Not-so-tender tale of Govt hatred and paranoia
Updated April 05, 2012 15:16:39
A democratic society is something of a collective-outsourcing system. We outsource decisions on national matters to elected representatives because it’s the easiest way to get it done; also, it means that someone else has to give speeches on Harmony Day and eat those horrible rubber-chicken lunches, for either of which very few of us would have the stomach, truth be told.
Two quite incredible failures in this system have this week been verified.
First, the confirmation that the affairs of the Health Services Union and its former national secretary Craig Thomson has now officially become a Kafka novel.
Fair Work Australia has completed its four-year investigation and has produced a 1,100-page document that no-one may read, implicating four individuals whom no-one may name. It describes several hundred offences, some of which may be criminal, of which no police officer in Australia may formally be apprised. Instead the report was supplied to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, who instantly declared the report’s thousand-plus pages more or less useless for the purposes of any prosecution.
Could Fair Work Australia possibly have foreseen this? After nearly $1 million worth of advice from the Australian Government Solicitor’s office, you’d have hoped so. Fair Work Australia has agreed, mind, that it could have been sharper with the whole thing. It’s now hired KPMG to investigate why its own investigation took so long.
Everyone knows that when faced with a choice between conspiracy and incompetence, the best explanation is usually incompetence, but in this case we are now dealing with some pretty special incompetence.
As of this week, conspiracy is now the more obvious conclusion.
The second failure, articulated this week by the Commonwealth Auditor-General, is scarier – possibly in this case because we’re actually allowed to read the report.
The auditor’s account of how the Government dealt with the contract for running the Australia Network (our overseas broadcaster) is one of the most incredible reports of its kind I’ve ever read.
I know what you’re thinking: Audit reports. Pretty low bar for thrills. But if you get a chance, have a look here – the tale of the Cabinet’s repeated refusal to accept the advice of even its most senior public servants is truly extraordinary.
The muffing of tender processes is nothing new for governments; ask any Coalition MP to tell the story of what happened when the Howard government tried outsourcing all of its IT capabilities at the beginning of this century.
But the Australia Network story is different, because it’s much more than just a routine tale of administrative incompetence or ideological overshoot. Rather, it’s an allegory – an uncomfortably direct one – about the war between Kevin Rudd and his cabinet colleagues. And if you’ve ever doubted that personality and personal relationships are central to the way decisions are made in government, then read the auditor’s account, and doubt no longer.
The tale starts in 2009, when Stephen Conroy – the Communications Minister, and probably the minister in the Rudd government who enjoyed the single worst relations with the then prime minister, if you had to pick one – took a submission to cabinet recommending that the contract for running the Australia Network be handed permanently to the ABC. Cabinet made no decision.
In November 2010, after Mr Rudd had been decommissioned by his colleagues and appointed to the foreign ministry, he argued in Cabinet for a different arrangement – that a 10-year contract for running the network, valued at $223 million – be put out to competitive tender. At the time, Cabinet members were extremely wary of Mr Rudd, being convinced that he had poisoned the recent election campaign by leaking against his successor, Julia Gillard. They were additionally concerned that Mr Rudd would use the Australia Network contract to curry favour with News Limited, whose part-owned broadcaster Sky would most certainly be a bidder. But the urge toward appeasement was still strong. They agreed to Mr Rudd’s suggestion.
But they didn’t really decide on any ground rules about who exactly would make the final decision. Mr Rudd appointed his own departmental secretary, former ASIO chief and ambassador Dennis Richardson, to convene a panel with representatives supplied by the departments of Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Stephen Conroy and Penny Wong.
Two bidders applied – the ABC, of course, and Sky.
On January 25 the following year – 2011 – Julia Gillard wrote to Mr Rudd directing that the final decision on the tender would be one for the Cabinet. In May, the panel agreed that Sky’s was the best bid but several weeks of pfaffing-about ensued, in light of the fact that no agreement really existed about whose job it was to make the final decision.
In June, Mr Rudd was called to bring a submission to Cabinet on the matter. His department argued – and this was an argument supported by Ms Gillard’s own department – that it wasn’t really possible for the entire Cabinet to be the approved decision-maker on the tender.
The Cabinet’s response was to amend the tender process retrospectively, issuing new terms on July 8. The ministers decided to add new criteria reflecting some of the significant international geopolitical rearrangements that had occurred – pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, for instance. They installed Stephen Conroy as the final decision-maker. And they specifically empowered Minister Conroy to overturn the recommendations of the expert panel, if he so chose.
This is all a bit strange. If your formal reason for amending the process is that international diplomacy has become more important because of the Arab Spring, then why would your corollary decision be to take the decision away from the department that is expert in such matters, and give it to the cable guy?
And in any case, as the report points out with classic auditorial understatement, “the Australia Network does not currently broadcast to the Middle East or North Africa, and the (tender process) did not specify an expansion to these regions as a requirement of the new contract”.
While all this was happening, by the way, every Tom, Dick and his dog in the public service appears to have been given a copy of the expert panel’s recommendations and the vying parties’ bids, despite the fact that the confidential tender round was still open.
When the panel reported back on August 30 that the Sky bid still provided better value for money on the new criteria, Minister Conroy tried another tack, asking that parallel negotiations be conducted with both parties, stalling a decision further.
And in November, he went further, calling off the tender process entirely “with the agreement of the Government” on the grounds that there had been “significant leaks” of confidential information to the media. (Which is hardly surprising, given the number of copies knocking around.)
In the course of 12 months, in other words, the Cabinet went from endorsing an open tender process all the way through frustrating it, twisting it, distorting it and finally arrived at the idea of aborting it entirely, thus messily reversing the first decision. Why would a group of rational people behave so irrationally?
The answer is that the Australia Network became a proxy for the Cabinet’s feelings about News Limited and about Kevin Rudd, whom many suspected to be cosying up to News. The more it looked like Mr Rudd was angling for Sky to win the bid, the more determined the Cabinet became to thwart his wishes.
Having begun by appeasing Mr Rudd, they ended by throwing everything they had at him, breaking all manner of bureaucratic conventions in their deep and persistent paranoia. By February this year, of course, it all came spewing out publicly; the parabolic arc of the Cabinet’s sentiments toward Mr Rudd – from fear to rage – found its sulphuric and highly public conclusion when minister after minister went on television to rail against their former leader for being a dysfunctional bossy-boots and all-round nasty person.
Dysfunctional? Well, the Auditor-General’s report doesn’t use that word exactly, but it’s pretty clear if you read between the lines that the Australia Network process was a screaming fiasco. So bad, in fact, that the auditor actually published details of cabinet discussions and submissions in the report, presumably because without them you’d never believe the yarn.
The real damage in the whole affair is not the outcome. It’s not a disaster that the national broadcaster continues to offer the service, just as it would not have been a disaster had Sky prevailed.
The real damage is that we now know just how far government ministers are prepared to go, and how absolutely they are prepared to ignore the structures erected to give some order to their decision-making, if their hatred and paranoia is strong enough.
And that’s an outsourcing failure, if ever there was one.
Annabel Crabb is the ABC’s chief online political writer. View her full profile here.
Topics:broadcasting, information-and-communication, federal-government, government-and-politics
First posted April 05, 2012 15:15:08
