(Image: Twitter)

Regular readers of Tips and Murmurs will know of our newfound obsession with merchandise created with defence forces and intelligence agencies in mind — the millions spent on that sub-genre of wacky mugs that people the state has trained to be capable of ending a human life drink their 10am instant coffee from.

And it turns out we’re not the only ones. It’s been noted that recent media briefings on the AUKUS submarine deal have been organised by some nifty submarine-shaped paperclips. Now someone has put in a freedom of information request to find out how much it cost the Defence Department to procure them.

It turns out that among the eye-watering figures governments have recently been wiling to pay to outsource seemingly everything, this spaceship of the ocean stationery was an absolute steal. After a bit of back and forth about the colour (disappointingly conservative, they went with plain silver) and delivery times, the paperclips set us back a very reasonable US$368 (or A$562.48) for 3000 — meaning they only have to do six more batches and they’ll have more than enough to include in the welcome pack of every new hire this scheme creates.

You may remember AUKUS will cost up to $368 billion, so we just have to find another cheeky $367,999,999,437.52 or so, having already met 0.000000152847826% of the total cost. Incidentally, defence got this bargain from House of Kitsch Communications, and we’re still trying to imagine a grizzled Navy figure being forced to acquaint themselves with the concept of “kitsch” as part of the approval process.

As we noted before, Liberal Senator Jane Hume has used estimates to ask (via questions on notice) of various defence agencies what they’re paying for merch — the paperclips represent a tiny fraction of the more than $2 million defence budgets for merchandise every year.