Charlie Apap, former Mayor of Brimbank, was last week convicted of indecent assault. He is a strong supporter of Bill Shorten and was responsible for organising a substantial number of his fundraisers leading up to the election.

The new Australian Federal Police Headquarters will be the heritage listed Edmund Barton Building.

Australian Public Service Commissioner Lynelle Briggs finalising negotiations to launch her in her new role as Secretary of a Department – Health.

Further to Roger Cook being preselected for the ALP for Kwinana in WA, this is the bloke who disgraced lobbyist Brian Burke described as being part of a “dream team” of candidates. Given how hard Carpenter is working to say goodbye to the Burke legacy, his backing of Cook who is himself a lobbyist seems politically unwise.

Qantas engineers to strike on Thursday in Sydney and on Friday in Melbourne. National advertising for replacement engineers by recruitment company resumedomain.com has angered the ALAEA. Qantas has also upset the ALAEA by doing a deal with rival union for a new permanent workforce.

Dstore has started selling the Underbelly DVD online — good to see that legal restrictions work…

I was a delegate to the Victorian Labor Party’s conference. There was much excitement in the air for the PM’s speech on Saturday morning. There was an enormous roar as he entered the Conference. There were high expectations. But instead of a speech of great oratory, inspiration and passion, instead we were left with a rather monotone, lifeless and flat delivery, almost entirely read from the podium, with little flair, style or great lines. Instead, we got a long list of thank yous and a laundry list of achievements and things he has done and wants to do. But where’s the rhetoric about what the party believes in and what his government believes in? Many of us are questioning the real point of his government — “securing the future” is just not enough. Yes, we got rid of WorkChoices, but there has to be more. Where’s the fire, the passion, the vision, the narrative? Where’s the beef? Did he write this rubbish himself?

On Friday afternoon (23 May) I responded to the “Jack the Insider” blog about the Bill Henson photos. I wasn’t too concerned about the photos, considering them to be photos and not much else, but curious as to why The Australian had a link to its gallery displaying eight of them. Considering they might be classed as child porn it surprised me that The Australian was distributing them via the net and I made that point. Needless to say, my post never made it to Jack’s blog and the photos were yanked soon after. The Australian … soon to be busted for child p-rnography?

Whatever happened to the College of Immigration previously Chaired by Michael Palmer AO? DIAC conducted a tender process to seek a training partner for training services at $50M per annum. Where did all this go? Who was successful? There was substantial funds expended on this tender process, tenderers attended information sessions, gave presentations etc. Who won the contract?

The Commonwealth Bank last month announced it is embarking on a AU$580 million four-year program to modernise its legacy core banking systems and introduce new features with the help of SAP and Accenture. This involves converting CBA’s legacy system from the mainframe to SAP. Let me state, quite categorically, with my 40 years hands-on experience, this is never going to happen. Let me repeat; it will never work. People have plenty of time to unload their CBA shares, because it will be a few years, I am sure, before CBA get the message and pull the plug.

The tax office should never have allowed Second Commissioner Greg Farr to be poached to the Defence Department because nothing has gone right since he left. The Accenture Executive team have advised Commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo that the R3.2 Superannuation July release (part of the ATO’s $500M change program) would not meet the planned 7 July 2008 deployment date. They are six weeks out and the delivery schedule has been reported by the R3.2 team as Red for some time. Additionally they have had a growing number of Change Requests and Issues that need to be addressed. The combination of these two pressures means that the planned delivery schedule is unachievable. To remedy this situation a 48 hour intensive workshop is being planned to target a new release date.