Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State (House)) Share this | Hansard source

It's hard to imagine a less intelligent, less informed contribution to this otherwise important conversation about the budget. You can come in here with your opinions. You can't just make it up as you go along. The only reason we have a AAA credit rating from all three agencies is that it was won, for the first time, under the same government that the previous speaker was criticising. Can someone please, before he speaks, check his notes for him or write some notes for him? That was embarrassing. We have three AAAs because they were won under the government that he was criticising. Surely you can at least check a fact as basic as that. Or maybe, before you talk about interest repayments, check the fact that they are higher now than under any other government. If you want to talk about debt, maybe at least be a little bit ashamed of the fact that net debt has doubled and that gross debt is over half a trillion dollars, and both measures have accumulated faster under this government than under the Labor predecessor. It is so tempting to go through all of the ways that that was really just an appalling, fact-free contribution to what should be a conversation based on facts—really quite disappointing, unbelievable.

I will move on to other matters, given the lateness of the hour. One of the noticeable features of changes in government spending in the last little while has been the quite extraordinary increase in spending on contractors. If you go to the government's AusTender website, you can run a whole bunch of searches to show that, since the government changed hands in 2013, a lot of the categories have just exploded in terms of spending—billions and billions of dollars in extra spending on a lot of things that used to be done by the Public Service. The reason that we have that is that an arbitrary cap has been placed on public servants, in this town and right around Australia. Federal public servants have had an arbitrary cap imposed. That says to agencies: 'If you want to get this work done, you need to get it done externally.' There will always be a role for external expert advice, but we shouldn't be wasting billions of dollars in marked-up work—labour hire, contractors, consultants—when that work could and should be done by the Public Service. I think one of the things that sticks in the public's craw is that they get lectured all the time—'We couldn't possibly find that money for the pensioner energy supplement; we couldn't find that $270 million for TAFE'—but we can spend billions and billions more every year on contractors and consultants in the Public Service because there is an ideological commitment to a Public Service cap.

So what's happening in Australia on the government's side is that we're paying more and more for poorer outcomes. We're paying more than we were before, and we're getting inferior outcomes. That's because those opposite cling to this ideological Public Service cap, which is not actually delivering the policy outcome that they want. The purpose of the Public Service cap was to keep down costs in the Public Service. Instead we have costs blowing out madly. Anyone who spends even 10 minutes on the AusTender site can see the quite remarkable multiples of growth in certain categories, particularly of management services in the Public Service. Agencies need to get the work done but they've got the cap, so they have to go outside. So we're seeing all of this public money wasted on what is an IPA ideological frolic, which is the cap on the APS headcount.

This was put to the finance minister, Senator Cormann. Over the summer there were a number of well-informed stories in our broadsheet press, which had done what the public expects it to do, which is to examine the spending by the government on contractors and consultants, and uncover this extraordinary blowout that the government would rather Australians didn't know about. The government's response, quite remarkably, was to say you can't rely on those figures. They're the government's figures on the AusTender site. What we need, very clearly, is more transparency and more accuracy. If those numbers are wrong then other numbers need to be provided, because this scandalous waste of billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars to satisfy this ideological obsession is a matter of public interest. My question to the minister is: why have you made it not transparent enough for the Australian people to understand just how much money you're wasting on consultants and contractors?

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