There has been a lot of interest, from various stakeholders, on how ASADA's investigation into the Essendon Football Club is coming along.

A lot of that interest has been in the form of the Minister’s Chief-of-Staff ringing me and yelling ‘what the hell are you guys doing?’

The good news is the investigation team is making great strides. Here are some of the key achievements from recent months:

• Huge morning tea for Gary’s birthday (accounting Gary, not Gary from legal). Everyone attended and it pushed through lunch and into a wonderful afternoon tea. A lot of people had to leave after that unfortunately, to do the childcare/school run
• We’ve managed to upgrade Lotus Notes on almost everyone’s computer. This is obviously a huge step forward for the agency.
• Sharon and Peter finally finished writing that show cause letter to Stephen Dank. Both cut into their lunch several times over the last six months to get it finished. Peter’s insistence on continuing to use ‘Word Perfect’ has slowed the process down somewhat.
• Jodie picked up one of those coffee machines from Aldi that everyone is talking about. I can tell you, we've all been enjoying our morning coffees ever since and it’s so much cheaper than buying one every day.
• The standoff between finance and operations has ended peacefully, with Barry agreeing to take the slightly smaller office on level two, on the condition he gets Fridays off.
• I retired but need to get around to finding a successor. So far the 70-odd people I've asked have laughed before saying ‘oh, you’re serious.’
• The investigations team have found a wonderful font to publish our final report in. As Trevor said at after-work-drinks the other day though, ‘Now we need to write the bloody thing!’

Anyway, I hope you’ve found this update useful and we will be providing a new update in a few months. Give or take.

Warm Regards

Aurora Andruska

Chief Executive Officer ASADA