Try that again

I nearly choked when I read that Senator Minchin had issued a press release breathlessly reporting on the $1.1M the Rudd Government had spent on building "new websites to promote itself."

Minchin went on "While Governments have a responsibility to provide up-to-date information to the Australian public and the internet is an effective way of doing this, the costs associated with some of these individual sites seem to be quite extraordinary". Please - 36 sites for $1.1M, the biggest expense listed being $180K on something as sexy as promotion of accounting standards.

Let's not trawl over the 1 billion dollars that were spent by the previous Government over ten years in its promotion of everything from "alert not alarmed" to "Work choices" (the latter costing taxpayers $116M, the Liberals Government and Howard his seat). The Rudd Government has even announced clear guidelines on Goverrnment advertising campaigns to restrain that excessive expenditure.

As to the $1.1M, it's been my experience that people expect Government to overpay for these kinds of developments, but all up those bills look quite reasonable.