The rest? Well, good luck: Secrecy, it seems, is another common theme.

Perhaps because this is year 27 of uninterrupted economic growth, public money is sometimes treated like a toy for political toddlers (the ferry-naming contest that briefly yielded Ferry McFerryface comes to mind) and demands for details tend to produce answers only after the cash is spent.

This was also the week, for example, when the Great Barrier Reef Foundation announced its first project since it received A$443 million from the government last year. That’s a giant pool of money. It was doled out at record speed, with barely any oversight and no competitive bidding.

And the foundation’s first project — setting aside A$574,000 to finance a survey of remote parts of the Great Barrier Reef — has done little to douse the flames of outrage. It came on the heels of an audit that found the administration costs associated with the A$443 million grant could be as high as A$86.4 million.

But it would be a mistake to look only at the winners.

Even a wealthy country still has to make choices so to make sure I wasn’t overly distracted by all that generosity, I looked around a bit for what’s being cut.

The first thing I noticed was the value of scrutinizing spending in context.

Both the Liberal and Labor leadership scrambled this week to take credit for a A$60 million hospital expansion plan in Cairns, but that increase looks less impressive when you consider that the government — with Mr. Morrison as treasurer — shifted more of the health care burden to states in what Labor sometimes describes as a A$715 million cut for Australia’s public hospitals from 2017-2020.

The second and more obvious thing that jumped out at me: cuts to higher education.

This was already on my radar — many of our stories have examined Australia’s dependence on full-fee-paying foreign students — but the numbers are staggering.

In December 2017, the federal government announced it would cut A$2.2bn from universities, mostly through a two-year freeze in grants funding.