Foley phones up trouble. Word is South Australian Treasurer Kevin Foley’s Labor colleagues are none too happy with him about his $22,000 mobile phone bill and the media coverage over the weekend. Labor backbenchers (left and right) are increasingly losing patience with Foley, who seems to be inebriated on arrogance and power. Some say the $22,000 mobile phone bill yarn is the last straw and Foley is now on borrowed time. If Foley’s bungles and stuff-ups were a degustation menu, consider this the eighth and final course. Indeed delicious, but fulfilling? No.

Green Loans insider. I work for Green Loans and have done since 2008. I think your article was accurate. A couple of things you might not know: there has been a terrible personal cost to lower-level public servants working on this toxic program in terms of stress leave. And the new proposed Green Start program, which is coming out of the same branch, has multiple flaws in it. Currently an IT taskforce is semi-secretly trying to cobble together data from the Green Loans program as a precursor to Green Start. This is a Herculean task given that they want a badly designed Green Start program to begin in mid-November.

Virgin bets on IT shutdown. Why is Virgin Blue shutting down its booking portal for two days, at a cost of $16.5 million? It would take a problem of catastrophic proportions to force management to make a decision like that, and that appears to be what has happened. Did eastern European criminal hackers compromise the Navitaire’s Sydney data centre used Virgin Blue? Did they hack the code to steal credit card details, and inadvertently bring down the reservation system?

A week ago, the Virgin Blue reservation, check-in and departure control systems were down for several days. While complete system failures such as this have happened before to airlines in the 1970s and ’80s, they are really rare in recent years. All the hardware is duplicated and triplicated. The system architects spend enormous amounts of effort working out where failure points may occur and making sure that if they happen, the failure doesn’t affect the airline.

While a design fault may cause a major outage, Navitaire (along with all other IT providers) plan for disasters (what Nativaire calls BCS — Business Continuity Services) and have separate data centres. They run disaster-recovery tests once or twice a year to make sure that recovery will go smoothly. Things didn’t go smoothly on Sunday the 26th.

Airlines never shut down their reservation systems. It costs thousands of dollars every minute. It threatens their cash flow. If horrible things happen during the planned shutdown (unlikely, but possible) it’s conceivable that the reservations system will be offline long enough to cause serious financial damage to Virgin Blue. To some extent, this shutdown represents “betting the company”. Airlines never do this.

Cleaning up in Tassie. About 12 years ago, Tasmania considered contracts for school cleaning and grounds management. The potential savings were more than $25 million per annum at the time. The Labor government then did a deal with the unions and the change never occurred. Under a different agreement, senior secondary colleges were already cleaned under contract and these were used as a benchmark for the proposed school contracts.

The quality of cleaning of these, under contract, was not an issue and generally exceeded that done by “career cleaners” in other schools. It has always seemed a shame to me that the millions that could have been saved over the years by moving to contract would have been better spent on teachers and school facilities than giving career cleaners a relaxed lifestyle. I hope the Victorians don’t fall for this push by the LHMU.