Asylum seekers stay at luxury Pacific Island resorts

Well obviously they must have been staying in 5 star luxury, given the estimated cost of the government’s “Pacific Solution” of $1 billion to process some 1,700 refugees.  A report, prepared by Oxfam and A Just Australia, which oppose the offshore-processing scheme, calculated it cost more than $500,000 per person to process fewer than 1700 asylum seekers in Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island … thats $1,830 per day.  For that I’d be expecting total luxury for those detainees.  And I thought the government was treating them poorly …must have been wrong!

“The Pacific solution is neither value for money nor humane,” said Andrew Hewett, the head of Oxfam Australia. “In six years since Tampa the cost of the Pacific solution to the Australian taxpayer has been $1 billion. We are calling on the Australian National Audit Office to investigate the full financial cost of the Pacific solution.”

By comparison, it costs $238 per day to keep someone in the Villawood detention centre in Sydney …still the price of a reasonable hotel, but not the complete luxury that our tax dollars are paying for in the Pacific.

Seriously, you have to wonder where the money goes.  Was it truly worth a billion dollars to keep a couple of thousand refugees from the middle east and south Asia out of Australia?  I can’t honestly see how any rational analysis could possibly argue it has been money well spent.  The Government has highlighted the deterrent value of the Pacific solution. However, the report quotes the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, showing a corresponding drop in the number of people seeking asylum in other Western countries due to “improved conditions in some source countries” including Afghanistan.

So not only has Australia’s treatment of refugees since the Tampa incident been absolutely shameful - its also been a fucking huge waste of money.  I wonder how much per redneck vote the cost works out at.

A lesson in budget management for the states

The announcement by John Howard that the Federal Government will take over the funding of the Mersey General Hospital in Tasmania, should offer State governments a valuable opportunity to stretch their budgets further.

The Tasmanian Government has downgraded the Mersey Hospital in Devonport after taking it back from private owners in 2004.  But it has upgraded facilities in Burnie, 60 kilometres away, with an expanded day surgery facility, and at the main hospital in Launceston.  The federal government has decided to underwrite a community-based proposal to keep Devonport’s Mersey hospital open as a fully-operational hospital.  This will will cost taxpayers between $40 million and $45 million a year.  But it will save locals a 60km trip to Burnie for hospital care had the hospital been downgraded to an GP-run community hospital and day surgery unit under state government plans.

The lesson for State governments is of course to drive their budget dollars further by letting key services and facilities in marginal federal government held electorates go to shit, and letting the Feds bail them out.  Only works in marginal seats though, so State treasurers, why waste money on them, put your money into your own marginals, and look after the voters in seats held safely by your own party.

$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.”

Electioneering on the taxpayer’s tab

One of the things opposition parties always bag governments out for is the amount of money wasted on such things as advertising, consultants and travel. Advertising is the big one. And what do oppositions do when they become governments …cut back on the advertising? Of course, not, its snouts in the trough time for them when they win government.

When the Howard government came to power, they cut government advertising spending inherited from the Keating government in half, from about $100m to $50m. Since then its been up, up and away, according to Labor’s Penny Wong, around $1.7 billion during the 11 years of the Howard government.

It now looks like the government is about to spend another $75m telling us how good Workchoices Lite is (sorry, the workplace relations system, seeing Workchoices is now persona non grata). This is after $55m spent last year telling us how good the original Workchoices was.

This year, for ad campaigns already announced, the Howard Government will be spending $173.8 million of our money. It includes, for example, $69 million to promote the Government’s superannuation reforms and $17.5 million to promote the private health insurance rebate. The Howard government has become the single biggest advertiser in Australia … outspending the likes of Macdonalds, Coca Cola, all the banks, car companies, retailers etc. The vast majority of the advertising is purely political messages, not information about essential services, which at least has some justification. The government using taxpayers money to campaign for its re-election so blatantly is nothing short of obscene. When the Howard government is replaced later this year the first thing Kevin Rudd should do is invoice all the advertising costs to Liberal Party HQ - of course thats not going to happen, is it?

To put the size of government advertising into perspective, the Liberal Party spent around $15m on its 2004 election campaign ads. We pay for those too, through public funding of elections, but thats at least vaguely legitimate.

And its not only the federal government advertising constantly its wonders. State and local governments milk their treasuries for everything they”re worth. You can’t go past a government project site without having logos of every agency involved plastered all over it and the smiling face of the premier/minister/mayor responsible. This stuff is high priority too … I’ve seen tender documents that specify the signage to be erected by the winning bidder - saying stuff like how big the signs have to be, the logos etc to be placed on them, how big these are to be, the order they have to appear in, all that sort of junk. Amazing isn’t it, that we have public servants paid to think of shit like that!!!

Update (19/5/2007) - Surprise, surprise, Kevin Rudd is promising to do something about the abuse of government advertising. Lets see what happens after the election.

News roundup

1 Workchoices

According to the federal government, its somehow sinister and nasty that the union movement fund an advertising campaign against the Workchoices legislation, allegedly costing $70m (or $100m depending who you believe). The ACTU denies it is spending anything like this.

Federal Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey claimed the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ campaign would outspend the Federal Government’s commitment by five to one and two-thirds of that money would come from unions. So what? I’m guessing here (I don’t think its much of a stretch) that whatever advertising Joe Hockey is talking about is going to be paid for by taxpayers, not by the Liberal Party, despite it being nothing but party propaganda.

So the government thinks its OK for it to spend taxpayers money on its own propaganda but chucks a sook when opponents use their own money to counter their arguments (by the way, I think the government has done an extremely poor job of arguing a case for Workchoices all along …they have been totally unconvincing).

2 Daily Telegraph vs Kevin Rudd

Isn’t the Telegraph trying to have a serious go at Kevin Rudd? All that beatup about the Anzac Day dawn service in Vietnam that the Sunrise program was trying to stage early so it could appear on their show is just garbage. So what, politicians stage contrived events for TV? Wow, news! Politicians lie …surprise me! I had a look at the Sunday Telegraph yesterday and there were pages on it.

Funny though how Rudd used the “my office didn’t bring it to my attention” excuse in denying knowledge of the dawn service being a stunt …convenient when in trouble, ask Alexander Downer and co, works all the time for them. They’re no doubt all fudging the truth.

Rudd has denied he’s knowingly told a lie or would in his political life. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall …just waiting now for one to be exposed, and no doubt there’ll be journalists on a mission to do exactly that.

3 Footy frolics

More footy boofheads at it again over the last week or so.

First, Sonny Bill Williams and his adventures with Candice Falzon in the toilet at the Clovelly Hotel in Sydney. There’s even photos of the happy couple courtesy of someone’s mobile phone.

A patron said it was obvious what was going on in the toilet.

“There were people in the toilets hearing them in action - they were certainly not discreet,” the source said. “There were a lot of people around who saw them and remarked how brazen they were.”

Sonny Bill is of course “ashamed and embarassed” by his behaviour but claims he was too drunk to remember. Then he grovels to his girlfriend via the press.

Williams said he was speaking out about the incident because he wanted his girlfriend of almost a year, Genna Shaw, to know he loved her.

“Football’s here for a lot of my life, but I want Genna involved in all of it,” he said.

Sweet! Maybe should have thought of that before letting his dick take control. In the mens’ at the pub, errk, how romantic! Surely Williams on his $500k per season salary could have gone to the expense of a room? But of course he was too drunk to remember …not too drunk to get it up though. “Dunny Bill” … what a champion!

Meanwhile, Falzon said her fling with Williams was a huge mistake.

“I’ve made a mistake and I’m very, very sorry about it,” Falzon said.

“I’m conscious of my image as a sportswoman and I’ve got a responsibility to young people.

“Young girls look up to me.”

I’d like to know which ones. She seems to be working her way through a team or so of football players … and she’s a follower of all - rugby league, rugby union, soccer … a true sports fan!

Second, Willie Mason proves himself a tool, yet again. This time he’s been in trouble for carrying on like an idiot after refusing an interview with Radio 2GB journalist Michelle Keighran. She was reduced to tears after Mason refused an interview with her, then interrupted her other interviews with teammates by yelling and imitating rap artists. Hey Willie, fair enough to refuse an interview …but can’t we do it politely like a civilised human, without carrying on like a dickhead? Mason turned 27 yesterday - still acts like a 12 year old much of the time.

To give him some credit, he did call Keighran today to apologise for his behaviour. Next time, Willie, remember, engage brain, then speak and you won’t have to go round apologising for being an arsehole.

Third, Michael Braun of the West Coast (Coke, and I don’t mean the black fizzy stuff) Eagles let slip the magic F word in his acceptance speech for the best player award at a game on the weekend, which was heard by the crowd and TV audience. Not a huge big deal, but I’d have thought the Eagles players would have the smarts to be on their absolute best behaviour at the moment … clearly not it seems.

Just more examples of young men with too much money and time on their hands, inflated opinions of themselves, not much brains, molly coddled by managers and team officials just because they are good at footy.