$135,000 for a seat at the PM’s table

Prime Minister John Howard quickly abandoned plans to spend $540k to extend his private dining room at Parliament House, once the estimated cost of the work was revealed at a Senate estimates hearing yesterday.

Amazing coincidence isn’t it that while officials and the PM’s office had been fluffing around with the proposal since at least September 2005, the decision to scrap it happened virtually instantly it became public knowledge and politically embarassing to the electorally challenged PM.

Don’t know why it took more than 18 months to not make a decision to proceed or not, then about 5 minutes to make it under pressure from the Opposition. Actually why the hell do the parliamentary officials take anything remotely like 18 months to not even get to a firm go/no go decision point? Surely at some stage someone should have realised that “mmmm, half a million to add a few extra seats at the table, not a good deal” or even “this could be a bit embarassing for us if the voters find out about it”.

And how do you spend $540k on extending a dining room to seat 20 rather than the current 16 it can handle? $135k per seat, fuck me dead!!! So the PM can entertain guests with plates of mixed sandwiches at a working lunch. Get real!

More than $65,000 has already been spent on architect and consultant fees for the extension. This is to knock down and rebuild a few walls - how architecturally challenging could that be? And they haven’t even got to the stage of a final design and costing to have spent this. Parliamentary Services Secretary Hilary Penfold said a formal estimate would not be made until the architect put in a final design, at which stage a decision would be made on whether to go ahead with the work. She also said that the budget for the architect was actually $44,000 of which $13,000 had been spent so far.

Still whether its $13k, $44k or $65k, its still a lot of architect for a bit of internal office renovation. And a lot of time spent stuffing around to get to the point it did (or more accurately, didn’t get far at all) in 18 months. The wheels at Parliament House turn very slowly obviously. And clearly no-one until yesterday really thought “mmm, this is a bad idea” …even based on the $200 odd k original rough estimate - they’ve thought that was ok, and then it was ok to spend a decent amount of money on architect and consultant fees, and to continue work even with a $500k estimate which was seemingly also quite far from final. Who knows how much it would have ended up by the time it was finished in (lets guess at the rate they were proceeding with the project) about 2015?

Clearly these officials and political staffers operate in a world where money is no object, nor time it would seem judging by the amount of it wasted not actually getting a hell of a lot done. With crap like this happening, its hardly surprising politicians and their officials are perceived to be out of touch with reality … they routinely demonstrate precisely that!

I’ll close with Senator John Faulkner’s words on the subject:

“Four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, not including the furniture, not including the fit-out, and not including any of the consultants’ or architects’ fees. Four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, and of course the prime minister would want it covered up.

“It is the cost of a house, of course it is. This is just outrageous.”