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The Australian Wheat Board affair should serve as a stunning warning to all Australians that public services agencies and departments in all states and territories and federally are inherently corrupt and corruptible.

I don't mean in the sense that they take bribes or are dishonest. It is all part of a general view that public service departments and agencies have every right to protect themselves from criticism over mistakes and blunders.

Now while a private sector agency might do this from a perspective of reputation and profitability, agency and department executives do it from the perspective of saving their own skins.

I say this after finding in 20 years in journalism that my real target for exposure and misuse of public money was public servants. Politicians are just as culpable, but predominantly because they join this charade because they need senior public servants on side.

The AWB scandal has all of the elements that usually typify a departmental blunder, and the ensuing mystery occurs largely because public service heads rely on time and other pressing public interests for taking away the heat.

Canberra has endured such a litany of gaffs, blunders and disasters and it is amazing that the ACT itself hasn't gone into liquidation. By my reckoning, the ACT lost $65 million over the disastrous Australian International Hotel School, before handing it over last year to the Blue Mountains Hotel School.

Since this insane idea took place at one of Canberra's icon hotels, the Kurrajong, it should be national news. But it is not because of the on-going effort to hide the truth from the people of Canberra. Ask yourself why an ACT Labor Government would decide to set up a hotel school to service students mainly from overseas. At one stage of this affair each subsidised degree was costing the ACT $200,000.

But I don't want to dwell on a blow-by-blow history of Canberra, a national financial basket case, what I really wish to focus on is how the AWB affair is simply standard behaviour for bureaucrats using other people's money.

There can be little doubt that everybody who mattered knew what was going on at the time, including politicians from both sides of politics. It now its all a grand theatre put on a national stage in order to provide entertainment and to allow Labor and the Coalition to match their wits and enjoy the drama.

Meanwhile, what has all this cost? First, the process of redemption designed by John Howard has achieved its aim of allowing the Government to plead innocent and to be able to prove it. Having an inquiry is standard practice when you get caught. This particular time, however, it has virtually ruined Australia's reputation on a world stage, since not one of the other countries that paid Saddam Hussein's demands has held an public inquiry. Nor would they dream of it.

So we have given the cynical United States lobbyists a perfect weapon to use against us.

This inquiry was about the egos oe men like Howard and Kim Beazley and had nothing at all to to with probity. It was about everyone covering their arses. They are good at it aren't they. And the obedient national media simlply report what they are expected to report.

Why think outside the box when you don't think inside it?

The news media, funded by the big end of town, have done their part in this fiasco by allowing the pantomime to run its course, to the inevitable day of redemption. And so why should anyone be surprised that at the end of it all, no-one was responsible.

Think about it next time you pay your car registration.

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