Finance hires consultant to advise government on its consultants
The Department of Finance has hired a consultant to consult on how best to deal with other consultants.
Simon Longstaff of the Ethics Centre. Michael Quelch
Finance has hired an ethics consultant for advice about handling ties with PwC Australia and Scyne, an entity focused on government services that the consulting giant spun off after a tax-information leak scandal.
“It’s like outsourcing your conscience,” said Greens senator Barbara Pocock.
Senator Pocock, in an emailed statement, likened the situation to a scene out of Utopia, an Australian satirical TV series about bureaucrats.
“Just imagine a bureaucrat in the Department of Finance saying, ‘We need to hire a consultant to advise us on how to hire consultants,’” Senator Pocock said. The writers of Utopia, she said, “couldn’t have come up with a more laughable scenario”.
In a July letter to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, the senator raised concerns about the department hiring Scyne, saying employing consultants from the offshoot company “appears to have the effect of sidestepping accountability”.
In her response, Ms Gallagher said the department had hired Simon Longstaff, a renowned philosopher and chief executive of the Ethics Centre, a not-for-profit organisation. Mr Longstaff would assist the government in assessing whether it could “have confidence in any future work [Scyne] delivers”.
The Finance Department said in an email that the contract was worth $32,000. Mr Longstaff’s “significant knowledge and expertise in the field of ethics appropriately places him to provide the Commonwealth with advice on the range of ethical issues that may arise while engaging with PwC and Scyne”, the department statement said.
But the scenario has instead provided another
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