Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice I asked today relating to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Well, what a disappointment, what a disgrace, what a bunch of sideways answers—and I can't really call them answers, but responses that failed to address my questions. This government has said it would bring in a significant package of reforms that would crack down on misconduct in the wake of PwC's tax scandal. What do we have instead? We have PwC back at the trough. Where is your outrage now, Labor? Where is this government's commitment to meaningful reform? The two consulting inquiries made 52 recommendations between them, which were agreed to by both Labor and the Liberals. There is tripartisan agreement about what needs to change, but right now Labor are all talk and no action.

Here's one thing the government needs to do straightaway: ban dodgy contractors from getting government work. Integrity in our public institutions depends on it. One of the most extraordinary things to come out of the PwC tax leak scandals was the revelation that the Commonwealth does not actually have the power to ban a supplier for unethical conduct, and the minister confirmed it today. This is astonishing. In 20 other jurisdictions, including Western Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, they have debarment regimes that ban unethical contractors—laws that prevent suppliers who are convicted of corruption, bribery or fraud—from receiving public money.

Australians would be shocked to know that we currently don't have these protections in place. Well, the Greens are taking action. We've got a gift for Labor. We've got a bill that's here right now that can help. We want to close the legal loophole that allows suppliers who behave unethically to get away with it. It's unacceptable that the government must currently rely on the wrongdoer to agree to ban themselves from undertaking future government contracts. It's absurd. It's obscene. This is like having to ask a criminal for permission to send them to jail. It beggars belief.

Australians are outraged that PwC has been greenlit. They are the epitome of an unethical supplier, and it's an insult to the MPs and to the senators across this chamber who have worked on two parliamentary inquiries examining what went wrong with PwC. PwC were never fully banned from getting government work. They still had contracts with government agencies worth at least $11 million throughout the mutual agreement period, which lasted just 16 months. This has exposed Australia's lack of a government-wide exclusion framework as a huge issue. Many stakeholders have said it's time: the OECD, the Law Reform Commission, the CPSU, the Tax Justice Network and even a previous Senate inquiry. They all recommended a federal debarment regime. That's why earlier today I introduced a bill to do just that. It's a practical bill that will establish a debarment framework at the Commonwealth level in Australia, and I call on the major parties to support it.

Then there's the issue of spending on consulting. Labor vowed to crack down on consultants and made a pre-election pledge to cut spending on external contractors, including consultants. What do we get instead? Labor spent almost $1 billion on outsourced work to consulting firms last financial year. This is more than in the last year of the Morrison government. This is a business-as-usual approach from Labor following a PwC scandal. It's a continued lack of transparency by a government which claims to be spending less while, in actuality, spending more. We know that outsourcing Public Service work to the private sector costs three times as much as hiring public servants to do the work. It erodes our Public Service, and we heard the minister say that herself today.

Labor needs to get serious about reducing its reliance on consultants and set strong savings targets. They need to establish an independent regulator to oversee the entire consulting industry in government and they need to cap partnerships at a hundred partners. They need to make sure that firms can't provide both audit services and non-audit services to the same clients, eliminating conflicts of interest. But the first step is they need to support the Greens bill today, to ban dodgy contractors like PwC from accessing the public purse.

Question agreed to.