COULD we "persuade" the latest "Australian of the Year", David Morrison, to take early retirement - like, immediately; and replace him with the person who has made the greatest, boldest and, dare I say it, most "innovative" contribution to Australia so far this year?
No, I do not mean our first "innovation prime minister", whose one great "innovation" after nearly six months in the job was to finally take something off his "tax reform table": nothing less than its centrepiece, an increase in the GST.
Nor do I mean the leader of the Opposition, whose GBNI or Great Big New Idea is to tax the seeming rich in order to not so much "hide the decline" in his chances of ever getting to sleep with the prime minister's wife in The Lodge, as more to hide his GBNTE or Great Big New Tax on Everything, lest it guarantee that non-sleep, so to speak. 
The real Aussie of the Year is Larry Marshall, the relatively new CEO of what should be our premier 21st century research organisation, the CSIRO, but which has been in sad decline for most of this century as it institutionally gulped the Global Warming True Believers Kool-Aid by the gallon while wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.
All Marshall, who has been CEO for a year, has set about doing is what any competent CEO of any organisation - whether a charity, a government-owned business, a government department, or a bank or mining company - would, indeed should do: aim to best, well, marshal its resources to maximise and indeed optimise outcomes.
Yet in doing so, he unleashed roars of outrage, for what he was also doing was making the first direct assault, infinitesimally tiny as it was in the global scheme of things, on the great climate-change gravy train.
This is the train funded by tens of billions of dollars of your money and that of your peers in other developed countries every year, and which rolls continually around the world, stopping every 12 months or so to empty thousands of its passengers at the annual global warming feast otherwise known as "COP" or Conference of Parties.
The 21st COP was of course in Paris in   November - and yes, there have been 20 before that and no doubt there will be 20 or more in our future and further hundreds of billions of dollars to be sucked up by thousands of main-chancers around the world, from so-called researchers to business rent-seekers. "All" Marshall has done - and I put the word in quotation marks, because in its way it's as big a step as that taken by Neil Armstrong on the Moon - is to say: can't some tiny, tiny, bit of that money be better spent?
Instead of spending the money to continually proving over and over again the supposedly (long since) "settled science", redirect some of it to research on mitigating or adapting to what that "settled science" is going to deliver?
On a number of occasions I have put this slightly differently. If you believe in the "settled science" of global warming aka climate change, that increased emissions of carbon dioxide are going to heat the planet, the only logical thing to do is to spend the money to prepare for and deal with that heated planet.
Because despite the nonsense written about Paris, the latest COP confirmed that global CO2emissions are just going to keep going up.
We could reduce our emissions in Australia to zero today and it would make not the slightest difference to those - rising - global emissions. It would make not the slightest difference to whatever global warming is going to throw at us this year, next year, forever.
SO on all number of levels of rationality, what Marshall has set out to do, makes the most basic sense.
This is so most especially if you are a global warming true believer and have some grasp of rationality - true, a rare if not quite impossible combination - it makes sense to spend the money to minimise the expected, indeed, inevitable harm.
This is so, especially for Australia and Australians. It is where - for true believers - you will get the most bang for your CSIRO research buck.
As Marshall put it, in rebutting the wave of hysteria which flooded out from the gravy train passengers - some thousands of whom of course, live in his own organisation: "We must also focus where we have most need and that need is in innovation, turning inventions into benefit for society." But where he went right off the reservation, or the train, so to speak, was to add to his statement that with Australia's biggest challenges and opportunities, climate was just "one piece of a much larger puzzle".
And, "no one is saying climate change is not important, but surely mitigation, health, education, sustainable industries, and prosperity of the nation are no less important." Larry, Larry, you can't say things like that! For the Kool-Aid drinking True Believers there is only one thing; as you clearly know, based on your earlier comment that the hysterical reaction to your move indicated "more religion than science".
Equally, if you are a supposed global warming sceptic aka a believer in the scientific method, what Marshall is seeking to do similarly makes a lot of sense - a la Danish logician Bjorn Lomborg.
It's the best use of our limited resources; it could actually deliver win-win - economic and business and climate - outcomes whichever way the climate truth breaks.
It also returns the CSIRO to the mandate specifically spelt out in its legislation - to do research to "assist Australian industry", the "I" in its organisational title.
Self-evidently it's been done with the wholehearted and clear-sighted support of the even more recently appointed new CSIRO chairman, former (and very successful) Telstra CEO David Thodey.
He was appointed in   August last year by then science minister Ian Macfarlane and then-PM Tony Abbott; what can be honestly described as their last great - just-in-time - gift to the nation.
So to return to my opening paragraph, Marshall is exactly the sort of person who should be Australian of the Year - if we intend to stick with the absurdity of being the one country in the world (plus New Zealand who recently copied us), as I noted last month, to culturally cringe to ourselves in this way.
As I detailed, the award has deteriorated into the offensive selection of someone to "run an agenda"; and as if on cue, up popped the selection of Morrison, a general whose greatest (only?) claim to fame is not winning battles John Monash-style, but picked to lecture - to hector - us all on gender equality.
And then, you really could not make this up, his former colleague and current "competitor" (in the award race), Cate McGregor - who had actually written the seminal speech - whined she should have won; beautifully confirming what a farce the whole thing had become.Morrison can retire gracefully - if he hasn't already; for he seems to have disappeared since Australia Day? - enabling Marshall to run his "make Australia great" agenda.