Senator Stephen Conroy wanted $3 billion for the spectrum he was selling. Perhaps it would have been better if Conroy had carried through with his boast, to demand that the local telco company executives did wear them like that. It would have been less costly to the public purse when they refused. For instead he demanded that they pay $3 billion for the spectrum he was selling. They declined. They paid only $2 billion. But as my Business Spectator colleague Stephen Bartholomeusz mused, what's another lost $1 billion in the context of the financial chaos enveloping this (federal, Gillard-Swan) government. Except it's of course also enveloping us. Their never-ending deficits are also our deficits. And future tax rises and spending cuts. But mostly the former. That's (largely) bi-partisan Canberra. A more specific contrast would be between the - in the scheme of things, petty cash - money raised from the auction and the much, much, bigger sums that Conroy has so insouciantly committed to the National Broadband Network. That's $40 billion going on who knows how much more were it ever to be completed. Which, of course, is the second "politicians gone wild" reason to vote for a change of government on September 14, or perhaps earlier. The first big reason is the carbon tax - the single stupidest and most destructive thing that any Australian government has ever done. Closely followed by the NBN. The government will run scare campaigns on both, aided and abetted by main-chancing beneficiaries of both. Geeks on the one hand, the vast industry that has grown up around alternative - another word, for useless - energy. Perhaps it is Senator Conroy who should be wearing the red underpants on his head. Until the election.