Now let me emphasise that there is a comma in between the “Hello” and the “World”!
I wish to emphasise this so that nobody gets confused and thinks that I’m making any reference to that time that the Liberal donor and Helloworld booking agent, Andrew Burnes. Now when I call him a booking agent, that wasn’t his only role. He also ran the company and was the one who complained to Mathias about the tender process for the awarding of a government contract before ultimately gaining the contract. I’m not sure if that was when Cormann said, “Oh, by the way, could you book a Singapore holiday for my family at the full commercial rate because I’m a busy man and it’s easier while I’ve got you on the phone to ask you to do it because you’ve obviously got less to do than any of my staff who I’d normally get to make travel arrangements on my behalf.”
However, that was a mistake on then-Senator Cormann’s behalf, because Mr Burnes was so busy that, while he had time to book a Singapore holiday for the whole Cormann family for the full commercial price of $2780, he was too busy to remember to invoice Mr Cormann for the amount and Mr Cormann was too busy to notice that no money had been deducted from his account nor had any bill arrived. Both parties failed to notice until somehow Fairfax media noticed, at which time, both Mr Burnes and Mr Cormann said, “What an oversight. We both certainly hope that the company hasn’t forgotten to charge the government for their government contract…” And to be fair to Mathias, who hasn’t failed to notice when they aren’t charged the odd couple of thousand for a holiday?
Anyway, I’m just pointing out that when I wrote, “Mathias Cormann says Hello, World” it has nothing to do with that whole saga of a finance minister failing to keep track of his personal finances which is surely none of our concern and we should only be worried when he fails to keep track of government finances. Thanks to the watchful eyes of the Liberal Party, Australia’s debt hardly did any more than double in the time he was Finance Minister… Unless you want to count the last Budget which one shouldn’t because that’s nothing to do with the government as it’s bad news.
No, this is about ex-Senator Cormann demonstrating his environmental credentials by helping avoid the spread of Covid-19 and taking a private jet everywhere. Of course, when I say “private”, I actually mean “public” but that would be confusing because it would make it sound like he was using commercial flights and that would be like taking public transport and we can’t have someone who used to be an important figure in the government being forced to wait in line for a flight.
Now some people have asked why he can’t just use the internet and go on Zoom like nearly every worker has been forced to do in the past year. Let me just remind you that he’s going for a very, very important job and we can’t risk the NBN failing to work in the middle of a call. No, he has to go to each city and do the Zoom meeting from there.
The same whingers are also pointing out that there are Australians wanting to return home and the government isn’t putting RAAF jets at their disposal. However, this overlooks the fact that we’d need to house the returning Australians in hotels and the states aren’t making enough positions available. Even though the Federal Government has made a very generous offer and told the states that they have a number of ex-SAS officers prepared to look after hotel quarantine in ways that ensure that any positive cases won’t escape into the community, the states just aren’t helping.
No, some people just don’t understand that were Mr Cormann to be the successful candidate that would be a real feather in the cap for all Australians and people around the world would sit up and take notice because who can’t name all the Secretary-Generals of the OECD for the past twenty years?
And surely, given it’s such a high-paying position, private citizen Cormann would feel an obligation to repay the taxpayer for the use of the jet, and make available all those frequent flyer miles he must have accumulated from his trips to any of the poor souls trying to make it home for Christmas.
Or perhaps he could just avoid controversy by actually paying the bill for his travel this time!
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