It was the $4.99 million question: what does a "complexity and systems thinker" do when he "looks for patterns and weak signals" and "works on reconfiguring organisational dynamics" on a public contract for a vocational education and training institute?
When no one could answer it on Tuesday in the Legislative Assembly, Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee was on to a political winner.
Skills Minister Chris Steel has sent a please-explain letter to the chair of the Canberra Institute of Technology board. How exactly do these contracts - which total more than $8 million and date back five years - present value for public money?
And what does the consultant actually do? In plain, clear English - and don't forget the itemised list.
The demise of the English language is often lamented, but writing like this backs up the claim. Take "a multi-disciplinary and multi-scaled approach to the codesign and implementation of appropriate practices for internal learning and knowledge exchange, for developing improved situational awareness, and for developing both context-specific and generalised responses to the situations CIT encounters" and explain what that actually is.
It's a cliche to evoke George Orwell here (and he was not one for cliches), but he attacked prose that consisted "less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house". That was 76 years ago.
What a prefabricated hen-house the Canberra Institute of Technology have built for themselves.
Not even Mr Steel knows what the contract is for, writing that he was "unable to determine the specific work to be delivered ... based on the use of jargon and an ill-defined statement of requirements".
Mr Steel would be within his rights to be angered. He raised concerns with the Canberra Institute of Technology in March 2021 about contracts issued to the same consultant, questioning whether they were the best use of the institute's money.
It might be the best management consultancy work in the world, taking the Canberra Institute of Technology to new heights and worth every cent.
But if they cannot explain what it is, it's nothing more than an overpriced bitter-tasting soup of words.
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