The Albanese government’s vow to radically trim the outflow of public service work to the Big Four consulting firms — dubbed the ‘coalition of the billing’ — is steadily taking shape, with two key leadership positions for the government’s in-house wonk and strategy shop announced.
Officially named ‘Australian Government Consulting’, and run from under the roof of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the fledgeling insourcing play has successfully poached Victoria’s chief data officer Andrew Nipe to become Australia’s first-ever chief consulting officer to lead the charge in restoring public service capabilities like strategy development and project management.
It is understood a website for the AGC is coming soon.
Previous to embracing the commonwealth, Nipe spent a decade running reforms across Victoria’s vast Department of Education, where even the smallest nudges can create big ripple effects through a system that sees users — students — spending their formative years.
State education departments are also huge consumers of most things, whether it’s staffing budgets, technology or textbooks, and are among the most heavily evaluated organisations in the public sector.
Prior to a decade in government, Nipe spent time at US consulting firms Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Company, polishing off a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a favourite hall of learning for ascendant antipodean leaders looking to gain global experience.
Seconding Nipe will be deputy chief consulting officer Jo Rossiter, who was last listed on the government executive directory and org charts as the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ National Skill Agreement Policy and Modelling unit.
Previously a director at management consultancy Nous, Rossiter also comes equipped with a master’s of public policy, from Oxford, as well as commerce and law degrees from the Australian National University, and spent around seven years in Prime Minister and Cabinet before going private and then returning to the commonwealth.
Announced by public service minister Katy Gallagher on Monday, the two senior appointments come with the government already standing up a project pipeline, and two pilots already in train.
One is listed as “partnering with the Centre for Australia-India Relations to analyse opportunities for closer collaboration between federal and the state and territory governments on economic engagement with India.”
Unpack that a little further and it’s fairly clear the recent national leadership visits, combined with strong administrative synergies and a vast talent pool make India a logical source to bolster trade, international relations and skilled migration, especially given India’s huge tech industry that has seeded a diaspora that now commonly appears in senior leadership positions in the world’s biggest and brightest tech firms.
Getting jobs happening on the renewables front is also getting a kickstart, with AGC now “partnering with the new Net Zero Economy agency to develop its vision and undertake strategic business planning”.
It’s fair to say that at first glance the AGC’s initial projects are, well, responsive to government. Not necessarily a bad thing and one the previous government may be a little envious of.
What is more widely known in Canberra is that there was a stampede for consulting positions at AGC, with Gallagher confirming on Monday that more than 1,000 people applied for positions.
Part of that stampede will have come from the ministerial fatwah on the restricted use of consultants to wean the APS off its rather convenient addiction to external advice, but given the jobs are at stock-standard APS pay rates, it’s more the chance to make a difference that seems to have lured people across.
If the profiles popping up on LinkedIn are anything to go by, there seems to be a fairly even blend of public and private sector candidates in terms of who’s scored a role at AGC.
One is AGC’s business development lead, ‘Lisa L.’ who was formerly PwC Australia’s senior manager for public policy and economics.
Notable senior consultants and advisers include:
- Linda Ma, an anthropologist with a clear passion for data and evidence given she has come across from the Open Data Institute, where she was a fellow;
- Amy Choi, one of the APS Reform advisers as well as an academic;
- Ethan Barden, who is down as a senior adviser and project lead, coming across from PM&C’s Policy Project Taskforce Office;
- Clement Yoong, the Digital Transformation Agency’s director of portfolio assurance, seconded to become AGC’s capability lead but also previously the New South Wales Department of Customer Service and Digital policy lead on artificial intelligence; and
- Harley Dennett, an astute and renowned observer of government and former editor of The Mandarin.
While the government will, no doubt, have its policy priorities for the AGC, one of the major challenges it faces is selling the concept to project managers and advisers, architects and vendor wranglers, especially around technology uplift or legacy replacement. The government has no real chance of attracting needed candidates because of the APS salaries and T&C.
Even if the government could attract such technical talent, there is at least a five-year window before serious internal capability could seriously come online in the same way as specialist systems integrators and contractors are now tapped for mission-critical builds.
While the trope of the Big Four consultancies selling the government’s own ideas back to it at a premium is convenient and compelling politically, in reality, a lot of it is simply contracting or sub-contracting project labour simply to keep already funded builds or projects running when there’s a skills shortage.
The major difficulty ministers like Gallagher and her agencies, indeed many agencies, have is that a lot of reform policies are still essentially run by generalist lawyers and clerks when outcomes are frequently determined by technical and technological choices.
There is still no APS classification for technologists, despite digital being down as an APS profession, a ceiling that means specialists with serious tech skills usually struggle to make it past SES Band 1 if they even get that far.
It’s unlikely AGC will be able to shift this culture in its own right, but it will be able to contest some of the more rapacious exploitations of the government’s learned helplessness caused by former staffers and politicians who were retained by major firms for the express purpose of opening doors and greasing the wheels.
It could also potentially break the nexus of power held by major enterprise software vendors who partner with consultancies to run a procurement playbook around change imperatives that governments are expected to react to.
Online service delivery. Digital transformation. Artificial intelligence. Smarter services. And the evergreen, vendor-propelled, proprietary lock-in “shared services”, most recently exemplified by the now-neutered GovERP.
One positive sign is that there are already around $1 billion worth of cancelled, stopped or failed major projects across Services Australia, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and Finance since Labor took office.
Ministers like Bill Shorten have also figured out that a lot of service delivery, and the technology that underpins it, is not inherently political (unlike robodebt). This means accepting political actors apart from your own side can also have practical ideas and solutions that traverse jurisdictions and partisan allegiances. One example is digital identity.
This can require the decoupling of rhetoric from policy design, independently validating results and being prepared to take onboard advice contrary to the standard political playbook.
If Australian Government Consulting can start to cultivate that culture rather than rebrand the past decade of spray-and-pray solutionism, it could accomplish a lot.
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