There has been some dirty work

going on again in government circles - or so it would seem. This time the government appears to have completely ignored a court ruling. It has gone ahead with the sale of a large parcel of industrial land to a development consortium at a much lower price than should have been paid for it.
The Supreme Court had some scathing things to say about this but it made no difference. The sale went ahead.
It went ahead despite the fact that this state is in debt and needs all the money it can get. We are getting hit with increased taxes. The government claims this is necessary because there were "cuts" in funding from the Federal government.
There were no cuts. What happened was that there was a change of government in Canberra and what the previous government had promised in its election campaign did not come into being. We could not have afforded it. It would not have happened even if they had been returned. The money simply wasn't there. It was never there. But, it makes a good excuse for the present state government. The lie doesn't matter. People are going to believe it.
So the question now has to be - why did they sell off the land for far less than it is worth?
You don't do these things without a reason. If there was a good reason for it I suspect we would have been told. The government would have been only too happy to tell us that someone had paid "X" but they had undertaken to do "Y" and that meant that there was more profit to be had in the end.
But it has all been kept quiet. Is this because someone made a blunder? Was the government so desperate for short term finance it had to agree to the sale? Or is there a more than a whiff of corruption in the air?
The last seems unlikely - or so we would like to believe. Our governments are supposed to be "clean". We aren't supposed to have the same problems as other governments. Corruption is not supposed to exist here.
That's nonsense of course. It does exist. High ranking officials do take "kick backs" and more - everything from the expensive lunch to the new car and more besides.
But there are other sorts of corruption too. The corruption of being in power for too long, in believing you can do as you like because you are in power - the sort of corruption which leads to carelessness.
It might be that and that frightens me.