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

See, they yell and they scream and they don't want to hear it. When you cut the Public Service, yet Australia has grown, you say to secretaries and government departments, 'To get the work done, you have to contract this out.' That is their only choice. In a private business, to randomly control one of your cost inputs, or one of your levers, is completely irrational. But that's what those opposite did to the Public Service. If we were writing emojis into Hansard, at this point we'd have 'facepalm', 'head explosion' and a few others that I probably won't mention.

What happened, though? With this privatisation by stealth, we've inherited government departments with thousands upon thousands of casual labour hire workers—permanently temporary, a shadowy shadow workforce, sitting there at desks doing the same work as the public servants sitting alongside them. But the private labour hire companies clip the ticket on the way through—literally thousands of them. In this budget the government put forward an initiative to convert 3,000 of these people to permanent jobs, with a saving over the next four years of $800 million. Through the audit committee, which I've been a member of for seven years, we proved, year after year and inquiry after inquiry, that those opposite wasted billions of dollars. That is on the national debt for the next generation to repay because of their ideology of privatisation and their hatred of and disregard for the notion of a public service and the public sector. It is based on a flawed view that somehow the private sector is always more efficient. It's just not true; it's rubbish—as, interestingly, the previous speaker actually acknowledged, without taking any responsibility for the situation we find ourselves in.

I will say: there is absolutely a role for good consultants, commercial advice, a fresh set of eyes, sometimes surge capacity, international lessons and jurisdictional comparisons. There is expertise from time to time that you don't have in the Public Service, and that's perfectly fine. But let's not pretend: the billions of dollars of work that flowed at great expense and great profit to the big four consulting firms was body shopping, as it's called—stuff which should and could have been done far cheaper within the Public Service, stuff like grant assessments, business cases and business plans. Why on earth was this stuff—low-level routine rubbish, frankly—to contract out, given to the big four consulting firms? It was a false economy from the so-called party of fiscal discipline over there with a trillion dollars of Liberal debt—wasted money.

Labor's policy, unashamedly, is to remove the staff caps and save money—who knew! You employ more public servants in the right areas and you actually save money—a thing those opposite still fail to accept. They say all the stuff but they don't get the core point; they created the mess because of their ideology. We are unashamedly reinvesting in the Public Service.

We heard the start of a scare campaign earlier this year from the Leader of the Opposition. Remember him in question time: 'Labor is employing 10,000 more public servants.' He started that line, and then the PwC scandal erupted—haven't heard that line since! I think that's driven home the point to the public: yes, we can save money and rebuild the capability of the Public Service now and for the next generation by bringing some of that work in-house. Wait and see whether that scare campaign returns!

There's also—and the previous speaker touched on this—what I've termed the logo fetish. I hope if something good comes from this disgraceful scandal at PwC, it's that, once and for all, the media, the public and people in this place, and, frankly, ministers, get over the logo fetish. I've been a senior public servant myself. I've had the experience with Labor and Liberal governments that, when you do a piece of work and you're an expert in the area and you send it up, and they go, 'I'm not so sure about that'—it was worse with the Liberal governments but not across the board—you then go to KPMG or PwC or EY or one of them, and say, 'Can you do this bit of work; here's what I want you to do,' and they put your work with their logo on it, and, somehow, it's a form of magic. There's a demand side to this equation, not just a supply issue. That's something we all need to take some responsibility for.

It leads to my next point: there's no such thing as an independent consultant. It is a fiction. It is a fantasy. The Auditor-General said that very clearly to the parliament a number of times through the public accounts and audit committee. He does not accept that there's an independent consultant. There's not. Like I said, there's a legitimate use, but, at the end of the day, you get the draft report. I've had that experience myself when we had a minister of the other persuasion who said 'No, all program evaluations have to be done by an external firm.' So you put it out for $75,000—a cheap bit of work, frankly—and get it back on a Friday night. It's due back on a Sunday and it's rubbish. Then you look, and the firm has sold us back someone who, frankly, you got rid of about a year ago because they weren't any good. They did this work. You sit there and make tracked changes on a Sunday. They accept them and give it back to you, and that's the independent report. That's too often what goes on. That's a frank exposition of the reality. There is no such thing as an independent consultant. You can partner with consultants. You can get external capability. You can get grunt. You can get intellectual experience. But they're not independent, and we should stop pretending that they are when we're paying the bill.

This bill responds to the independent review of the APS led by Mr David Thodey, the former CEO of Telstra. It was commissioned by the former Liberal government. It was nice to hear that they now say they support it, because they wouldn't implement it. Prime Minister Turnbull commissioned it. Then they got the report, and Prime Minister Morrison went 'Well, we're not doing that; the Public Service is here to shut up and do what they're told.' That is basically what he said to them. In the first address as Prime Minister, he said: 'We'll do the policy. You'll do the implementing.' In a narrow sense, of course that's true. Of course governments decide. But it is the Public Service's responsibility to brief governments whether they want to hear it or not. That's part of how our system of government works. The Public Service does not just work for executive government. It was created in the Constitution and it's also accountable to this parliament separate and different from its accountability to ministers. Like I said, frank and fearless advice is so critical.

The final thing I would say on the notion of the APS value of stewardship is that it's incredibly important that we add that value in as a new Public Service value. The APS values articulate the culture and the operating ethos of the APS. They reflect the expectations between public servants and the government, the parliament and the community. They should change very slowly. They really should stand the test of time and they shouldn't be changed lightly, so it is a significant thing that the government is legislating a new value. It was developed through extensive consultation and input from over 1,500 APS staff across the country, from graduates to senior executives, and it outlines the stewardship value as meaning 'The APS builds capability and institutional knowledge and supports the public interest now and into the future by understanding the long-term impacts of what it does.' All APS employees, from the last person in the door last week at the most junior level to the most senior secretary, the Secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, are bound by those values. Unlike consultants, it is the Public Service, which the public ultimately can trust, that is bound by those values.

Stewardship involves learning from the past and looking into the future. It's actually a conservative value because it involves conservation of the capital you've inherited—the knowledge which should be valued—as well as cultivation, leaving things in a better place than you found them, seeing your role as part of the whole, preserving public trust and promoting the public good. It also has deep roots in Australia. It's a First Nations Australians value, with our country's original stewards caring for the country over tens of thousands of years and untold generations. And so, whilst it's a value that this legislation is inserting or imposing on all public servants to be accountable for, I will close close to where I started. It's also a value that governments—this government and governments that will come after us—and secretaries must also hold dear for their responsibilities to steward the Public Service for the next generation.

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