Over the last days a lot has been made of Senator Barnaby Joyce having crossed the floor in a Senate vote on Government legislation. Why the hubbub? As the Senator has said - or the "National Conscience" as Alan Kohler of The Age and the Eureka Report [the latter well worth reading by the way!] describes him - if all votes are in effect automatic for Coalition members they might as well be proxy votes and made from back in his electorate rather than him having to travel to Canberra to sit in the Senate. His point is simple and nothing new - but worth refelecting on nevertheless.
Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend. Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
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