State-owned enterprise Solid Energy, which is mandated by statute to maximise its dividends to the Government, has been caught doing the dirty on its former political masters.
Why anyone should be surprised that this major miner of coal and producer of greenhouse gases contributed a significant sum of money towards funding a report, which subsequently proved highly critical of the Labour-led government's emissions trading scheme, is beyond me.
Even those not particularly au fait with the intricacies of the scheme probably appreciate that the object of it - and similar ones around the world - is to penalise in some shape or form those industries that contribute disproportionately to climate change.
And thus encourage investment in renewable energy forms.
Under the ETS, which the National-led Government is furiously reviewing, Solid Energy would have faced higher operating costs and, quite probably, dwindling demand.
Any management worth its salt and any management, including the top brass in the country's largest coal-mining concern with, one suspects, performance-related clauses, naturally would act to protect its patch.
I mean, do turkeys vote for Christmas?
So in this case, Solid Energy threw $240,750 at the $1 million research project run by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, whose report purported to quantify just how much the ETS would cost.
It got the right answer - too much! The report projected that the scheme would cost households about $3000 a year by 2025 and reduce average wages by $90 a week.
Which is why this particular initiative is, dare we say, on the coal-fired backburner.
(Although, of course, excavating the parameters and the economic modelling that produced such figures, and contextualising them - within scenarios calculating costs of inaction, for example - might produce very different figures.)
It used to be that you would take research funded, or part-funded, by an organisation that subsequently showed results in some way favourable to that funder with a pinch of salt and a large dollop of scepticism.
One of the sad truths of the modern age is that the currency of much "research" has been sadly devalued by the mercenary funding environment in which it occurs, the commercial and political imperatives that so often drive it, and the superficial manner in which its results and implications are translated for general public consumption.
Not that the general public is entirely blameless. Today, it seems, we prefer to wallow in a warm bath of indolent naivete, readyto be "shocked" at the first provocation.
When you add a generous sprinkling of hypocrisy to the mix, it all becomes rather unattractive.
The British public - or at least the cheerleading UK newspapers - have got themselves all into a right royal lather over a few "off-colour" comments made two or three years ago, and which resurfaced this week, by a member of the armed forces: Lieutenant Harry Wales.
A member of a prominent, upper-crust British family, known as Prince Harry - or simply Harry - was heard on a private video constructed in the form of a mini "mockumentary" to refer to one of his mates in the platoon as "our little Paki friend" and to another, wearing camouflage gear, as looking like a "raghead".
The British Ministry of Defence was horrified ("this sort of language is not acceptable in a modern army") and the lad's well-to-do family, which keeps a small army of public relations boffins at a place called St James's Palace for just such occasions, issued an apology on his behalf.
The media went into overdrive. Hysteria reigned.
What, I wonder, does the popular consciousness imagine that the "modern army" trains its soldiers to do?
What, I wonder, does the popular consciousness imagine it requires to take a group of young men and turn them into licensed killers.
It seems the popular consciousness would rather not know.
It would prefer the comfortable sedative that modern soldiers are nice people and fight only just battles against evil forces in far away places (Iraq, Afghanistan?) - the results of which play out, with all the reality of war movies, on the nightly news.
Is the great British public - and, by extension, are we really so scandalised by what Prince Harry has said?
Or is the offence taken more because it threatens the sanitised images we construct to normalise the nature of war and to obscure the required attitudes of the soldiers we pay to prosecute it?
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
