John Linton ....of 'private enterprise' scamming.
One thing that never seems to change in the business patterns in Australia is the 'end of financial year manic buying' of State and Federal government departments as they find "errors" in their spending over the finacial year that hasn't managed to use up all of their allocated budgets. As this money isn't theirs (it's yours and mine via the taxes we pay) they immediately find something to spend it on (the only criteria being the supplying company must provide an invoice dated prior to whatever their individual department's cut off date for accepting payments is). This happens for small and large amounts of money and in my many decades of experience in dealing with the Federal and State governments Australia is cursed with there has never been an exception to this practice.
You may well shrug your shoulders and simply say ".....well that just the government - what do you expect". Personally I expect sensible spending of the taxes I pay but I understood a long time ago that wasn't ever going to happen. However I'm particularly appalled at the glimpse I got of just how much money Krudd and co are wasting on their mantra of "it's all about jobs". A three page fax came through our home fax machine from this organisation:
http://www.upskilled.com.au/about-upskilled.html
urging us to pay them $4,000 per person (no limit on the number of people) to send them on an 8 day course to "do a National Qualification In:Increased efficiency in administration and better management" for which "the government" would reimburse us. "A more detailed course outline can be seen on www.upskilled.com.au" - but it can't - there is just a few sentences of general fluff on each page of that site with absolutely no specifics of anything including the people runing this scam nor their pretended or actual qualifications - the web site has a 2009 date on it and some of the, few, pages link to the same general page linked from other 'tags'. It also references an organisation called Outsource Services Pty Ltd with whom "Upskilled" has "an auspice partnership".
The first claim of the "Business Sales Cert IV" was that it "Developed product knowledge"....something I would have said was impossible to do without having a course teacher who had detaied knowledge of each attendee's company's products and services wich woud be clearly impossible.
The first three claims of the "Business Administration Cert IV" was that it would each the atendee how to "produce complex business documents, use complex data bases and develop and use complex spreadsheets"...clearly an impossible promise to keep even if the attendees had many years business experience and an MBA.
The fax stressed there were no formal educational or experience pre-requisites for attending any of the courses and the courses were "ideal for eople looking to move into a supervisory or management role".
The fax also..... but no need to go on....you either get the picture or me citing more examples isn't going to help.
I'm not sure who this scam is being pitched to - it arrived on our personal home fax in our case - no addressee company or anything other than our fax number. I can only assume that the intended target bunnies are the same people who respond to the Nigerian - "send me money to get access to millions" dumb scams....only this seems pitched at even dumber people.
If this is an example of Krudd's "Job creation" lunatic spending it exactly defines why 'pump priming' only wastes money that will be impossible to replace.
So nothing to see here....government waste is, for whatever reason, acccepted by taxpayers in every country in the world because it is an inevitability, like corruption, of democracy - as the recent parliamentary scandal in the UK has amply demonstrated - it is very difficut to find a "demoratically elected" politician who is not corrupt - often in the meanest spirited ways. Perhaps Turnbull and co actually do have the proof that Krudd and Whine have not only illegally conspired to misuse the powers of their offices "to help out a mate" but have also brazenly lied to (mislead) the lower house (and the media) about what they did on several occasions. It seems quite probable but whether, if in fact it is true, Krudd can get any such evidence destroyed in time is another matter.
Given Krudd's propensity to keep flinging billions of taxpayer's money in every conceivable direction, including the sort of scam I cited previously in this rambling, it is entirely consistent that he would think it OK to "use a quiet word" to get Ford Finance to provide their money to "a mate"......it's not real money after all.
It doesn't really matter of course.......Krudd is odds on to beat the rap whether there is any truth in it or not......but, for the first time in his smarmy 18 months of demeaning the office of Prime Minister of Australia he will not escape some of the mud that, as the proverb correctly points out, will always stick. It's the only way that 'insignificant' people like us can tell on a few occasions which of the 'significant' people have been found with their hands in the cookie jar.