The pink phone: costs add up. Transfield call centre operations to support the ongoing pink batts repairs will cost Australian taxpayers $40,000 per month.

Which bank is under pressure? The Commonwealth Bank’s under-performing markets sales division is under some pressure. And some are questioning a round of staff appointments …

Sounding off on Canberra venue. Australia is about to lose one of its best acoustic venues. The ACT government is handing a building in Kingston — the Fitters’ Workshop — to the Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, an arts collective that specialises in printmaking and is itself funded by the ACT government. The aim is to move Megalo from its current location in Watson, a North Canberra suburb, and help establish the Kingston area as an arts precinct, a laudable enough aim in itself (which could be achieved with a new purpose-built construction).

Unfortunately, the Fitters’ Workshop is one of the best acoustic spaces in Australia. It is used by the Canberra International Music Festival (a major cultural event that hardly registers with Australia’s major metropolitan papers — but that is another story) for many of its most successful concerts. The acoustic properties of this space were discovered by CIMF some years ago, but were apparently not recognised by the ACT government. Interstate visitors have told me that this acoustic is superior to anything they have experienced in Sydney or Melbourne. Just a couple of years ago, it hosted for a memorable revival of Peter Sculthorpe’s Rites of Passage.

The ACT government is not proposing to do anything to this structure, except to hand it over to an organisation that intends to use it for its own non-musical purposes. Megalo are proposing to use the existing structure as a shell and to remake its interior, with funding provided by the ACT government, in part to limit sound carrying from one area of the building to another. This reworking will inevitably destroy the existing acoustics of the building and render it unsuitable for music performance. The ACT government claims that it has consulted widely within the ACT arts community about what to do with the building, but few music groups in the community were informed of this process.

Qantas feeds its staff first. I went from Sydney to Brisbane last week in business class on a 17.30 Qantas flight as the 18.00 was cancelled. In that class were six Qantas cabin crew paxing in full uniform. Next to me were two full-fare paying passengers, also from the 17.30 flight. We were all told that catering was not assured — yet the passenger crew were given food before the fare-paying passengers were offered any.