It’s the definition of insanity.....unemployed and underemployed Aussies screaming for work because the Liberals are under the thumb of big business -  aka the global rip off merchants!  Public comment: "If the public servants can’t make decisions without consultants then they’re useless parasites."

Government incompetence makes pensioners pay and pay

http://morningmail.org/10bn-bill-outsource-bureaucracy/

Government spends $10 billion to outsource bureaucracy and slugs pensioners’ assets $2.8 billion over four years. That will not be forgotten come election day—especially by the many hard workers that put a few dollars aside and now are punished by moving the goal posts on January 1 this year.

Nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funds were spent last year on outsourcing, including labour hire, external contractors, rent and legal advice, as federal government departments tried to fill holes left by staffing cuts and circumvent hiring caps imposed by the Coalition.

Source: News Corp

$10bn bill to outsource bureaucracy

An analysis by The Australian of the government’s procurement site, AusTender, ­reveals federal departments and agencies spent $9.7bn last year on “management and business professionals and administrative services”.

This included $2.6bn on management advisory services; $2.26bn on leasing and renting properties and buildings; $750 million on temporary personnel; and $498m on project ­administration or planning.

About $510m was spent on consultancy contracts. Other big-ticket items included $315m on ­information technology and consultation services, $942m on legal services and more than $126m on marketing and distribution.

The opposition and the public sector union say spending on ­labour hire has rocketed as a ­result of staffing cuts imposed by the Coalition, which in 2015 introduced a cap aimed at keeping the bureaucracy at or below the size it was in 2006-07.

But Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has defended the ­appropriate use of consultants as a means of keeping the public service flexible, improving efficiency and avoiding recurrent costs for one-off tasks.
Australian public service numbers dropped to 152,095 as at June 30 this year, down 2.3 per cent from the previous year’s 155,771, to the lowest headcount figure since 2006 when the number of employees was 146,208.

Precise spending on labour hire and contractors is difficult to determine as most departments refused to reveal their expenditure or said they did not keep track of it. The AusTender figures rely on bureaucrats correctly classifying their contracts.

The Australian Taxation ­Office spent $331m on ­labour hire and contractors last financial year — all but wiping out the $333m it reaped in settlements with small businesses and individuals. This was up from $278m the previous year, and $177m in 2014-15, ­according to figures provided by the ATO to The Australian.

The labour hire and contractor expenses were in addition to the $1.86bn in total benefits paid to its 20,435 employees in the 2017 ­financial year, according to the ATO’s latest annual report.
Opposition finance spokesman Jim Chalmers said the government’s headcount cap had contributed to rising consultancy and labour hire fees.

“The Turnbull government wastes too much money on work which could, and should, be done by public servants,” he said. “They’ve found a way to spend more taxpayer dollars on an ­inferior outcome.”

In a speech to the Australian National University last month, Dr Chalmers railed against “arbitrary caps” placed on bureaucrat numbers, which had “left the public service hollowed out and unable to provide strategic advice”. “That’s led to far too much taxpayers’ money being wasted on contractors, consultants and labour hire firms to do work that public servants could do at a lower cost,” he said.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood said there had been “a massive and completely unsustainable jump in spending on consultants, contracts and labour hire arrangements”.
She said the “government’s obsession” with cutting the public sector to the size it was under John Howard was “completely illogical” and “built on a lie”. “The government pretends it’s cutting the size of the public sector but … it’s paying above the odds to get that same work done by the private sector, almost always at a lower standard,” she said.

Senator Cormann said the use of consultants “where appropriate” helped “to keep government administration flexible and efficient”. “It helps to keep the cost of commonwealth administration low, by helping to avoid the ongoing costs which would be incurred with the recruitment of additional permanent public servants when the need for specialist skills or additional support is temporary or project-specific,” he said.

Senator Cormann revealed his own department had spent $21.7m on contractors in 2016-17.
One of the highest-spending departments, the Department of Social Services, spent more than $50m in two years on almost 300 contracts with just one recruitment agency — Hays, according to an analysis of AusTender. Hays was one of more than 20 providers The Australian identified that DSS had used for personnel recruitment and contractors. DSS spent $147m on labour hire in 2015-16, according to figures provided to Senate estimates.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics spent $21.1m on contractors last year, while Geoscience Australia spent $32.4m in 2015-16. The National Disability Insurance Agency blew $19m on labour hire in 2016-17, with a total of 842 staff provided by 12 companies. The Department of Parliamentary Services spent $8.1m in 2016-17.
The Attorney-General’s Department spent $6.7m last financial year on labour hire and external contractors, up from $6.3m the previous year.
Revelations about the extraordinary levels of spending on labour hire and contractors come ahead of a joint parliamentary inquiry into government procurement, which was launched in response to an Australian National Audit Office report that found $47.4bn was spent on government contracts last year, with a large jump in fees handed to consultants.

A Department of Employment spokeswoman said contractors were “usually engaged to undertake one-off tasks or a set of tasks due to peaks in workload or where specialist skills are required”.

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