From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Ubi est Romanam? You’ll recall the kerfuffle at the start of July when Australian Border Force head Roman Quaedvlieg went on leave while “a matter is under consideration by appropriate authorities”. Media reports since then have suggested the matter related to a personal relationship Quaedvlieg had with a junior female colleague and claims of favouritism, strongly denied by Quaedvlieg. But six weeks later, where is the “consideration” at? We’ve asked Border Force media repeatedly about whether Quaedvlieg had returned from leave but, in the time honoured way of that place, they haven’t even acknowledged our emails. Crikey understands that he remains on leave, but there’s no official word. What’s taking the “consideration” so long? Well, one possible issue is that natural justice requires affected parties to be given a proper opportunity to comment on any findings relating to them, which can often take as long as the compilation of the findings themselves. We hope Roman had sufficient leave up his sleeve to cover the extended break.

Angry Turnbull demands Parliament resign over Hadgkiss scandal! The plot thickens! Yesterday we explored the, ahem, peculiar way in which Chuckles Cash was trying to wriggle off the hook for appointing the lawbreaker Nigel Hadgkiss to the ABCC when the government re-established it on December 2 last year: that she didn’t really appoint him, it was actually all Eric Abetz’s fault. Now the Prime Minister has doubled down on what we should probably now term the Michaelia Manoeuvre. Pressed yesterday about what he knew and when he knew it, Turnbull opted to blame not Abetz, but parliament itself. “Mr Hadgkiss became the ABCC Commissioner by virtue of an Act of Parliament, because he was already the Commissioner of the Fair Work Building Commission which then transformed into the Australian Building and Construction Commission and given obviously stronger powers and the ability to levy greater fines. So, he transitioned into that new role by virtue of a Act of Parliament.”

So there you have it — it was parliament’s fault that Hadgkiss was appointed to the ABCC despite his “behaviour”. It might have been Chuckles’ bill that was before the Senate being amended, it might have been Turnbull’s government, but it was parliament wot dunnit. Funny, our memory might be playing tricks but at the time, we could swear Turnbull and Cash boasted about how the passage of the bill showed that it was a government that got things done.

Postal survey governance issues. The company tasked with printing the postal survey forms has been banned from accepting any new government work in New Zealand, due to a $450 million accounting scandal in its Australasian subsidiaries. Fuji Xerox won the contract to print the 16 million survey forms in what industry website Print21 has called “one of the largest-ever jobs in the industry”. It has not been revealed how much of the $122 million to spend on the same sex marriage postal survey will be spent on printing alone, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics has confirmed that Fuji Xerox has the job. 

The NZ government suspended contracts with Fuji Xerox in July, meaning that the company wouldn’t be allowed to bid on new contracts but would need to deliver on existing contracts, on Friday it was reported that the ban had been extended until at least October. The company has appointed a new chairman for its Australian subsidiary after an investigation found revenue had been overstated in Australian and NZ operations for five years by $450 million. The Australian Financial Review reported that the revenue had been overstated through income reported from photocopier leases.

Is it on? Stockmarket says no. So yesterday we had speculation that Fairfax Media and Seven West media were talking, or had talked engagement and perhaps marriage — normally that would be news to get the day traders breathless pushing up the shares of both companies. In the event, nothing happened. Fairfax’s share price rose 0.5% to 95.5 cents while Seven West shares fell 0.7% to 71.5 cents, while the shares of its biggest shareholder, Seven Group Holdings (Kerry Stokes’ master company) dropped 2.4%. In other words, ho-hum, heard all this before, wake us up with the real story and some money, or let us sleep.

*Heard anything that might interest Crikey? Send your tips to boss@crikey.com.au, use our guaranteed anonymous form or other ways to leak to us securely