The Finance Department has awarded a $20 million quarantine contract to consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the company behind the government’s botched vaccine rollout.
PwC will provide the Morrison government with “strategic planning consultation services” and “commercial and financial advice” to support the delivery of centres for national resilience, a contract published on AusTender shows.
The centres are purpose-built quarantine facilities in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and will provide extra capacity to manage future potential health and natural disaster crises. The contract runs from August 2021 to June 2022, and the firm will collect about $1.8 million a month (roughly $60,000 a day).
Few details
PwC was the Health Department’s lead delivery partner for its vaccine rollout which was besieged by delays and inefficiency, with millions of doses behind schedule.
Details of the $11 million Health contract were kept secret for eight months; department officials claimed the contract was “incorrectly registered” in its financial management system.
So why is the government turning to PwC again?
The Finance Department says engaging PwC will support and supplement its capability to deliver the projects and meet the expectations of the Commonwealth, Victorian, Western Australian and Queensland governments.
“Consultants can deliver value for money when the need for specialist skills or additional support is temporary or project specific, or is highly specialised in nature,” it said.
But as Crikey has reported throughout the pandemic, this is critical work that is being outsourced at great expense, and we are unlikely to ever see the results.
When asked for comment, PwC said: “We don’t comment on client matters.”
Boom time
Big international consulting firms are making more money from the Morrison government than ever before because of the billions that are being spent on recovery efforts.
But there is little transparency about the advice they provide, often due to deals being labelled commercial-in-confidence, despite grappling with key parts of the pandemic response.
More than $1 billion in contracts have flowed to the major seven consulting firms during COVID, raising calls about the need for greater transparency. This boiled over during the bungled vaccine rollout, during which millions flowed to consultants with little to show. One of those consulting firms, McKinsey & Company, had been accused of causing delays to the French government’s vaccine rollout.
PwC in particular has done spectacularly well financially during the pandemic. But the riches haven’t flowed to everyone. Despite sacking 250 staff and reducing pay and hours of about 65% of its staff by 4%, its partners have taken home an 18% increase in profits.
One is continually astonished at the gall of neoliberal, small (in every sense of the word) outsourcing government. How do democracies allow their malfeasance to flourish? Is it the indifference of the voting public? Are we mostly stupid, complacent or is something else at play. I am genuinely baffled, as I was in May 2019 and as I fear I will be again, some time or other in the next 6 months or so.
‘We don’t comment on client matters’ : really !?. The client is the Australian public including taxpayers. Echos of ‘we don’t comment about ‘on water’ matters’. The legacy of ‘Splash’ Halton and assorted mates is spreading like a virus (or perhaps remains visible like a ‘stain on the underpants of history’) I am not happy.
Only ten years ago corporate tax avoidance was not on the public radar. Now tax fairness has come to the fore; people understand that the richest institutions among us, those who can afford to pay the most, pay proportionately the least.
Efforts by politicians to hike the GST, lower corporate taxes or lift other taxes on ordinary workers are also loudly derided. Multinational tax avoidance is no longer a secret. It is now understood for what it is. The Double Dutch Irish Sandwich no longer bewilders; it is now widely debunked as a scam.
Public understanding and transparency are therefore everything. The public funds government, voters are entitled to disclosure, and they should demand it.
Tthe Coalition actually has the record of greater profligacy when it comes to showering billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on external consultants.
Consultants’ fees, after rising under Howard, eased back under Rudd before falling by more than 30% under Gillard.
They rose again the moment Tony Abbott assumed office, and have continued to rise…
Morrisin far outstripping all of them now
PwC in particular has done spectacularly well financially during the pandemic…sacking 250 staff and reducing pay and hours of about 65% of its staff by 4%, its partners have taken home an 18% increase in profits.
Parasites and leeches all of the Big Four Audit firms.
PwC has its fingers in all sorts of pies. A great example of their parasitical grift is their subsidiary outfit “Skills for Australia”, which has just had ratified the new Creative Arts training package. I’d love to know how much they got paid for shuffling a few words around to make the already execrable even worse.
They had two of them on the board of AEMO, may still do.