ASIO is giving a defence academic nearly $1.8 million to write its history, it has admitted to a Greens senator.
ANU Professor David Horner, a former soldier and high-profile military historian, was commissioned to write the first history of ASIO earlier this year. What was missing from the attendant publicity around the announcement in June was the cost. In response to a question from Greens senator Scott Ludlam, ASIO has said the project will cost $1,757,981.
It will be a two-volume history and will take at five years. Horner will employ a second historian to assist him. Horner and the second historian will remain ANU employees during the project.
An ASIO spokesperson told Crikey this morning that the contract “was entered into after a tender process that considered a range of factors, particularly the ability to produce an independent, accurate and well-researched manuscript. The Australian National University (ANU) was selected after consideration of several high quality applications.
The fee over the life of the contract is $1,757,981 and accounts for the substantial effort involved in producing a comprehensive and extensively researched history of ASIO, including the employment of authors and researchers for five years, their employment on-costs, facilities and other expenses.”
ASIO’s budget has more than doubled since 2005-06 and it has also received over $200 million in capital. A giant new headquarters for its 1700 staff (expected to reach 1800 by mid-2011) is being built at Campbell in Canberra, at a current cost of $589 million.
It was originally to house ASIO and the much smaller Office of National Assessments, but ASIO’s remorseless growth forced ONA to abandon plans to share the building and move into a refurbished heritage building near Parliament House.
ASIO also told Ludlam that it had originally proposed to build a complex higher than the 25-metre limit imposed on buildings by the National Capital Authority, and been forced to scale it back to comply with NCA requirements.
LOL
Nice work if you can get it.
No wonder the “history wars” were such a bunfight.
The contestants were clearly following the money. 🙂
I hope my grandfather Eric the slosher, get’s a look in. Eric, helped write The Petrov Story for THE spy Michael Bialoguski around 1955. The book is not very complimentary of Colonel Spry, nor ASO as it was called back then.
ASIO and national library have no mention of Eric apparently, that is no file, but there he is acknowledged in the front pages of the book and he was a war correspondent to the Eastern Bloc in WWII and matey with Menzies apparently. At one point in the book hilariously, MB visits PM to implore intervention on ASO to action his feting of Petrov. ASO wouldn’t pay MB’s expenses account apparently.
The PM has the Russian ambassador in the same carpark – at the same time MB was booked to visit the Secretary to the PM’s office. MB being a Russian speaker well known to the embassy came within a glance or two of having years of cover blown by …. Menzies.
ROFL. As I said not very complimentary. Put that in your history, spooks!
Recently on a foray in Canberra I walked through the old Hyatt Hotel there on Commonwealth Ave constructed in 1926 and felt a bit of an echo, as though he hung out there. Menzies had a cigar room there apparently.
Even with just the two historians, that’s $170,000 each per annum for salaries, on-costs, equipment, office space, travel and accommodation etc. Sounds a reasonable figure, actually.