In times of trouble and distress I retreat to my happy place, the Commonwealth contracting and procurement hub AusTender.
Loyal readers of this pamphlet will understand the ritual scroll of comfort that can be found in its vertical, Babylonian hallways. It’s a bit like bird-watching, but instead of a wren you’re hoping to find some kind of fucked-up tit. Something aggressively ordinary or ridiculous and upsetting but nothing in between. The comfort, then, is not in the content but in the act of scrolling to find it; the thrill of discovering the procurement equivalent of a cross-eyed finch.
If this says something about me, I won’t hear of it.
Treasures can be found but one must truly seek. I saw a contract posted the other day for what I thought said horse assembly and almost had a stroke, but, alas, it was hose assembly and I lost interest immediately. It was for the Department of Defence (DoD), of course, because those camo cowboys are always buying something. If it’s not parts for a war vehicle or lubricating oil, it’s stamps.
I always get a little shiver when I see them purchase stationery. You chose the sword, back off. Maybe they’re collecting barcodes from a war periodical and sending them off to redeem one (1) AUKUS submarine in 2055.
Normal can be unsettling in the right circumstances.
There is something troublesome to be found in the spiritual uncertainty of whether to be alarmed or reassured that the DoD needs batteries, for instance. I mean, of course they do, but so do I. We’re the same, really. And that is concerning to me. But also good.
As ever, my affections for the Grains Research and Development Corporation are absolute. How industrious they are, always scheming on some kind of bean breeding program; finger on the pulses.
Lately, the grainiacs have started a search for fresh ideas to protect canola from sensitivity to frost and I’m over here pumping my fist in the air for some reason and shouting Yes, YES, protect my sweetlings and their cold little feet.
I love this for them.
And I find myself thinking: if the grains boffins are doing kindly and noble grain stuff, what are the coastal waters folk up to in the salty broth of the Pacific? Not a legume for days, as far as I know, but the coral is getting a bit hot… Might be something in that for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Let’s see what they’re up to:
God fucking damn it.
I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess the reef is dying and that’s hard to talk about. This contract description is very funny to me because it actually sounds like they have booked “difficult conversation training” and now they’re spending $22,000 to mitigate it. Some guy called Greg has reserved a conference room and is making everyone who wants to talk hold a crown of thorns starfish until their hands bleed. And management is like he’s doing it again. I’m just spitballin’.
I looked up the company that offers this course and now I’m getting targeted ads on Instagram in case I wanted to learn how to manage difficult conversations which I do not. I want to lean into them.
One of the perennial AusTender favourites that shows up every now and again like a shooting star — appropriately just celestial ejecta burning up in the atmosphere — is the temporary personnel hire for [insert humorously opposed job title here]. You could have a temporary labour hire contract for a lion tamer, par exemple, which implies the last guy [or girl] was not very good at the job and little is expected of the new one. Or you could have this:
Same same.
And who better to manage labour-hire contracts in your agency than a person you found on labour hire?
The call’s coming from outside the house.
I like these ones the most because they appeal to my deeply held belief that the absurd is right next to horror. Last week I wrote about a national audit of the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) asset management and maintenance of its weather observation system and it was, uh, not good. Like, it was really bad. And there were so many examples throughout this report where the BoM said it would have some process or plan or even money in place only to report back three, four or five years later that they just didn’t bother or forgot. That’s my excuse. You’re an agency. Of government!
There was one line in the audit report which made me chuckle and chuckle even though it was not ideal. It was about a key Strategic Asset Management Plan, or SAMP, developed in 2018 and last updated in 2020 and then sort of, just, not touched again. Like the rest of us during COVID, come to think of it.
Without further ado:
The Bureau has not reported on progress against the initiatives of the SAMP, including the initiative to regularly review progress.
I wrote ‘LOL’ in my research notes next to this line when I clipped it for my bower (this is what I call my nest of curios and trinkets I collect for my stories) which is very restrained of me, just so you know.
AusTender is a great friend of the bower. I scan it like a factory worker on the line sorting produce into one bucket for serious journalism and a second bucket for a little chuckle. To wit:
Hard two words to say right next to each other, you’ll note. Try it now.
I vote for a shortened form: dogstacles. I don’t know how many dog obstacles they planned on buying — the turreted spreadsheetists at DoD never do say — but imagine the kinds of hurdles you could put in front of a dog for $13,400. You could start young, at puppy school, and fund a career counsellor to give them shady advice and mangle their professional trajectory. Or build a wall of vacuum cleaners three metres high.
Somebody funnier than me on the internet once said “you just don’t see dogs running out of butcher shops with three links of sausages in their mouths anymore” and I think I know why: dogstacles.
What else aren’t they telling us?
I came across an agency looking for this the other week:
And I wanted to email and let them know there is a 14-year-old kid called Jayden at the Boonah skate park who would absolutely do this for at least half the asking price of the best bid. And he’d do it in grapefruit!
Look, I know there are, 98% of the time, perfectly reasonable uses for all of these things that get put out to tender. Like, I know the Royal Australian Mint uses a die to create hobs to strike coins out of blanks but when I come across an entry like this:
I still think it’s the funniest thing in the world because it’s one-third German for “the failure investigation”.
To be fair to me, I never claimed to be sophisticated.
Which brings me to the last of our Defence contracts about which it is very important I say nothing at all.
Nothing. At. All.
This is republished with permission from Rick Morton’s newsletter Nervous Laughter.
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