Canberra

Kevin's public hostility toward the city of Canberra is one of the institution's most extensively documented executive positions. In internal communications, Recording 3, and the marginalia of the Articles of Incorporation, Kevin has variously described Canberra as "the worst possible place to be obligated to exist", "geographically punitive", "roundabout-infested", "structurally smug", and "the only city in the southern hemisphere that has clearly done something wrong."

Kevin's grievances are described in Southbag corporate messaging as falling into three categories: jurisdictional (the requirement that the Articles of Incorporation be registered in the Australian Capital Territory); civic (the layout of the city, with particular reference to "an unforgivable number of roundabouts"); and personal (an unspecified incident at Lake Burley Griffin in early April 2026, on which Kevin has declined to comment except to confirm that "the lake knows what it did").

Operational consequences of Kevin's position include the Canberra Adjacency Levy, the institution's refusal to acknowledge the existence of Parliamentary Triangle postcodes for fee-routing purposes, and a standing instruction that no Southbag customer service recording is to be produced inside ACT boundaries unless Kevin "is having a bad enough day already that it cannot meaningfully be made worse."

Recording 3

Recording 3 occupies an unusual position in the Southbag documentary record, being both a primary source for Kevin's Canberra statements and, by Kevin's own standing instruction, a document that could not lawfully have been produced. Internal auditors have noted the resulting difficulty: the recording exists, is catalogued, and is cited in the Articles' marginalia, yet its creation inside ACT boundaries would have required a prior determination that Kevin's day was already bad enough to be beyond further deterioration. No such determination appears in the minutes. Southbag's official position is that Recording 3 "was made somewhere, at some point, by someone, and that this is sufficient for indexing purposes." Kevin has declined to clarify, noting only that "the recording is aware of the circumstances of its own making, which is more than can be said for most of us."

The Canberra Adjacency Levy

The Levy applies a graduated surcharge to any transaction, correspondence, or personnel movement determined to have occurred within a "Canberra-adjacent" zone. Adjacency is calculated by the institution's own metric, understood to be a function of distance, intent, and "whether the individual involved could reasonably have gone somewhere else." Because the metric weights intent heavily, several employees resident in Melbourne have incurred the full Levy, while at least one contractor physically stationed in Civic was assessed at zero on the grounds that "he clearly didn't want to be there either, and Southbag does not punish the blameless."

Disputes over Levy assessments are heard by Kevin, which is generally regarded within the institution as the reason there are so few of them.

The April Incident

Southbag maintains no official account of the events at Lake Burley Griffin in early April 2026. The Board's Reconciliation Subcommittee — convened, dissolved, and reconvened three times over the following quarter — was unable to establish so much as a timeline, having been furnished by Kevin with a single sworn statement reading, in its entirety: "I was there. It was there. One of us behaved acceptably." Efforts to determine which party this referred to were abandoned after the Subcommittee's chair reported that the question "seemed to make the lake angrier," a phrasing that was struck from the minutes and then, following Kevin's intervention, struck back in.

The institution now treats the incident as a settled matter, in the specific sense that it has agreed never to raise it again.

Cartographic Policy

Southbag's standard-issue maps of Australia render the Australian Capital Territory as an unlabelled grey polygon described in the legend as "Reserved." Requests to restore the label are routed to Kevin and returned marked "Denied — see label." A 2026 proposal to depict Canberra at correct scale but rotated forty degrees, so that "at least the roundabouts point somewhere honest," reached advanced planning before being tabled indefinitely on cost grounds.

Legal Standing

The central and unresolved contradiction of Kevin's position is that the Articles of Incorporation are, by law, registered in the Australian Capital Territory — meaning the institution's legal existence is anchored to the one place its senior executive refuses to acknowledge. Southbag's counsel has described the arrangement as "stable, in the way that a person holding their breath is stable." Kevin's own view, recorded in the marginalia beside the registration clause, is shorter: "Under protest. In perpetuity."