Uncle Colin not impressed
âCuttingâ funding leading into an election.
LNP Culture wars.
Iâm sure itâs not the last racist policy to be announced before an election.
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Isnât it interesting that we really only want to remove coal mining, but itâs always labelled under mining so things like iron and copper get lumped in.
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Wait till he finds out about Australian companies offshoring staff, like for call centers.
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Itâs straight out of Howardâs playbook.
He got into Power back in(96?) from memory on âslashing the public service â.
On the way out he left us with the largest public service (excluding counting wartime soldiers) in our nations history.
All to try and keep the economy a float.
History repeats.
I donât approve of the rhetoric and coming down on trying to have more diverse workforces and I think communications staff play an important role.
But the message to cut waste out of the public service is the right one.
Itâs ridiculous we are running near full employment based purely on public sector hiring.
It is unsustainable.
I still donât want Dutton anywhere near the lodge.
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Under Howard there was recourse to outsourcing to the private sector. Helen Coonan tried to privatise all legal work for the public service.
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We really want public service privatised again? Isnât that how you get people suiciding and ministers awarding themselves and mates future windfalls? In other words the MO of modern LNP?
"audit found the former Morrison government had spent $20.8bn outsourcing more than a third of public service operations.
Nearly 54,000 full-time staff were employed as consultants or service providers for the federal government during the 2021-22 financial year â the equivalent of 37% of the 144,300-employee public service, it found.
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âQuarantine Servicesâ anyone? Scott Briggs, Scomoâs close buddy, grinning that â â â â eating grin and pocketing untold millions? Yeah, cut the public service, and make sure you start with oversight of outsourced projects.
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I do wonder where all of the hirings have been under Albanese.
What didnât we have in the public service under Morrison that we do now?
And is it all federal?
Spot on.
Privatisation dodgy.
It more expensive to be giving out extraordinary amounts of funding to the public sector to deliver services to peopleâŚ. Especially with executives pulling huge wages and sending jobs overseas.
A public sector run by the state is a better service.
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NDIS is possibly the major one, and possibly major driver in associated private business investment too.
Look at Loflyerâs post above. Lib govts have done this for years, Kennet did it as well, sack public service workers and employ consultants to do their work at an inflated cost.
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The Liberal Government has shown that it cannot be trusted with procurement.
There are countless cases of libs lining their mateâs pockets with Government contracts.
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I mean âwe want more nurses and hospital bedsâ
Look at how the public spending on this has gone up!
Canât have it both ways.
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I have to assume that paramedics and police EBAs have contributed.
I donât get it.
Is it all âpublicâ jobs, or just some mythical government bean-counters?
Because as population increases and inflation increases then the budget for public jobs are going to increase.
And outsourcing to consultants is more expensive and less effective anyway, soâŚ
Oh, theyâre all government jobsâŚ
And?
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We need more taskforces to look into this and that!
Why is public spending going up?
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And anti semitism is going unchecked, maybe a private militia/security force?
Never a bad time for this reminder that, while we expect the newscorpses and 9âs to gloss over this â â â â , our ABC has been rendered toothless and full of conservative board appointees.
Dutton likely unscathed by damning Home Affairs revelations, thanks to the media
Itâs apparently of little significance to News Corp and the ABC that the alternative leader of the country is neck-deep in scandals care of Home Affairs.
FEB 14, 2024
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OPPOSITION LEADER PETER DUTTON (IMAGE: AAP/MICK TSIKAS)
You would think it was big news that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had presided over billions of dollars in government contracts to allegedly crooked companies and ignored all warnings about them for years. Not so, according to News Corp publications, with The Australian barely reporting on the latest damning revelations â and even then only to seemingly excuse Dutton. Even the ABC only managed a single desultory online write-through of the story.
It emerged via the Nine newspapers on Sunday that an inquiry into the Dutton-era Home Affairs department, conducted by former director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Defence secretary Dennis Richardson, blamed senior public servants for years of failures that could have prevented taxpayers from paying billions to companies linked to alleged serious crimes.
The Richardson inquiry was followed up by Labor Senator Deborah OâNeill in estimates on Monday, but nor was this reported by News Corp organs: they will decide, apparently, what is news in this country and the circumstances in which it is reported. And if a story originates in the organisation formerly known as Fairfax, itâs not news.
This week revealed new details about how Home Affairs under Dutton entered into contracts with multiple companies that were under investigation by the Australian Federal Police. His department contracted a company whose CEO was being investigated for possible drugs and arms smuggling.
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Richardson also found that the departmentâs internal audit, conducted in 2019 and reporting to minister Dutton, picked up that the government had subcontracted KPMG to look into a major tenderer, but that KPMG had conducted its audit on the wrong company. That is, instead of conducting a financial strength assessment on the company that the department had actuallycontracted (Paladin Holdings), it audited a completely different company (Paladin Solutions). The department had no financial statements of the company to which it would contract half a billion dollars worth of services. We learnt this week that Dutton had ânotedâ these auditing and procurement failures at the time, but did nothing to address them.
The audit also found that the department had never outlined its reasons for selecting Paladin (after a non-competitive tender process) in the first place. At the time, Dutton refused to release details of the contracts, but they certainly looked ugly from the outside: in 2017 the Australian arm of Paladin was registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island and had just $50,000 in capital. The company had prepared its bid in less than a week, and the contract it bid for was far more lucrative than anything it had undertaken before.
Soon after winning the contract, Paladinâs founder and major shareholder Craig Thrupp was being denied entry into Papua New Guinea over disputes about the companyâs local subcontracting practices. (While Paladin received government funding of around $1,400 per asylum seeker per day, security guards were being paid just $450 per month. The company was making $1.3 million profit per week, according to documents later filed in bitter legal disputes between Paladin and its former executives. Thrupp denies any wrongdoing.) Paladin has also been under investigation by the AFP over bribery allegations involving PNG officials.
Documents released to the Senate in September 2019 reveal that Paladin breached its key performance indicators thousands of times during the first year of its operations. Yet the government renewed its contract several times.
Nor is this the only entity under the spotlight over corruption and other probity allegations. âRichardson confirmed that former Home Affairs contractor Canstruct, which managed a $1.8 billion rolling contract on Nauru between 2017 and late 2022, faces a separate federal police financial crime and bribery probe,â reported Nineâs investigative team this week. When it was originally awarded a contract to run Australiaâs offshore processing in Nauru, the Brisbane construction company had not even commenced trading, and had just $8 in assets. Soon it was making $100 million in annual profits from its Home Affairs contracts.
In a strange coincidence, this was another case of KPMG conducting its financial strength assessment on the wrong company: Canstruct International Pty Ltd, rather than Canstruct Pty Ltd. (This may sound like an innocent or insignificant error, but according to Guardian Australia, the minister for Home Affairs confirmed that âits contract provided no recourse to Canstruct Pty Ltd should Canstruct International fail to meet its obligations under the contractâ.)
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Questions were raised by the Australian National Audit Office in relation to yet another Home Affairs contract too, with NKW Holdings, because they were ânot representing value for moneyâ.
Dutton presided over Home Affairs from 2017 to 2021, and in 2022 the Nauru offshore processing contracts that his department had initiated (under former secretary Mike Pezzullo) alone cost the Australian taxpayer $485 million, despite there being just 22 refugees and asylum seekers left there.
But is any of this really important? The fact that no bureaucrats, or the current Liberal Party leader, ever suffered any consequences for their failures, despite a litany of them over years, costing billions and prompting multiple corruption investigations? Itâs apparently of little significance to either News Corp or the ABC that the alternative leader of the country is neck-deep in it.
The current secretary of Home Affairs, Stephanie Foster, appearing in estimates on Monday, replied to Senator OâNeillâs pointed queries only by saying that the internal audit report stood for itself. And while noting that âthe processes were not adequateâ and that the department had âlearned from the pastâ, she nevertheless said that bureaucrats in the department wouldnât face consequences as a result of these failures. Nor, it seems, will Dutton.
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At some point, surely, someoneâs going to call him out on this garbage.
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Dodgy contracts and an external audit that twice âmistakenlyâ audited companies with similar names to the actual ones it should have. Next PM? Even you rusted ons should blush at this stuff. Wonder which one of Peteâs neighbourâs teenage sons will get a nuclear contract?
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