So he told staff to carry out a large-scale survey. The results infuriated him. He gathered a crowd at Russell to tell them the department now engaged more private-sector employees than it had staff. And he warned them he would be brutal in undoing this.

"You seek to manage things on the public service side, and then all of a sudden you see growth out here," he said. "You get really annoyed by that and you end up having to be a mongrel. Now, I don't like being a mongrel but I have managed organisations for 20 years and, if I'm given no choice, that is precisely what I'll do."

However, the mongrel retired a few months later. You can probably guess what happened next: rather little.

Last month, just before the election was called and Parliament dissolved, a few Defence executives tried to update Labor's Penny Wong on the latest headcount at Russell and elsewhere; a theme Wong had pursued in the Senate for some time. It wasn't pretty.

One of the department's associate secretaries, Rebecca Skinner, explained: "We don't calculate the number of contractors, but let me go a little bit further. I think we discussed last time that that was a manual process. It didn't give us the sort of workforce information that helped us manage the workforce."

Wong: "I just don't accept that. How can you say to me that not knowing how many actual contractors you have isn't relevant to managing the workforce?"

Skinner: "So the system and the process - I'm not disagreeing with the point that understanding the workforce is important. The point is the process that we used to calculate that figure was highly manual. It wasn't a use of resources that helped us manage our workforce in the end. What we've been doing is calculating the number of - we're looking to try to manage the workforce outcome. So, rather than have a mandraulic process that delivers that number that is a point in time that is most likely not highly accurate, we focused our effort more recently, particularly following our last discussion, for example, in our shipbuilding area, where we do understand the number of contractors. That's an important part of our workforce. There are 379 contractors working in our ship program."

Wong: "You've got it for that. What else do you have it for?"

Skinner: "I don't have it for anything else."

Bravo, Skinner. Who else will be challenging for this year's Sir Humphrey Appleby award for epistemological interlocution?