Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, the public sector has been hollowed out by big consulting firms. They hire the brightest and the best, and, in many cases, they make them offers that simply are too good to refuse. They hollow out the public service to such a degree that the only place that the public service can go to get the advice it needs to provide to the government is to the big consulting firms that are actually responsible for hollowing out the public sector in the first place.

The other point I want to make about the business model of big consulting is that it's not just based on conflict of interest; it is actually based on monetising confidential information. That is one of the ways that big consulting has been so massively successful over the years. A year or so ago, I read When McKinsey Comes to Town. I recommend that book to Senator Scarr, who I know likes a good book because he's often waving them around in this place. That is a credit to him. I admire a reader. I do refer When McKinsey Comes to Town to you, Senator Scarr. I can assure you some of the revelations in that particular tome about the unethical behaviour of McKinsey will curl your toenails, and I have no doubt that behaviour is reflected across a number of big consulting firms.

The government has made it very clear that it condemns the actions of PwC, and so it should. At the time the scandal broke, 43 per cent of Tax Practitioner Board members were former partners of the big four consulting firms, including two ex-PwC partners who were receiving ongoing financial payments from PwC at the time. That is the fox in the henhouse, colleagues. The Greens amendment—that will pass with government support today or tomorrow—kicks the foxes out of the henhouse. It fixes the loophole that effectively allowed big consultants to regulate themselves. Never again, thanks to Senator Pocock and the Australian Greens, will we have members of the Tax Practitioner Board financially tied to those same large tax agents that they are regulating. This is the first regulatory step to respond to the PwC scandal. I sincerely hope it won't be the last.