Confirming my prejudices

Apologies for a light post this weekend. I appear to have formed quite a number of fixed ideas about St Kevin, his motives, his world-view, and his behaviour, so that my reaction to news about him is now more 'well, that's in keeping with his character', than 'I'll have to write a post about that!'

For example, who could be surprised to learn this week that the Haloed One had banished the former head of the international section at the Prime Minister's department to Stockholm, a relatively minor posting compared to Berlin, the one originally offered to him?

St Kev has dismissed talk of this as being his punishing a bureaucrat that he doesn't happen to like as rubbish with the line that Mr Borrowman's German is substandard, and therefore he isn't fit for a position in the German embassy.

This. Is. Rubbish. Don't you believe it. Let's go through some reasons why.

It's just not true. By the government's own admission:

Mr Rudd's claims on Tuesday that he rejected Mr Borrowman's credentials for the Berlin post because of inadequate language skills was contrary to a statement five days earlier from Mr Smith singling out his proficiency in German, Swedish and Mandarin, Ms Bishop said.

Not all people appointed to embassies speak the language of the country to which they have been posted. Some do, but not all - that is my understanding.

Foreign Affairs has an excellent language training program. If speaking German is so important for the position, then why not send Mr Borrowman there for a couple of months of intensive German, to tighten up his skills?

Like many workplaces, Foreign Affairs has its Important Jobs and Backwater Jobs, and a successful career will likely see a person occupying a few of the Important Jobs as he or she works their way up the greasy pole. Berlin is clearly an Important Job, and is offered as a plum to those who have done well or deserve reward or who have been Marked For Greater Things, language skills notwithstanding. Stockholm is clearly a Backwater Job. St Kevin's decision is all about taking a plum away from Mr Borrowman and putting him in a Backwater Job.

No, this decision had nothing to do with Mr Borrowman's language skills. It is all about a petty man abusing his position to settle a score with someone who crossed him in some way.

Which is exactly the behaviour you would expect from someone who would chuck a tantie over a lamb dinner, or a missing hairdryer.

No wonder they can't find a replacement for Mr Borrowman.

Then we learn, via the Senate Estimates process, that the $43 billion plan for a national broadband network was cooked up on a couple of plane trips that Nanny Conroy took with St Kevin after it was clear that the tender process had failed. No cost benefit analysis. No estimates of demand, of the responses of other media and technology players. Just a couple of Labor party hacks deciding to spend an amount of money nearly nine times the amount spent on the Snowy River Scheme on an election promise.

Then we get the madness of the hard hats and fluoro jackets, as St Kevin pops up out of the ground like a mole at building sites all over the country. Surely, work as important and costly as this has been subjected to rigorous financial analysis?

The Rudd-Albanese strategy is clear. Between now and voting day the Prime Minister and his Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, plan a "shock and awe" campaign with an onslaught of Labor MPs in hard hats advancing electorate by electorate armed with the heavy artillery of localised infrastructure projects paid for by government.

But there will inevitably be an Opposition counterattack and the shape of that response is already taking shape.

It should begin with questions about the transparency of this entire $22 billion enterprise. Infrastructure Australia, the arms-length body headed by Labor's handpicked business favourite, Rod Eddington, "chose" an initial "A" list of 10 projects in the budget for immediate go-ahead.

But there's a remarkable omission in all of this. Neither in the budget papers, nor in the National Infrastructure Priorities list published by the Government, nor on the Infrastructure Australia website is there any supporting cost benefit analysis of any of the chosen projects. None.

The Government is simply asking voters and the private sector to take them on trust. To say groups such as the Business Council of Australia are worried by such an approach is an understatement. They are now demanding the numbers that underpinned the choice of the selected projects be published so it can assess, on behalf of voters, how much productivity bang they're going to get for their buck.

Their chances don't look good. A spokesman for Albanese told this column yesterday that while the economic analysis in question was in the hands of Infrastructure Australia it could not be released because it is "commercial in confidence".

Which really means the Government plans to spend $22 billion of taxpayers' money without any explanation as to the viability of that spending. All of which made for a somewhat uncomfortable interview between Eddington and Alan Kohler on the ABC's Inside Business program yesterday.

Kohler made it clear he was less than impressed with the Infrastructure Australia budget process, to which Eddington could only reply: "We put forward the submissions we felt met all the criteria and where the work had been done with the rigour that we demanded and, to be frank, the Prime Minister and the Infrastructure Minister demanded."

Well that's great. But it's also a hard proposition to test without public access to the calculations supporting the spending. Especially when you get critiques like this from experts such as Paul Mees, senior lecturer in transport planning at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who's cast his eye over the budget funding for the Melbourne Regional Rail Link.

"The Victorian Government adopted the Eddington regional rail link proposal and forwarded it directly to the federal advisory body Infrastructure Australia, chaired by none other than Rod Eddington," Mees says.

You can add into this opaque process some unusually loose words on the planned national broadband rollout from the usually highly disciplined Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, during a week obscured by the budget babble. Tanner told the online finance news service Business Spectator that the estimated $43billion cost was the "outer limit", which included "a sizeable chunk of contingency built into it".

A couple of people have wised up in the last few days to the charade. Mark Thomson, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has questioned the spending plans behind the defence white paper:

"We risk adopting a defence posture that is more talk than action," says the report. [What, like the Prime Minister? ed] "Having made the case, albeit elliptically, that we need to hedge against the rise of the Middle Kingdom [China], [the white paper] presents a response that will take decades to take form … The focus on the far-term comes at the expense of almost any information about what Defence will deliver in the meantime."

Then there is the frank appraisal of the Prime Minister coming from Beijing.

"We truly want Australia, which we view as a middle power, to play a bigger role internationally," he said.

"I think Mr Rudd's proposal for an Asia-Pacific community is brilliant, and has earned solid support from China. But there has been no follow-up. Nothing substantial is happening to take it further."

He said that "perhaps we should focus on Mr Rudd as a politician".

"He offers words that can be very touching, but may not be taken too seriously,"

You don't say!

He said that Mr Rudd "came up with a lot of thoughts".

"But how to put them into effect? Maybe he's just too much entangled in domestic politics.

A bit like the defence white paper, and the broadband network. And the infrastructure projects.

You see, St Kevin's workaholism is nothing more than constant movement and frittering away time on trifles. He doesn't have an appetite for hard work - planning, discussing alternatives, ironing out small but crucial details, nutting out costs and benefits, listening to dissenting opinions and forging a consensus. This is too hard. Better to think of a grand plan, sell it by wearing a hard hat, place it on the national credit card, and leave it to others to work out the details and pay for it later.

This flippancy and pettiness are going to cost us.