ADJOURNMENT
Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (20:18): Tonight I want to speak about the privatisation of the public sector via the big four. The partners in the big four consulting firms, PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte, are the high priests of turbocharged multibillion-dollar revenues. In so many organisations, they are the architects of privatisation by stealth, especially if we look at our history in the recent few decades.
These are the well-heeled folks who, as big four partners, advise, audit and make up the one per cent. Their special skills are tax minimisation, working the revolving door, landing and expanding massive public contracts, and pushing services away from the public sector into a privatised world of massive profits. Despite Labor's promises, core government work is still being outsourced in our country at the Commonwealth level at an alarming rate.
New Centre for Public Integrity data shows that the APS spent $742 million on consultancy contracts—that's over the $2 million disclosure threshold—in the last financial year, 2025-26. More than half of that money—$394 million—was for management advisory services or basic consulting. The government's own data shows that KPMG was the largest supplier of this work in the last financial year.
That's KPMG, now infamous for its dishonest sharing of audit information to win massive new audit contracts. No wonder Labor's only chucked them in the fridge for three months! Labor is completely addicted to KPMG, and it looks like they may well be back into government contracting before too long, despite their enormous, and growing, clear sins.
In recent decades, especially through the Morrison years and now the Albanese years, the big four have made billions from privatised public services—money that could have been building houses. We need to spend it on the things and the services that Australians really need: health, education, a roof over our heads, hospitals, transport and all those essential public services, including Commonwealth public service advice and service.
They've pushed for the privatisation of services because that's where their money is made. They capture governments on everything from climate policy—even as their client lists includes the world's worst polluters—to the privatisation of aged care, child care and disability services, even as they advise the providers of these services on how to deal with the regulations they helped create.
The big four have deliberately hollowed out and de-skilled our public sector, and they've cultivated dependency. They've aggressively mapped agencies, looking for the next highly profitable opportunity, and that's despite denying that they actually do this mapping and then farm these relationships so aggressively. They've made billions from 'land and expand' strategies where, once they're on the map, they cultivate and farm profitable opportunities.
They bully, intimidate and overwork whistleblowers and staff. They lie to parliaments. They buy political influence through donations, and they make sure that they have a seat at every political table of influence.
They appoint directors to fake roles that have no legislative responsibilities or penalties when they fail, unlike those that apply to independent directors in corporations. As huge partnerships, they pay no corporate tax and no payroll tax. The payoff for them is huge and lines the pockets of thousands of partners who earn 10 times more per year than a nurse or a firefighter.
They've shocked parliamentary committee after committee with their lack of integrity, their cover-ups, their dishonesty and their pursuit of revenue at any cost. Last Friday's KPMG hearing revealed nothing short of a catastrophe. We heard gold-standard evidence that these firms are using law firms to hide behind, creating fake, narrowly scoped, so-called investigations.
They use massive payouts of up to half a million dollars to silence whistleblowers—a number of whistleblowers—not just the latest very brave soul, but many of them. KPMG's deputy general counsel was visibly emotional when he told his colleagues in front of the inquiry that he had been misled by his own partners in KPMG when he tried to investigate leaked allegations.
(Time expired) Senate adjourned at 20:23