Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important debate, and I associate myself with the comments of my colleagues already on the table. National security laws and outcomes are too important to be done in quiet agreement between the political duopoly behind closed doors. Too much work in this place is done secretly and doesn't get the benefit of scrutiny from media, from our community, that informs the broader Australian public about what is happening in these services and departments. We need debate in the parliament on what is happening.

There are some important, positive measures here, like removing the ability to delegate powers and expanding committee membership. We have long argued for those. Those committees need to be more representative. There are also matters of further consideration which need amendment and consideration more broadly. I want to talk about four things that in my experience here in this parliament go to questions of security and intelligence and an effective and uncompromised defence service. They are: firstly, the revolving door between Defence and major contracting and consulting bodies; secondly, the way in which the contracts have expanded in recent years and the hazards that that creates for our intelligence and security; thirdly, the issue that my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson has just spoken of with such clarity, around the role and importance of whistleblowers and their treatment and the facts they bring before us and the treatment of those facts; and fourthly, the climate crisis and the really significant contribution that makes to enlarging the security crisis in our country potentially into the future.

We in the Greens have previously argued that the existing constitution of the PJCIS is not just unrepresentative of the parliament but also, in being so, probably unlawful insofar as it fails to comply with the intelligence act. This question of representative proper committee processes and structures is very important for us in the Greens, and we want to continue to see those bodies made representative and made effective to properly represent the skills, experience and perspectives in this parliament, which is what the Australian people want as they look to us to establish an effective security and intelligence service.

The first hazard I want to talk about is this issue of the revolving door. Over the last year we have learnt a great deal about the movement of people who hold critical information from within the public sector, who rotate out into large consulting firms and then contract back into government. Defence has been a major area of the manipulation and use of the revolving door over the last year. This is an important security question. In the last five years, 100 personnel have moved out of Defence into KPMG specifically. I recently asked a question on notice about the work and security clearances of people moving out of Defence into such bodies. I asked what their security clearances were and what kind of work they had been doing. I've got to say that I think the people who responded to my QON had read the handbook that we've been hearing about recently that shows public servants how to block, obscure and make sure senators don't really get the depth of information they are seeking, because the answer they gave me answered another question. It didn't even address the question of what previous employees were doing and what their security clearances were before they left the service to join the private sector.

We need to know not only what their security clearances were and the kind of work they did but where they are now, what they are doing now and what risks they create for us out there in the private sector. At the moment, we have no way of tracking and knowing what they do. That is a security risk. Where is that dealt with in what we have in front of us? That's a really important question for us. We need a public sector which does not push against the Senate but gives us the information we need to help ensure clarity, honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability and truth about what people are doing out there with the information they may have harnessed which could put our security at risk.

Defence is a major contractor to the big four and to the consultancy industry more broadly, and their behaviour and the behaviour of the big four firms really need attention. It's a matter of security and intelligence integrity, and at present it is not properly managed. Defence has a massive reliance on external contracts. It's a critical challenge to security. We know that the previous government spent $20.8 billion in 2021-22 on external consultants, contractors and labour hire. I'm going to say that number again because it's huge: $20.8 billion in a single year. Seventy per cent of that spending was in Defence. We have a major issue in Defence contracting out enormous amounts of work.

KPMG is the largest player in that big pool of consulting and contracting work. KPMG was found to have charged Defence $1.8 billion over the last decade. As PwC is to many other agencies, or was, so is KPMG to Defence, and the lack of scrutiny that this bill provides on this very important question of security is a real gap in our legislative program. We need to look at the culture that persists around these contracts. Too often it's a culture of overcharging, of duplication, of contracts for mates and of worse. We have a problem in the management and overseeing of these contracts, and the lack of scrutiny and the use of national security arguments to hide information is a really important issue in this massive use of private consultants in our defence sector.

I want to go one example that has had some publicity, and it utterly deserves it. Defence has a $100 million contract with KPMG and, in recent times, made an alleged payment of $100,000 out of that $100 million contract for work that had not been delivered. The timelines had not been met. The work had not been done. A $100,000 payment was made to the consultant, KPMG, despite it not doing the work. That is an emblematic example of the failure to just properly manage the financial elements of that contract, let alone know the implications for security of such a strong, deep reliance on consultants. Our spending on consultants in this country, especially in Defence, is amongst the biggest external dependencies on consultants in the world. We have created a massive security risk, without any proper governance, by the overuse of consultants and contractors, and we are not properly managing it. Defence alone has expended almost $4 billion on the big four consulting firms in recent years, more than all other departments combined.

It's very clear that KPMG has used insider information to profit from its consultancy projects. We've had evidence of inflated invoices, billing for hours not worked—I gave an example of that. I recently asked a question on notice about how many staff from the big four are inside Defence and carrying Defence common access cards. They have a card which gives them access to Defence. The answer is that 1,891 people who are from the big four consulting firms have access by a card into Defence. This is a problem. This is ungoverned. What challenge does this create for our security? It's something that deserves much closer examination. Where are we dealing with this question at present? Where is it dealt with? It's certainly not dealt with in this bill.

I want to mention procurement, because procurement is such an important matter for value for money, which Australian citizens are interested in. It's also really important to be managed properly for security and transparency. It's not at present. We don't have proper oversight of what's going on with the procurement processes, and we don't properly track, monitor and observe the outcomes of some of them. When things go off the rails, they are not pulled into public view and properly managed within the public sector. We need an authority which looks at contracts like the one I just described and creates a path forward so that they don't occur again.

The third question that I think is vitally important and has already been dealt with a number of times by previous speakers is the question of whistleblowers: how we treat them, what we do with the information they bring forward, whether we lock them up or whether we listen to the information they give us and honour them for the risks they have taken in the public interest. There would be no PwC crisis and no examination of the surfacing of our society's big challenges with the big four without whistleblowers and the actions they have taken in the last year. Many whistleblowers, in terror of the possible loss of employment not just in the big four firm they currently work in but in other large firms, have brought forward information—seeking anonymity and very frightened—which they feel, in good conscience, they cannot stay silent about. Whistleblowers do our Australian community a great service. They pay a very big price for it. Many of them know about that price before they come forward. David McBride knew he would possibly pay a price. Certainly Julian Assange's family did, and they have certainly paid a huge price. The price is not just paid by the whistleblowers but paid by their families and by their community. It means a lifetime loss not just of earnings but of security, safety and their mental and physical health.

We must do more to protect our whistleblowers, not punish them. David McBride served two tours in uniform for our country, but we have just made a horrific decision to meet his bravery and courage—in exposing events that deserve our attention as a parliament and a community—with a jail sentence of more than five years. Shame! That is wrong. That is not the right way to treat someone who believed they were doing a good thing, and it happened under this exact legislation. Key decision-makers need to be held accountable, and one of the ways we hold our decision-makers, departments, public sector and defence and security services to account is through the work of whistleblowers, and we need to change the way we deal with whistleblowers—we need to provide them with an agency that assists them and stop punishing them for calling out, in David McBride's case, egregious war crimes. There were no intermediate officers held to account; he received a long jail sentence. Those who commit war crimes should be called out, and our whistleblowers should be protected, not punished, not locked up. Certainly they, along with their families, should not be paying the kind of price that they are for trying to see justice. We all owe them a very significant debt.

The final point I want to mention is the way in which our country must address, through its security and intelligence and defence services, the massive challenge that faces our country in relation to the climate crisis. The big challenges that are going to come at us and the generations ahead in the coming decades will relate to the disasters and the emergencies that come from the climate crisis. We know that there will be mass global migrations. There'll be massive costs within Australian communities around the consequences of the climate crisis, and we should have that at the top of our agenda when we come to consideration of how our defence, security and intelligence services should be working.

Where is the advance work on this challenge? It is missing in this bill and it's missing in our approach as a Senate. As a parliament, we need to respond to that challenge, not just lock up people who come forward and offer their incredible evidence and the experience they bring from their work in all kinds of services. We should be protecting whistleblowers. We should be looking at the procurement processes and protecting defence from the invasive and predatory efforts of big consulting firms. We should be ensuring that anyone who does move from a defence or security service into the private sector is properly managed so that we can be confident that we are not seeing the harvesting of important parts of our defence and security service for the benefit of profit and very large consulting firms.