at [111]-[112). There is therefore no basis on which to find, as a fact, that there is a Lebanese, Arab, or Middle Eastern "race" within the meaning of s 772(1)(f).

My emphasis. And of course, this is a legal argument. But the point is bigger than that. The ABC has refused to settle this case despite opportunities to do so. The testimony offered by its three top decision-makers in court has been embarrassing and at times genuinely comical. The emails are worse. And no legal argument is ever contained to a court room when it has implications this woeful; no ordinary human would argue there is no Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern race.

You run that case in there, you’re running it to all of your staff. What a cluster.

1. I am almost certain that if the Department of Defence really was assembling horses they would put the hooves on back to front and remove the knees as superfluous to operational requirements and then get upset 20 years later when they arrive to discover they can’t be ridden at all and especially not in the rain because they also bred them with hydrophobia to see what that would be like

2. I’m doing an event at a festival next month in which I have to tell a funny story about a time in my life something went horribly wrong and, look, there’s a lot to choose from but the problem is each of the ones I can now manage to laugh about, personally, are actually wildly traumatic and potentially a mistake to tell on stage. I mean, it’s a mistake I will still choose to make, but the thought occurred to me in advance this time and that’s progress baby.