Page 1734 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2022
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(iii) whether it was appropriate to use a contractor based interstate for services that could have been provided by a Canberra-based supplier; and
(iv) what outcomes have been delivered for CIT and Canberra taxpayers; and
(b) report to the ACT Legislative Assembly on the findings of the audit by the final sitting day in September 2022.
I sought leave to speak today on this very serious issue about procurement that has been raised in the ABC story that was published today. Here we are again learning of more procurements under the watch of this Labor-Greens government that raise significant alarm bells. This time it is the Canberra Institute of Technology and the publicly available contracts that go back to 2017. There are seven contracts that I have been able to find, totalling $8.87 million, and they have all been awarded to one individual and his related entity. Let us be clear. Government contracts regularly run into the millions of dollars. The value of the contract itself does not raise significant concern, but when you start to look a little deeper, there are some serious questions about what is actually going on here. Madam Speaker, let me give you a few details.
The first contract that I could find was from 2017 for $86,280.58, and it is mentioned in CIT’s annual report from that year. I am not sure what that one was for because, as far as I can see, the contract itself is not publicly available. The second is a sole-source contract from 2017-18 for $198,000. This contract equates to $1,058.82 per day. It is also not clear what this one was for.
The third is another sole-source contract for three months in 2018 for a total of $151,250. That is approximately $50,000 per month, or $2,326.92 per day. That one was for CEO and executive team mentoring and “familiarisation of organisational transformational theory and practices” and the delivery of workshops. That contract also included $6,791.13 in travel expenses so that the consultant could travel to Canberra.
The fourth is where things start to get really concerning. This one runs from 2018 to 2020 at a cost of $1,220,000, or $3,333.33 per day. This was also the first one to go to open tender, but CIT ignored Government Procurement Board advice about improving its tender processes and language. It went to tender and, hey, what do you know? Apparently, the “best value for money provider” was the same contractor. This contract was for mentoring, coaching, workshops and “strategic guidance on transformation” and providing CIT staff with “learning materials, research articles and relevant reading texts”.
In relation to this contract, I have seen an FOI document with a seven-page board paper produced by the consultant called “thought piece”. Most of it, as you can see, is redacted, but some of the headings are here. They mentioned “key temporal scales”, “key spatial scales” and “context-specific approaches”—if anyone wants to tell me what that means. I seek leave to table this “thought piece”.
Leave granted.
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