The Canberra press gallery has peculiar priorities. This week we've found out that the national broadband network hired a Labor mate to a $450,000 a year job without advertising the position and without interviewing any other candidates.
We have also discovered that a federal government scheme to subsidise household solar panels, estimated to cost $150 million over five years, has in fact cost $1 billion in 18 months. That's a budget blowout of more than 600 per cent.
This comes on top of the deaths of four people while working on a government scheme to install insulation in homes.
Then to cap it off, the Prime Minister goes on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night and comes up with lines such as unemployment in Australia is "the second lowest of all the major advanced economies in the world". Which is not true. Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Austria, for example, have lower unemployment rates. The PM also claimed: "My predecessor ripped a billion dollars out of the public hospital system." In fact over the life of the Howard government, funding to public hospitals doubled.
But who does the Canberra press gallery want sacked? Barnaby Joyce. Why? Because a few days ago Joyce, as shadow finance minister, raised the possibility of Australia defaulting on its sovereign debt.
"Foolish", "farcical", "crazy", and "dangerous" are some of the media's descriptions of Joyce's comments. There's no doubt that Joyce's remarks were foolish. And naive. And the attention they generated distracted the focus from a more legitimate argument about the effect of government borrowing on interest rates.
Joyce's mistake was to construct a thought bubble in public. And he's got form. Restricting foreign investment, and breaking up the Big Four banks have been the subject of some of Joyce's other thought bubbles. To a certain extent the problem is not so much that he's willing to engage in contemplation of this kind, but that he's pondering ideas that are quite contrary to what coalition policy should be.
The irony is that on some issues Joyce is excellent. He's one of the few MPs willing to speak out on how environmental regulations are eroding landowners' property rights. And to declare himself sceptical about the science of climate change.
It seems that when it comes to Joyce, the media hold him to a higher standard than his government counterparts. If Joyce had made any of the sort of the factual errors that Rudd committed on Q&A, the pressure on Tony Abbott to sack him would have been irresistible.
Joyce is branded as incompetent because he confused billions and trillions. Meanwhile his opposite number, Lindsay Tanner, is happy to wave through the largest infrastructure project in the nation's history, the national broadband network, without any sort of cost/benefit analysis whatsoever. Surely Tanner's job as Finance Minister is to do exactly what he doesn't appear to be doing. Peter Garrett as Environment Minister is getting the blame for the cost overruns of his green loans scheme, but the question has to be asked, what was the Department of Finance and Deregulation doing while the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts was going $850 million over budget?
In December last year, when Joyce contemplated requiring the major four banks to divest their assets to promote competition, Financial Services Minister Chris Bowen went on ABC radio's AM program complaining of Joyce's "irresponsible thought bubbles". Bowen accused Joyce of thinking "that it's fine for Australian governments to go in and break up existing businesses. We [the Labor government] have a different view". Bowen is right.
However, the interviewer failed to ask Bowen why he was outraged by Joyce's suggestion that the banks be broken up to generate competition in the financial sector, yet he seemed completely comfortable with a Labor government doing exactly the same thing to Telstra.
However ill-considered Joyce's words about Australia defaulting were, the man's in opposition. He can't actually do much. Consider what's worse. The shadow finance minister engaging in idle speculation on the country going broke, or the real Finance Minister allowing his cabinet colleagues to run amok?
Of course the Canberra press gallery should scrutinise what opposition MPs say and do, but there's also a government they should be reporting on.
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