Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank minister for his contribution. I note the minister has two big white folders on the desk over there and I note that there are staff supporting the minister with several volumes of white folders with lots of red tabs and lots of information in them. I would like to ask the minister, who is so well supported, if he can tell us: how much is his government spending each year on contractors and consultants? We have asked the Department of Finance officials on several occasions how much they are spending on contractors and consultants and they cannot tell us. Perhaps the minister, who has some big folders in front of him, can assist us with that question. It's no small issue.

The government like to tell us how good they are at managing money. This is the same government that managed to blow $27 million of taxpayers' money on the Leppington triangle that was valued at $3 million. The Prime Minister got outraged that the head of Australia Post spent $20,000 on some very expensive watches, but didn't get outraged that his government had spent $27 million—I retract that—wasted $27 million in what looks like a very dodgy land deal in western Sydney. That's not cause for outrage. The same government was roundly condemned by the Australian National Audit Office for its sports rorts affairs, and I'll have some further questions on that. But we'd like to know why they cannot tell us how much money they're spending on contractors and consultants. It's a very good question. It goes to the heart of good management. We know that 40 per cent of the Department of Veterans' Affairs workforce—that's four in every 10 workers—are external consultants. If you have any veterans in your electorate who are wondering why they can't get a decent or consistent answer from the Department of Veterans' Affairs, four out of every 10 of the staff are external consultants. The National Disability Insurance Agency has 200 senior executive service staff employed by labour hire agencies. You would think that might be an outlier, but it's not. Right across the service, we have similar examples of massive spending on consultants, labour hire companies and contractors, and the government can't even tell us how much it's costing. We can tell you what it is costing the patients and what it is costing the customers.

There's no better example than in the agency that is charged with the job of overseeing aged care in this country. During the height of the crisis we saw the importance of this. More than 700 people died in aged-care facilities and many more were kept in conditions that left them alone, scared and isolated. It was a national tragedy. There wouldn't be a member in this place who wasn't touched by it. Oversight of aged-care homes is the responsibility of this government. This is the cost of the policy, and they can't tell you how much they're spending on contractors and on labour hire, but it's going up and up. Thirty per cent—that's three in every 10—of the staff working in the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission are casuals. Is it any wonder they can't get a policy out? Is it any wonder they can't oversee quality within the aged-care sector? Thirty per cent of the staff in the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission are casuals. Most of them are employed by labour hire companies.

It gets worse. Staff at the commission are being provided to the commission by the very same labour hire company which provides the staff to the aged-care homes—a red-hot conflict of interest. If they could argue that this was good value, maybe they could convince us that this was good economic management. What makes it worse is that we are paying more for less. We're paying more for these contractors, more for these consultants—more for the labour hire—than we would if they were directly employed. So my question to the minister is: how many, and isn't it true that it's going up? (Time expired)

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