Who'll admit to confusion at the news that there's an investigation into the leaking of plans, or lack of them or somesuch, regarding Australia's submarine fleet?
Why would anyone bother? Everyone knows that Australian submarines leak. It's been a point of honour among the Collins Class subs. They leak for Australia. 
If the actual submarines leak, and have been doing so for years, why wouldn't the plans to get new ones in the water leak 
The point, as we are given to understand, is that the new fleet was allegedly due in 2026. Now it's some time in the 2030s.
This was "flabbergasting", according to a Tony Abbott.
Apart from the fact that almost everything about Abbott has been flabbergasting for quite some time now...really?
The idea that a contract for a fleet of submarines to cost approximately the entire tax take from the late and much-lamented mining boom (if there had been a mining profits tax, which there wasn't), might run a few years over original estimates is not particularly flabbering, nor even gasting. Even if it's true, which the head of the Defence Department says it's not.
Who ever heard of a self-respecting Defence contract running on time? Or budget?
Consider the Joint Strike Fighter deal for F-35 jets. They were supposed to be operating in....errr...2010. 
Australia originally thought it would be spending $8 billion. The current estimate is somewhere between $19 billion and $24 billion, and the first of them are supposed to arrive in 2018 and go into service in 2020. 
There is much expert comment that these wondrous things are, to put it politely, duds: too slow, too visible, carry too few missiles and in recent tests, outmanoeuvred by fighter jet designed 40 years ago.
Which seems inconvenient, for recent evidence suggests an outmanoeuvred pilot would likely snap his neck if required to eject.
Abbott when he was PM decided to increase Australia's order of these machines by 58, to a fleet of 72.
If the Joint Strike Fighter deal remains pie in the sky, what of the truth about the submarines in the depths?
There is currently no contract. No one's actually worked out which country might supply them, though Abbott, clearly an expert on the best defence materiel money can buy, has long yearned for a Japanese sub.
Keen early last year to obscure the whole matter, he sent his Defence minister of the time, the estimable Kevin Andrews, to Adelaide to explain. 
"We have to evaluate a whole range of issues," said Andrews.
"Primarily, it's the capability that Defence will have at its disposal. We have to line up a number of things so far as the future defence of Australia is concerned. [And] the aspirations of the Australian people, as expressed from time to time by the national government. That has to be lined up with the ability, the capability, if you like, to be able to say to the defence forces in this country that if we want you to do something on behalf of the Australian people then you have the capability of doing that. And then finally, we have to also line up the cost of that."
Someone should have called at the time for an investigation of what he meant, though it would have been a vain exercise, as vain as the attempt now to uncover who might have leaked what about an apparently non-existent and anyway meaningless timeline for a new fleet of submarines.
Abbott is flabbergasted because that's what former prime ministers who can never understand the meaning of former are reduced to.
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