Penny-wise, pound-foolish PM off the dial on watches

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Gary Ramage

Well, you have to concede one stunningly successful achievement to the Captain Queeg of our downunder polity, our Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

No, he might not have found the strawberries, but he has decisively settled a centuries-old head-to-head confrontation between two of our most entrenched, and in simpler — and also, self-evidently, pre-decimal — times, also most oft-quoted maxims.

It’s almost as if he set out to make the mark of his prime ministership the proving beyond doubt of the truth of the saying about being “penny wise and pound-foolish”.

Not that he and his cabinet have been that wise about the pennies; and the depth and extent of their big-spending stupidity has made one long for mere foolishness.

But most certainly, he has been unrelenting in his dedication to denying any truth to the competing, contrasting instruction that if only you “look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves”.

Boy, “looking after the pennies”, or at least being outraged, and I mean outraged by them — the $20k of course that former AusPost CEO Christine Holgate spent on those damned Cartier watches — well and truly has not seen “the pounds” look after themselves.

Indeed, the PM immediately embarked on wasting “pounds” wholesale, starting with the expenditure of somewhere between twenty and fifty times that $20k on an utterly pointless and similarly inclusive Caine Mutiny-style investigation.

Indeed, the so-called Maddocks Report into the nefarious case of the Cartier time-pieces reads at times like a parody of the nefarious case of the Caine Mutiny strawberries — or perhaps the alternative script the movie-makers didn’t use.

Where the original Captain Queeg had the mess-hand dole out sand to mimic servings of strawberries, our downunder Capt’n Queeg’s report doled out solemn findings like it could find no written approval to buy the capital-W “Watches” from the board or even from a “single board member”.

And, it could find no formal policy that supported gifting of the, still capital-W “Watches”.

Imagine the time — and big-figure dollars — spent to prove that AusPost did not have a specific policy for the handing out of Cartier, still Capital-W, Watches.

Surely not; doesn’t every company have such a policy, written down and spelt out in detail? Surely, these policies draw distinctions between Cartier and Rolex, Omega and Patek Phil­lipe? Surely, surely?

Substitute, capital-S of course, Strawberries for capital-W Watches and you might get some sense of how utterly insane — and breathtakingly inane — this whole entire frenzy has been.

Our Capt’n Queeg didn’t only commit to his $600k or more on the strawberries-style search, he also committed AusPost to spend perhaps 30-40 times the $20k on finding a successor-CEO.

This could in the long-run cost AusPost and the taxpayer not merely the aphorismic “pounds”, but tens of millions of actual pounds (one for every two dollars) if the new CEO proves to be less effective than the established and undeniably effective predecessor.

Indeed, the whole Watches saga only came about precisely because Holgate was such a great CEO — the $20k was spent in recognition of a deal that brought $220m into AusPost.

All that is just the immediate, appalling implementation by Morrison of “penny wise and pounds foolish”. The $20k versus the millions he has already wasted — and potentially the much greater millions that could be further lost as a consequence.

Let’s look at – only — some of the rest, in ascending order.

There’s the $1m-plus the government spent on getting a private citizen, former finance minister Mathias Cormann, a lush tax-free job in Paris as secretary-general of the OECD.

Cormann does not represent Australia; we have a separate (expensive, and arguably, already pounds-foolish) “ambassador to the OECD”.

The idea that Cormann is going to impose Australia’s agenda on the OECD is utterly laughable. He’s already imbibed the European agenda on so-called climate change to get the job.

There’s the $30m the government paid for a property worth $3m — the revelation of which was the proximate cause of Morrison’s outrage over the $20k.

He didn’t target Holgate because of her sex, simply her unfortunate timing. He went full Captain Queeg on her watches to bury discussion of the property.

There’s the $90bn spent on JobKeeper. Yes, I have always been and remain a supporter of the program — especially as I specifically called for it before we got it, back in March last year. And in the broad, it’s been a stunning success.

But at the individual enterprise level, it’s also been a major, major overspend. I wouldn’t use the word rort — because in the great words of John Singleton “a rort’s only a rort if you’re not in on it”, and just about “everybody’s” been in on JobKeeper.

But it’s clearly been one of the three great COVID-era government-mandated wealth generators — the others being property and shares. As a very rough guess I’d say maybe $10bn-15bn of the $90bn flowed into the pockets of business-owners, not their workers.

Then there’s the $40bn-plus we are spending on buying and maintaining the increasingly problematic F35 fighters.

But at least they are 21st century technology, they are actually in the air and indeed here. Contrast that with the greatest and never, never to be equalled far less topped exercise in “pounds foolishness” in our history.

This is the $200bn, and counting — that’s 100bn pounds, and counting — spent on the mythical ‘‘back to a First World War future’’ French submarines.

Take a nuclear sub and replace the nuclear engine with an old-style diesel one; just like you’d take an F-35 and replace its engine with a propeller. And why not add a second wing for real authenticity?

Now true, Capt’n ScoMo didn’t buy the subs; it was his predecessor, the Philby-level loyal Malcolm Turnbull. But if he didn’t want to be (100 billion or so) pounds foolish, he should have long since cancelled them.

Or at least, have extracted a promise from the Chinese that they won’t do anything naughty before the subs might get here, sometime after 2045.