Politicians love leaving a legacy. Preferably something grand enough to distract from everything else they stuffed up.

Australians would settle for an aged care system that looks after the elderly and an energy project that bears some passing resemblance to its original price tag.

Two unfolding debacles that tell us plenty about the distance between ambitions and political reality.

The dysfunctional aged care system is fast becoming Labor’s version of Robodebt. Meanwhile, the increasingly expensive monument to Malcolm Turnbull’s opinion of himself, Snowy Hydro 2.0, is already a financial sinkhole, and it’s getting worse.

And you thought Albo’s ill-considered voice referendum campaign (the mismanagement of which stoked divisions in our community rather than healed them) was his abiding legacy fail.

The ongoing problems attached to the automated aged care system and Snowy Hydro’s strain on the nation’s finances are substantive policy challenges.

One has vulnerable Australians fighting a computer for the care they need. The other has taxpayers watching billions disappear into a mountain.

The common thread is a political class far more accomplished at unveiling its achievements than actually delivering on them.

The party that quite rightly condemned Robodebt now has an automated decision-making scandal of its own.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman has delivered a damning assessment of the algorithm used to allocate funding to older Australians needing support at home.

His findings go to fairness, transparency and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting decisions when the computer gets it wrong.

These are people trying to wash, dress, eat and remain safely in their own homes. Getting their assessments wrong can turn an already difficult existence into a daily ordeal.

Labor understood the dangers of putting vulnerable people at the mercy of automated bureaucracy when Coalition ministers were responsible.

In fact it understood them so thoroughly it commissioned a royal commission. Yet the Ombudsman has now identified failures to apply transparency lessons from that very inquiry to the aged care system.

Apparently Labor thought the Robodebt royal commission was compulsory viewing for its opponents and optional reading for its own administration to learn from.

Robodebt pursued supposed welfare debts, the automated aged care system determines access to care. 

The underlying administrative arrogance is horribly familiar. The computer delivers its verdict and the vulnerable person faces the struggle of challenging it.

Labor points to a new escalation pathway allowing human review (to be put in place come January), alongside an independent review reporting sometime next year.

How reassuring, unless you’re facing difficulties right now. Frail Australians can’t reschedule their deterioration to fit Labor’s slow moving timetable.

Then there is Snowy 2.0, the scheme Turnbull promoted with the enthusiasm of a man already imagining the plaque unveiled at its opening.

He banged on about it endlessly: Vision, nation building, Malcolm thinking bigger than everybody else.

The original headline estimate was about $2billion, if you can believe that. The latest projections suggest it could reach $25billion, and we’ll be waiting another three years for it to be fully operational.

What was sold as a triumph of foresight increasingly resembles a white elephant with an unlimited taxpayer funded living allowance.

Snowy’s chief executive has acknowledged major mistakes and the need for substantial additional government support to dig the project out of its own financial sinkhole.

Fresh reporting reveals the cost of walking away remains unknown. We are therefore being told that we must keep going, potentially throwing good money behind bad.

Money already spent doesn’t, by itself, justify the next billion. Otherwise every financial disaster becomes an argument for making it even bigger.

Snowy and the government insist the project retains substantial benefits. Perhaps. They should publish a convincing assessment of the remaining costs, risks and alternatives, and let taxpayers examine the claims.

Secrecy rarely outweighs the value of transparency.

But Labor can’t simply blame Turnbull for this mess. It’s been in power four-and-a-half years since Albo became PM, and Scott Morrison was PM for nearly four years before that, after Turnbull was turfed out.

Between them, successive governments have turned a grand promise into a rolling exercise in explaining why the latest disaster must be endured.

The aged care and Snowy Hydro failures are all too emblematic of politicians failing the voters they are supposed to serve.

Politicians want legacies, but they are supposed to learn from past mistakes. Where is the evidence of that?