Pritika Kumar

The Coalition’s election pledge to cut between 36,000 and 41,000 jobs from the Australian Public Service raises a lot of questions, like who would do the work that keeps the Australian government going? The answer, most likely, is a swarm of private consultants. In 2021–22, the last year the Coalition was in power, the Australian Government’s contracts with the five biggest consulting firms totalled $2 billion – an amount that could have funded 14,700 additional public servants for a year. Australia Institute research shows that capping or cutting the public service is counter productive – departments and agencies more efficiently use public money when they are able to spend it employing public servants as needed.

But this isn’t just about money. The Australia Institute has highlighted that an overreliance on private consultants undermines the public service and weakens Australian democracy. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were banned from bidding for government contracts because they shared confidential government information with clients looking to game Australia’s tax avoidance laws. And don’t forget that PwC also had its fingers in the Robodebt pie. In testimony before the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, PwC disclosed that it did not document why it stopped working on a 70-page report, which was critical of the scheme, even though it was paid nearly $1 million to work on it. 

Would the illegal and cruel scheme have ended sooner but for the complicit silence of consultants and senior public servants?