Page 1736 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2022
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Frankly, this is just utter rubbish. If anyone in this chamber can explain what that means, how this benefits the CIT CEO and executive team and how these “deliverables” can be measured, then I welcome it. We certainly do not need external consultants to tell us that these contracts seem to have clearly been drawn up to be opaque and uncertain so that the outcomes cannot be measured in any meaningful way.
For $10,000 a day, Canberrans need and deserve answers as to how the taxpayer funds are being spent. I reiterate that this latest contract describes a series of bizarre “services” to be delivered, which is costing the ACT taxpayer $10,000 a day. If you thought that was bad, there is more. The consultant is not based in Canberra, so taxpayers are funding his trips down here, including accommodation, petrol and meals under each contract, to the tune of thousands of additional dollars.
When you read through the actual contracts, things start to look even more alarming. Facts and figures typically included in ACT government contracts are all redacted, or not there at all, in this series of contracts. Information such as the personnel delivering the so-called “services”, their hourly or daily rate, milestones, deliverable dates and an invoice payment schedule with dollar amounts is all redacted or is not there at all. Why?
A quick look through the Tenders ACT website shows that there are plenty of consultancy contracts where all of that information is publicly available, as it should be, so why not for these contracts? You read the resumé of the individual in question and it is exceedingly questionable, at best, as to whether this individual is qualified or experienced enough to deliver large-scale organisational transformation or, in the contractor’s own words, “develop iterative capacity to cycle through adaptive-renewal processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales”.
Honestly, could anyone measure that and be sure that it is actually being delivered? Remember, the Government Procurement Board gave CIT advice that their KPIs need to be measurable and that they should revise their tender document to “clearly articulate the role of the contractor, the work to be undertaken and what outcomes and deliverables are expected”. CIT blatantly ignored that advice. Is it a coincidence that the latest contract—remember, this is the one that is worth $4,999,990—is $10 under the threshold for review by the Government Procurement Board on procurements by administrative units of the ACT government? I will let the public come to their own conclusions on this.
This morning I had a discussion on ABC radio about this seriously alarming situation, and not long afterward there was a story about how we do not have enough paramedics to fill shifts in Canberra, so firefighters have been forced to step in. There are not enough frontline emergency services personnel, forcing firefighters to drive ambulances. This is an extraordinary situation where our firefighters are diverted from their essential duties to help fill the void of other essential staff because this Labor-Greens government has, and continues to, let down our frontline workers who put their lives on the line each and every day for us.
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