Do you love it when rooms full of people that hate each other try their best not to directly answer questions for hours at a time? If you answered ‘yes’, then I have wonderful news: Senate estimates are upon us once again.
Generally used as a mechanism of oversight into how government money is being spent, estimates has a tendency to unearth some extremely peculiar details about what goes on in parliament, like today’s revelation that a senior Parliament House security officer tested to see if a suspicious white powder was harmless by putting some on his finger and tasting it.
As the Australian is reporting, the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee was this morning determined to get to the bottom of why Graeme Anderson, assistant secretary at Parliament House’s security branch, in November last year thought a taste test was the best way to test the substance when he had access to a mobile testing kit.
Labor senator Kimberley Kitching made the observation that anthrax doesn’t have a taste and a smell, but Anderson somewhat paradoxically responded that he’d already assessed it to be harmless, again, by tasting it.
Anderson insisted that he had “handled this incident in exactly the same way it would have been handled in the Australian Federal Police“, which has made me deeply, deeply curious about how the AFP handles suspicious powders.
As you can probably tell from the fact that Anderson was able to attend senate estimates, the powder, found near a cafe, turned out to be sugar.
