The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet recorded a sharp increase in spending on consultancy contracts last year, as scrutiny on the government's spending on external advice grows.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
While the number of consultancy contracts recorded in the department's annual report grew by 20 per cent, from 104 to 125, the amount spent on the contracts doubled.
In 2016-17, the department said it spent $3.29 million on consultants, a number that jumped to $7.05 million in 2017-18.
Of that figure, $4.3 million is attributed to 101 new consultancies and $2.74 million to 24 existing consultancies that carried through from the previous year. According to the report there was 104 consultancy contracts in 2016-17 and 111 in 2015-16.
A Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet spokeswoman didn't identify specific projects that contributed to the hike in spending.
"The department brings in outside expertise where we don't have the specialist capability in-house. Due to the variability of the department’s role to support government priorities, including taskforces, consultant expenditure is not readily comparable year-on-year," the spokeswoman said.
Figures in the 2017-18 annual report are different to those in the previous year's annual report, where 64 consultancies were declared for 2016-17 and 72 for 2015-16.
Fairfax Media asked if the definition of a consultancy contract had changed between the two reports, and was told by a spokeswoman it had not, but this report included consultancies worth less than $10,000, which are not required to be listed on AusTender.
"Annual reports from previous years have not included consultancy arrangements with a value of less than $10,000," the spokeswoman said.
The spending coincides with the announcement of the independent review of the Australian public service, which has staff in the department, and an external security review after two locked filing cabinets containing cabinet documents were sold to an ex-government furniture store, leading to a series of embarrassing stories.
Of all the "challenging issues" faced in the 2017-18 year, the cabinet files debacle "had the most significant impact," Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Martin Parkinson said.
"I am deeply concerned that such an extraordinary lapse of security could occur," Dr Parkinson wrote in his review of the year.
"It is important that the APS heeds the lesson of this incident, and it has been the subject of attention at the secretaries board. Each secretary across the APS has reviewed their department’s security arrangements and asked all agencies within their portfolio to do the same."
Spending on consultants has been under the microscope since an auditor general's report found the value of contracts for external advice doubled at the same time as the government moved to cut 15,000 public service jobs.
Dr Parkinson has previously said departments shouldn't call in consultants for "core business" but that use of external advice was necessary for specialist work.
"Where there's a situation where I just need a fresh pair of eyes to have a look at this and just do a robustness test, just check that we're on track, I think that's totally legitimate, [a] traditional role of consultants," Dr Parkinson told Fairfax Media last year.
"If I have a concern, it's about some parts of the service relying on consultants to do what should be their core business because ultimately we deal in ideas, and that can be a policy idea, it can be the delivery of that through a program... or it can be the regulation of it through oversight arrangements," he said.
