The Devil Take Your Stereo And Your Record Collection!

Frequently, when I talk about music, I am showing my age. The title to this blog is borrowed from Stand and Deliver, an early 80s song from English group Adam and the Ants. They were very big in 1981 – I recall Ant Music spending about 10 weeks on top of the Australian singles chart which was pretty much unprecedented (try doing that Taylor Swift!).

The line just popped into my head last night, even though I have never had any interest in listening to Adam and the Ants in the intervening four decades plus, and don’t own (nor intend to own) any of their recordings in either physical or electronic form.

The catalyst for me thinking about an obscure 1981 hit single was the arrival, on Friday in the mail, of Flying with Angels, Suzanne Vega’s latest album – her first studio album in over a decade.

Streaming means that I very rarely buy any CDs anymore, and nor do I bother playing them. Suzanne Vega, my favourite singer, is an exception to that rule – I just had to have her album in physical form, as with all her other albums, and some of her more obscure song track or tribute recordings (how else would I know about Laura Nyro, a folk singer whom Vega sees as a precursor?).

So last night I did something which is rare for me in recent years – I played some CDs rather than to just simply stream. I unpacked the CD player my cousin bought for me as a gift several years ago, and which had sat unopened and unused for all that time, plugged it in, and worked out how to use it.

Then I played Flying with Angels twice. After that, being in an indulgent mood, I grabbed my copy of Tori Amos’ early (and disavowed) album, Y Kant Tori Read, which I bought for about $150 in the Belconnen Music Shop in 1999 during my seven month sojourn in Canberra, and played that. [OK – it is not as good as Under The Pink or From The Choirgirl Hotel, but Tori Amos did not need to disown it except for the terrible 1980s hairstyle she wore on the cover.]

Then, to finish off the evening, I played a CD of Maeba Mina, a reclusive Italian singer with a cult following – another gift from my cousin.

I found it all more relaxing than streaming, which usually involves me picking out individual songs I like and paying close attention.

So… whilst I don’t own a stereo as such, and my record collection is a story for another day (I inadvertently acquired a large vinyl collection 14 years ago), I do have a large CD library (300 plus) that I need to listen to again. So the Devil can’t take them yet.

Wine Industry Conditions The Worst In 40 Years?

As the few readers of this blog would know, I enjoy wine, particularly red wine. I also own shares in Treasury Wine Estate, the main (virtually sole) wine company publicly listed on the ASX.

Last week, I went to a winery dinner at a pub in South Melbourne. The convenor of the Bottle Club I regularly attend is close friends with the owners of a family owned Barossa winery, and arranged for tickets for us to go to this dinner.

It was a very convivial evening, and the winemakers were very generous with refills of their two flagship red wines (which have a recommended retail price of over $200 per bottle).

After the cheese platter was served and people were standing around chatting, glass in hand, I approached one of the owners along with my friend. I asked about how it was that Treasury had lost 30% of its share price in the past 6 months, and Australian Vintage Group (a relative minnow on the ASX) had lost over 80% of its share price in the past three years.

His reply was as sobering as it could be for an investor in the wine industry who had happily had his two glasses refilled several times over the course of the evening. He said that industry conditions were the toughest he had seen since his teenage years, when the vine pulling program had gone into effect. In fact, conditions were tougher than when the vine pulling happened.

I had been vaguely aware of the vine pulling program, which gets alluded to in various of the books on Australian wine and its history which I have read. But I had not really thought about it too much. After all, in 1987 when it happened, I was a silly 18 year old blundering into adulthood and making my fair share of dumb decisions.

The vine pulling program was a South Australian government initiative to subsidise the removal of uneconomic grape vines in 1987, a time when the wine industry was on very hard times. As a result of this, we lost a lot of ancient vines which might have been used to produce some very high quality wines (FYI, old vines produce less fruit, but of much higher quality).

Knowing that times are tougher now in the wine industry than they were almost 40 years ago is not great news. Not only am I a nominal investor in the wine industry, but I feel a great connection with and affinity to the industry and to winemakers generally (I am an amateur wine maker after all). When they suffer, it makes me feel sad.

And even though I have limited skin in the game, watching Treasury’s share price drop under $8 this morning was not a pleasant experience.

A Happy Day On The Sharemarket

At the end of March, one of those share market newsletters I subscribe to tried spruiking another more premium newsletter dealing with share market volatility, talking about ‘Big Wednesday’ – a period of great volatility and falls.

I wrote about that matter at the time. Soon after, the Trump tariff announcements caused some falls, followed immediately afterwards with great rises – a kangaroo market as some financial journalist called it.

That newsletter didn’t talk about Big Wednesday after that for a few weeks. Last week, after almost 2 months, they started predicting Big Wednesday yet again. Just as they have predicted it at various other times in the past few years.

I’m not going to listen to those predictions. I am inclined to think that a prediction about the megadraw jackpots this week on both Auslotto and Powerball are just as likely to come true.

What I think the takeaway from my experience at the time of the Covid bear market in early 2020 is that sitting on one’s share portfolio instead of trying to time the market is a safer bet for long term wealth.

Today was a very happy and totally unexpected day on the ASX for me. Washington Soul H Pattison, commonly known as Soul Patts, announced a merger with Brickworks.

For my entire life (56 years), Soul Patts and Brickworks have been in a strategic alliance where they have been significant shareholders in each other’s company. This has takeover proofed both businesses, although there have been raiders and shareholder advocates who have tried to undermine this arrangement.

With the merger, this will create a $14 billion conglomerate, which will probably be even more takeover proof than the cross shareholding arrangement.

As of ten seconds ago, the share price of Soul Patts shares have surged $5.64 since the opening bell this morning. That represents (given I have 5000 shares) a gain of $28,200 today. This has never happened to me before – mostly sudden share market movements have down seriously south.

I assume that profit takers will liquidate their holdings, and that once the endorphins wear off, the share price will drop again.

But I’m not selling for a quick profit. Soul Patts is the closest thing we have in Australia to Berkshire Hathaway, and I am holding on for the long haul.

Share Market Falls Upwards

This past Thursday, I went to lunch at Jimmy Watson in Lygon Street, as is now my custom one day each month.

You see, I have joined what is commonly known as a ‘Bottle Club’ – this is a convivial group of (almost exclusively male) like minded individuals who enjoy fine wine and good company to the extent that they will regularly spend an afternoon together regaling each other about amusing anecdotes and their own personal likes and dislikes in wine, whilst sharing personally selected bottles from one’s own cellar (well, sometimes some do cheat and buy something decent on the way to lunch).

Late in the afternoon, before we moved downstairs to the main bar to kick on for a little longer, one of my fellow bon vivants prodded another about share market tips. You see, the second chap, a retired stock broker, had once tipped a particular company, which had then lost about 90% of its value after the first chap had bought it, and then had gone forward. Timing is everything after all, and we all found this uproariously funny.

After all, none of us are going to bet the entire house on a single company, are we?

The retired stock broker proceeded to give us another hot tip, a pharmaceutical company which has announced a revolutionary new drug. When it was announced, the share price went up considerably late last year, but has now settled down to about 15% of its former value. He is now of the view that the drug is about to enter the market, and the price will recover greatly, making a tidy packet for those of us who might want to take a punt right now.

For various reasons, one of which being that I have never been successfully speculating on any hot prospect, I have not rushed out to buy shares in that tip. But I have added it to my high risk speculative watch list.

It did however remind me of how capricious the share market has been in relation to predictions in recent weeks. At the end of March, I casually speculated about whether the market was going to crash or not, and mentioned that one of the stock tipping pages to which I subscribe was spruiking an imminent period of volatility they were describing as ‘Big Wednesday’ and subscription to another newsletter to help surf through that period of volatility.

The very next week Trump announced his tariffs and the market universally dropped, and that stable of commentators were rather triumphant that Big Wednesday was upon us.

Things have changed since then, and the share market has, for the most part, been falling upward, defying those predictions, probably on the euphoria that comes from Trump starting to walk back his universal tariff plans.

[Another possible factor is the fall in interest rates, which reduces the possible benefits of holding cash, subsequently encouraging people to resume putting their money into shares.]

On the increasing regular occasions that I put on jacket and tie and visit the Savage Club, I like to sit in the Social Room and peruse all four of the major daily newspapers (The Age, The Herald Sub, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review). I think that it was sometime in mid April that a business commentator in The Age wryly commented that we were not in a Bear or Bull market, but in a Kangaroo market. It is simply hopping up and down.

That may well be the case, but it does make me increasingly skeptical about either taking any short term actions which do not involve simply sitting on my current position, nor indulging in making any small punts on hot tips.

Initial Thoughts On The Cessation Of The Liberal-National Coalition

I cannot be bothered being too insightful about the decision by the National Party to (for now at least) abandon the Coalition for the first time since the Clive Palmer managed debacle which was the ‘Joh for PM’ campaign of early 1987 (a debacle which I fully embraced as a rather naive and silly 18 year old, and which collapsed without me even having a chance to vote for a Joh endorsed candidate).

I might in a few days or weeks write something about it in greater detail, although as someone who is not particularly impressed by the Labor-Lite leadership of the Liberal Party offered by Sussan Ley and her beige sidekick, I am more content just to sit back right now and watch Ms Ley et al squirm.

But I remembered that in Warren Fahey’s compilation The Balls of Bob Menzies – Australian Political Songs 1900-1980 there is a song written by John Quiggin (most recently known as an economics professor) which is particularly apt when anyone thinks that the National Party (in its previous manifestation as the Country Party) has any integrity or reason to appeal to voters:

When I was young and easily led

And all the go was baiting reds

I thought I’d take up kicking heads

And join the Country Party

Chorus:

Toora Loora Loora Loo

Horse and dog and kangaroo

And if I was a thug like you

I’d join the Country Party

In Parliament I took a punt

With Nixon, Sinclair and Ralph Hunt

And soon was known as the biggest berk

In all the Country Party

If you’re young and very bright

Your dad can teach you how to write

Just sign his name and you’ll be right

To join the Country Party

Sing a song of Billy Hughes

A man of ever-changing views

But at least he couldn’t be accused

Of voting Country Party

Up in Queensland we’ve got Joh

And down in Canberra he’s got Flo

And don’t it make you want to go

And join the Country Party.

Insignia Financial Lose A Suitor

My late father’s superannuation was invested in insurance bonds with what was then IOOF. As a result, when IOOF demutualised circa 2002, my mother got 2715 shares in that company. At some point in recent years, they changed their name to Insignia Financial, and two years ago, they sold their insurance bond business off to Australian Unity.

So currently, the only link that my family has to what used to be known as IOOF is that small shareholding in Insignia Financial.

Given that I attend the annual general meetings now that I am retired, I have much opportunity to pay attention to this company which formerly had great significance to my family.

Two years ago, when the share price had dwindled to $2, there was barely a peep from the bemused shareholders. Last year, when the share price had risen to $3, there was significant anger, given that the dividend had been suspended for the financial year. [Some of the books I read 30 years ago when I was first teaching myself about the share market advised to sell immediately when a company stopped paying a dividend.]

One shareholder went back through several years of recent annual reports and quoted the identical language and repeated promises of improvement which had gone unfulfilled.

I can understand the anger. The share price has spent at least two prolonged periods in the past 20 years above $10, including around 2005 and then again around 2015. Just like AMP, another demutualised local financial institution, they have been an investor’s horror story.

My own attitude, when the news broke earlier this year that there was a takeover bid for Insignia, was that it could not happen soon enough. Let’s all cash in what we can get and move on. When it emerged that there were three companies bidding for IFL, and that the prospective price was $5, I was mildly delighted. That meant my family could disengage from IFL in its current form for good (my mother does not have a share trading account obviously, so we would have to wait for the takeover to come to fruition).

Today, Bain Capital (sounds like a Batman villian) has announced it is withdrawing its bid due to volatility in global financial markets. I expect that the other suitors will either withdraw their bids or revise them downwards. The IFL share price is subsequently down this morning from $4 at close last night to $3.41 – that is quite a spectacular fall.

So what should I do? Do I want to put some skin in the game directly and buy some shares in IFL myself, or just watch and see what develops?

Investing In Wine Companies Does Not Seem Like A Good Idea Right Now

I know a fellow who has, as his What’s App profile, a photo of the Bentley he possesses via hire purchase. As I discovered when he boasted to me and some others of his acquaintances (he is difficult to like enough to have real friends), a Bentley is far more expensive than a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or a Maserati (he is, like me, ethnically Italian so I was rather surprised he did not go for an Italian luxury car). I am not sure if he still has the Bentley, but I am pretty sure he does not have any of the money he spent leasing it (although as he used it as a prop to help him pick up women, I suspect he got exceptionally good value out of it).

It did get me thinking about all the sorts of material possessions we would like to own which might give us a little bit of pleasure, but cause us a lot of financial grief. Whilst I have no real interest, not having a drivers license, in getting a sports car, I do dream of other luxury toys I might acquire.

However, I am very well aware of the old saying:

What are the two happiest days in a boat owners life?

The day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it.

You can substitute a lot of expensive toys in place of a boat – like a sports car, or a pub, or a holiday house…

… Or, perhaps, a winery.

It has long been one of my dreams to own a vineyard or a country pub. I expect that either would very quickly turn into a nightmare of the money pit variety.

As a substitute for owning my own vineyard, I own 1000 shares in Treasury Wine Estate, Australia’s largest wine company. Those shares have recently taken a battering, and are now at about $9 each – about 10% under what I paid for them 5 years ago. Ouch!

The headwinds which seem to be battering Treasury are also affecting other local wine producers, and all of them seem to be reacting in the same way to the challenges, by tying to slash brands.

Late last year, Treasury announced its intention to sell off several of its less premium brands which are not generating as much profit. Those include Lindemans, Yellowglen, and Wolf Blass. Mind you, I do take exception to calling Wolf Blass less premium, as indeed would Wolf Blass himself, the not so shy founder of that label. Wolf Blass Black Label is a very known super premium wine of relatively ancient lineage after all, and I do still regularly enjoy the Grey Label, which is priced more reasonably.

Apparently, that attempted sale has fallen through, as no buyer has emerged who is willing to pay anything near the price Treasury expects for those brands.

Which probably means that some brands will be more or less retired and written off, as has been the case with Jamison’s Run and Rosemount, for instance. I just hope that if they take the axe to Wolf Blass, they do not get rid of the Grey or Black labels.

Australian Vintage Group, currently the only other ASX listed wine company, has got similar problems, but is a much smaller company than Treasury. Since I dumped my shares 23 months ago at around 40 cents (a loss of about 20 cents per share) when they announced that they were not paying a dividend for the foreseeable future, the price has declined down to around 10 cents per share. The intervening period has seen the CEO sacked by the Board, then rehired by the new Board after a Board purge, and then retire recently in what passes at AVG as an orderly succession plan.

Much as they cannot really sell off or retire individual brands due to having a much more limited range than Treasury, what they did concede at some stage was that everything was on the table, that is, that the sale of the entire company to any interested buyer was not out of the question.

I am somewhat skeptical as to whether that is going to happen. The company, at a market capitalisation of $20 million, is not big enough to make any particular dent in the Australian domestic or export market, and has lost about 98% of its value over the past two decades.

[Of course, if I were to win Powerball megadraw, the first hint you might get would be if I were to do something so puerile as to put in a takeover bid for Australian Vintage Group.]

Much larger than AVG, and probably on a similar scale to Treasury, is the newly created Vinarchy. This is a merger of Accolade (which was previously known as Constellation and before that was the ASX listed wine conglomerate BRL Hardy – it currently is owned by private equity) and the Pernod Ricard owned Australian wine businesses. They have announced recently that they will shed 50 or so of their currently held brands so as to focus on 100 brands.

This is similar to what Treasury has down in recent years, where it has gone from over 80 brands at the time of initial listing circa 2010 down to just over 20 labels currently.

I follow those developments with interest, both as a long term investor in the wine industry (I have at various times owned shares not only in Treasury and AVG, but also Fosters Group, Southcorp and BRL Hardy), but as an avid consumer of the product.

Just as Holy Illium (ie Troy) fell, no business, not even any of my favourite wine labels, can be immune to market forces. Family owned multi general winery McWilliams went into administration several years ago and is now owned by a totally different family. Various small ASX listed wineries went under when the 1990s wine boom ended. Rosemount was once the second selling wine brand in Australia and is now a footnote in the Treasury annual report. Yellow Tail (ie the Casella Family) has steadily and shrewdly been buying up brands discarded by the conglomerates.

Which makes my attendance at the Treasury Annual General Meeting in 5 months’ time even more compelling – I do need to get as much value as I can out of the catering, which includes as many glasses of Penfolds Bin 28 as I can drink! If only it were Grange!

Flying With Angels

I have written in this blog before about how Suzanne Vega has been my favourite singer for a very long time – since 1986, which was one of the most challenging years of my life.

Her self titled debut album was released in May 1985, and the first single from that album started to get airplay in Australia in February 1986 – a very different time when the internet was not ubiquitous so we did not get our TV shows or music released at the same time as the US or Europe. I became very familiar with that debut album very quickly, and then bought the follow up, Solitude Standing, in 1987 when it was released in Australia.

Whilst most people regard Solitude Standing as the best of her work, I still enjoy the debut album, which seems to be mostly acoustic guitar, the most.

She did quite a few albums after that, although I was not as big a fan of all of them. I first saw her perform live in July 1993 at what we now call Hamer Hall when she was touring to promote her fourth album, 99.9F degrees. I had listened to that album enough by then to consider it weaker than her earlier work, but performed live, there was not a weak song in the set.

It was in 1996 or 1997 that she released her fifth album, 9 Objects of Desire. That album went in a different direction to what I was used to from her, and I was a little disappointed.

In 1999, when I was working in Canberra, she released Tried and True, her first Greatest Hits album – it had two new tracks on it which were well worthy of inclusion on any of her first three albums (Rosemary, and A Book and a Cover). At age 30, I said to myself that when someone I have been a fan of since my teenage years releases a Greatest Hits, I was getting old. She rereleased her Greatest Hits under the title Retrospective a few years later.

I still buy every album when it comes out (only two post the Greatest Hits releases), and I do try to get tickets when she tours, provided I have enough notice. Last time I saw her was at the Palais in August 2018 (or was it 2019?). Deborah Conway and Willie Zygier were the supporting act, and I do suspect that in their home town, the supporting act are more popular (even though I was disappointed Conway did not perform any of her own classics off String of Pearls).

Now Suzanne Vega is back, with Flying With Angels, her first studio album in a very long time. It was released less than a week ago, and I put aside some time on Tuesday night to stream the entire album through my Apple Music subscription. It is great that we can, with the miracle of the internet, stream music in Australia at the same time as it is released in the USA – we don’t have to wait for months as in the olden days.

I find it to be a great album. There are no songs which stand out particularly, but it does sound so much in the style of her earlier work from the mid 1980s as to fill me with joy, as if I was still on the northern edge of seventeen, about to embark on life, rather than in late middle age and a self funded retiree.

This might be the 21st Century, but I am not content to just rely on internet streaming to access this album. Today I decided to buy it in CD format. I first visited JB Hi Fi at Highpoint where I found, to my mild disappointment, that none of her music was for sale. So I went online. Amazon was offering it for about $40, and JB Hi Fi was offering it for about $30. I signed up for the JB Hi Fi loyalty program, got a $10 welcome voucher, so, with postage, it will cost me about $23.

True, I will have to wait until early July, but I am in no hurry for the CD to arrive. I mostly just want it for the peace of mind. I might even unpack my CD player, which still sits unused in its unopened box.

Vox Populi Vox Dei Redux – Takeaways From Last Saturday’s Federal Election

Three years ago, just before the 2022 Federal Election, I made some reflections on the lack of political engagement on the part of the Australian populace, compared to their counterparts in the 1950s:

Vox Populi Vox Dei – Reflections On The Upcoming Federal Election

With the 2025 election now all but over, with just a few seats left to count and confirm the winner, it is time for some sober reflection.

Having changed my two party preferred choice for the first time in my life, albeit with great reluctance and sadness (although not with regret), I was able to watch the election night coverage on my iMac with something approaching objectivity, if not actual schadenfreude. I sipped some decent (albeit not too fine) red wine over the course of five hours as I enjoyed the ABC coverage of the election.

As was clear before the night was over, the Coalition has suffered its greatest defeat since its creation in 1944, losing just about every seat in Melbourne and Sydney.

I was a little surprised, as indeed would have been most other politically interested citizens. The Coalition campaign was pathetic, but I did not (perhaps because I did not really follow the campaign that closely) expect it to result in such a landmark defeat.

I do see some serious concerns for the health of our democracy from this election result. A weak opposition is unable to hold the government to account, and is less able to present a viable alternative government going forward. This is one of the lessons we have not learned from the Victorian situation where there is a visually unchallenged Labor technocratic government.

Of concern to the Liberals is that little has occurred to reverse the existentialist threat that is posed to it by the Teal independents, who continue to win and hold seats which used to be safe Liberal seats. This is an existentialist threat because not only do most of the Liberal Party’s supporters live in the upper middle class blue ribbon suburbs (offering both manpower and donations to the Party), but those are the seats in which the most promising future leaders and front benchers should be found.

If you cannot seat potential future prime ministers, then you cannot plan to elect future governments.

Having said all that, the election really should serve as a wake up call to the Liberal Party. The conduct of many past and present members of the parliamentary party and front bench whilst they were last in government, both as ministers and in their internal machinations, make them look despicable rather than as a trustworthy alternative government.

For example, Michael Sukkar, who lost his seat at the election, was widely accused of branch stacking against factional rivals inside the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party. This looks angelic compared to Stuart Robert, whose litany of sins, both in pursing conflicts of interest and public administration failures like Robodebt, should see him consigned to one of the inner circles of Hell (metaphorically of course).

It is sad that both of the leading contenders for the leadership, Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley, are both less than of the highest degree of probity. Ley, for example, had to step down from the front bench when she was a minister due to using a taxpayer funded trip to go house hunting for an investment property in Queensland. Ley’s conduct is trivial, just as she is a risible lightweight. Taylor’s apparent conflicts of interest between his family’s properties and his own ministerial responsibilities suggest a more serious lack of suitability for high office.

Dutton, however, whilst inept and tone deaf, was a decent man. This was shown in his extremely gracious concession speech on Saturday night. But he needs to bear the brunt of the blame for the defeat, particularly through the public announcements which caused me to turn my vote against him and his party for the first time in my life.

Hopefully the Liberals wake up and shake themselves up and sort themselves out. But I am not optimistic.

What A Silly (Democracy) Sausage!

It has been quite a while since I read the classic Mr Men series by Roger Hargraves. I assume it was in primary school, which is now 45 years ago.

Hence I am not sure, but I do believe such expressions as ‘you silly banana’ or ‘you silly sausage’ originate in those books.

The phrase ‘Democracy Sausage’ is a more recent invention. It started getting used circa 2013 at the WA State Election, in relation to the sausage sizzles which community groups would hold outside polling booths. But such BBQ activities have been happening on election day for a long time before someone chose to give a name to the practice. For instance, I remember buying a sausage from a polling booth in Carlton on Election Day 1998.

‘Silly Democracy Sausage’ is a term of my own invention, taking the above two expressions and merging them. It can be taken as meaning a particularly inept political candidate who makes a major fool of himself and his party.

Like, for example, Peter Dutton.

Under Dutton, the Liberals have been accused of running the most incompetent election campaign in living memory. It is very clear, even four hours (at time I am writing) before polling booths on the eastern seaboard close, that the Coalition is not going to win this election, and may even go backwards in their primary vote.

This is despite a rather lacklustre Labor government led by Anthony Albanese, whose lustre as an authentic heartland Labor man has faded greatly in the past three years, aided by Qantas VIP Lounge membership rorts, purchasing a luxury seaside villa for his post prime ministerial future, and his tone deaf decision to adopt Hawthorn Football Club as his AFL team of choice.

I do not pay much attention to election promises, as my mind is usually made up very far in advance. The decision usually is whether to put the Liberals first in the House of Reps (which is my default position), or to preference them above Labor after giving my first preference as a protest vote to some conservative minor party (as I was forced to do in disgust in 2019 and 2022).

This election upended this, and all because Peter Dutton is not actually aware that at least one of his promises threaten integrity of the federal government apparatus on a major level.

In mid February, Dutton promised in an interview with SBS that he was going to reinstate Michael Pezzullo to a senior position as a Federal bureaucrat if he was elected. When this news first emerged, the certainty that I was going to vote Liberal faltered for the first time ever. Two weeks ago, in an interview with the Age, Dutton very stupidly double downed and repeated his intention of giving ‘The Pezz’ a senior appointment in his government.

For those who are not aware, Pezzullo was, until 20 months ago, the long serving Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs. He was ignominiously sacked, and then stripped of his Order of Australia Honour (an AM to be precise), due to the discovery that contrary to expectations of professional conduct of a senior public servant, he had been using his position to communicate secretly with backroom Liberal Party powerbrokers, as a back channel to the then Prime Minister.

Not only was this contrary to the Code of Conduct that public servants are meant to follow, but this also contradicted everything in Pezzullo’s public utterances about his expectations of the professional conduct of public servants and their balancing act in serving the Government of the Day. In other words, he was exercising significant hypocrisy.

Dutton’s decision to ignore the lack of integrity demonstrated by Pezzullo has broader ramifications than just promising to reinstate a much reviled and despised individual to a senior position. It sends a message that integrity in the Public Service does not matter. This is a serious shortcoming on the part of the prospective prime minister.

We are lucky in Australia that the Public Service is virtually incorruptible. This is due to its culture of honesty and integrity. The few bad eggs are quickly discovered, as in the case of Michael Pezzullo AM, and sacked. Where the conduct is particularly egregious, as in bribery or theft, the culprits are prosecuted and punished. But these are very rare, because the overwhelming majority of public servants are not only honest, but unwilling to tolerate dishonest conduct.

[Unless of course, when your name is Pezzullo. Not only did Michael say one thing in public whilst secretly doing the opposite, but his younger brother Fabio, many years earlier, had to leave the public service in disgrace for his own unrelated misconduct.]

Tolerating and defending people like Pezzullo, including when there first was talk of stripping him of his AM, as the Opposition has done over the past 20 months, is unbecoming of a party which wants to form government. It threatens to lower the professional standards which are required of the Public Service in an Anglophonic first world democracy to those of third world despotisms.

Perhaps the reason for this is that politicians themselves do not hold themselves to the same standards anymore that they hold their Public Service. So many of the people on the Coalition front bench have committed infractions in relation to their own conduct or conflicts of interest which would have resulted in their sacking if they were mere public servants. So they now appear to be applying the same standards of conduct which they apply to themselves to those whom they would employ as their intermediaries with the Public Service.

Hence, I am currently utterly disgusted with the Liberals on this one issue of character, decency and integrity alone. All the other ineptitudes and prevarications of their election campaign do not matter to me – I would have rolled my eyes and ignored them as simply amateurism.

But it only takes one truly stupid policy to undo much good and to do much evil, and that is to promise to do anything but shun Michael Pezzullo for the vile technocratic hypocrite that he is.