Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw. The government's ideology of privatisation is driving this waste. They pretend it's a competitive process, but the data is very revealing. There are these magical, opaque little panels where you get on the government's mates list, through the process, and then departments can buy from you. One lucky company got almost half of the $1.1 billion spending spree on recruitment firms. One! And 11 lucky firms scored more than 80 per cent of $1.1 that billion spending, although there were 61 companies on the magic list. More than $4.2 billion was awarded through 10,000 individual contracts, which were awarded past the panel's end date, breaching all the procurement rules.

The second way that the government's rorting this and privatising the Public Service is through outsourcing non-consulting work to the big four expensive firms. There has been an explosion of contracting, worth billions of dollars, to the big four consulting firms over the last few years. The graph is almost exponential. But, interestingly, a decreasing percentage of this work is actually flagged as consultancies on the government's tender system, so that means one of two things: either they're covering it up and departments are not flagging this work as consultancies, because they don't like all the articles showing the blowout in consultancies; or, I think more likely, the staffing caps are forcing departments to contract out low-value work, which should be done more cheaply in departments. We've proven this. It should be done more cheaply. The government says: 'We're the small-government people. We hate waste.' No, you hate public servants. You want to privatise all this work, at greater cost, to the big four and these labour hire firms. Why? There is no reason except mad ideology.

COVID-19 has triggered a deep nationwide reflection on big issues: rebuilding our national capability and the overcasualisation of work. The UK and the US are further down this privatisation road, and their responses have been disasters. The case for rebuilding the public sector is overwhelming.

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