If you thought doing nothing about a GST deal that hands extra money to a state with a $3.5 billion operating surplus was not enough to really irritate people, try announcing you're sending them one of the country's most famous paintings to really rub it in.
Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles - as vibrant and striking as it was expensive and controversial - is off on a holiday to Western Australia next year while the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra has repairs and a facelift.
If the building works demand a serious and lasting closure, put the highlights of international art on the road together rather than farming pieces out to a network of far-flung relatives.
But dressed up as a great act of cultural exchange, Blue Poles going alone is little more than Canberra bashing in fancy dress. It is also the latest act that shows when it really comes to it, the federal government likes talking up the idea of Canberra but does as little as it can get away with to ensure it is the nation's city.
The program of sending these works around the country is called "Sharing the National Collection". The gallery and the government talk excitedly about masterpieces in different places.
The masterpiece, if we need to entertain that deeply flawed idea, is only ever as good as what is around it. Does it overtake what has come before? How does it sit with what else artists were making at the same time? What does it say of its own time and how does it address ours?
There will be people who will never make it to Canberra to see the collection, whether for reasons of mobility, health or money.
A National Gallery that proudly toured a selection of its best pieces every now and again rather than posting out piecemeal bits would be an admirable national institution.
Lending art is a magnificent, and often right, thing to do. Masterpieces from Paris at the National Gallery in 2009-10 was the kind of once-in-a-lifetime show that brought pictures from the Musee d'Orsay that demonstrated why we ought to care so much about the application of oil-soaked pigments on canvas.
Indeed, at the Musee d'Orsay earlier this year I saw - and was mesmerised by - Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, a picture from 1881 that lives and breathes in its depiction of real people.
It was on loan from the Phillips Collection in Washington, incorporated into a Renoir show that justified the price of a European airfare. Canberrans of an earlier generation also got their chance. It was loaned to Australia in 1988 for an exhibition at the Australian National Gallery, as it then was, called Old Masters - New Visions.
Blue Poles went to London in 2016 for an abstract expressionism show to end all abstract expressionism shows. To have Pollock's great achievement there, with a credit line for Australia, was a testament to the forward-thinking decision to buy it, come hell, high water and an opprobrious public. The same is true when Blue Poles went to New York's MoMA in 1998.
But the difference with all of these loans is the paintings went to be part of exhibitions the likes of which are rarely assembled.
Judicious loans allow people to see whole movements in art - the networks of connections, the friendships, the feuds, the dealers and collectors - contextualised and enhanced.
Packing up a masterpiece and sending it off to a regional gallery is not the same.
The National Gallery has a world-class collection of modern art. Its first director, James Mollison, did the heavy lifting in an era where government chequebooks were fatter. It is a collection vastly enhanced by it being seen together.
Blue Poles is an undeniable achievement but it's enriched by proximity to the work of Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife, William de Koonig, Mark Rothko, Warhol and others. A Duchamp readymade is not very much at all until it has things around it.
Claude Monet's Haystacks, midday is an aesthetic pleasure on its own. But together with exemplary picks from the 19th and 20th centuries, it shows just how important that particular Frenchman was when it came to the way we see - and think about - light.
Just don't expect to see it in Canberra at the moment. It's in Geelong until November 2027. And the Rothko is in Ipswich.
The National Gallery also has a vast storage shed of great work that, assembled into exhibitions, could also tour the country and introduce Australians to art they might never otherwise see in a meaningful way. Plenty of it rarely makes it out of the vault here.
Arthur Boyd's Saint Francis tapestries, currently on display in Canberra in a free exhibition not to be missed, are a taste of what the gallery's collection holds. They had been in storage for more than half a century. Package these finds up and send them to Perth, by all means.
There is already some of this happening, but more of it would enrich this program. The Know My Name: Australian Women Artists touring exhibition is arguably the best example and what sharing the collection done well looks like.
These shows might even act as a beacon to the rest of the country that Canberra is more than chaps in suits being mean to each other in a green room with benches from 2pm about 67 days of the year.
It says a lot about the way Canberra is still seen as an illegitimate and unreal presence in the country's cultural life, a bubble city where real Australians aren't encouraged or expected to be.
Maybe that GST money and stonking state surplus could help fund subsidised holidays for Western Australians to visit Canberra?
An announcement on Tuesday that sending Blue Poles, probably the most famous thing in the National Gallery and a bona fide drawcard, to a gallery with fewer annual visitors was dressed up as a way to share the painting with more people.
Perhaps. No doubt there will be people in Western Australia who make the trip to see it (they should and will not regret it), just as there were when Blue Poles toured Australia after it was purchased in advance of the National Gallery building being finished.
Meanwhile, in Canberra next year it will be like turning up to Amsterdam to find the Rikjsmuseum has sent The Night Watch to Groningen or the Mona Lisa has been shipped to Toulouse.
Canberra is an odd little city. But it's the nation's odd little city and we should not feel the need to be so squeamish about having brilliant art here.
