With the establishment of the in-house Australian Government Consulting underway, the government continues to look at how other jurisdictions achieve value for money from consultants.
Responding to a question on notice from senate estimates, the government has already stated it is looking at the UK, Canada, the United States and New Zealand on how to get better savings on consultants’ contracts.
In the New Zealand context, it is examining the All-of-Government (AoG) consultancy service, which began in 2015.
The service has a panel of pre-approved consultancy businesses for participating agencies to select from.
Speaking to The Mandarin, New Zealand Government Procurement’s Tim Sherborne said the process is streamlined for government and consultants as providers respond to a simpler secondary procurement process.
“Provider information is made clearly available to agencies and agencies can choose providers via an easy-to-use online panel directory,” the head of collaborative procurement said.
Terms and conditions are standardised but can be negotiated by agencies.
“The AoG consultancy services contract offers agencies a range of benefits, including quality services, value for money (savings), and resource efficiencies for agencies through not having to undergo a primary procurement process via [the Government Electronic Tenders Services],” Sherborne said.
Services are split into 11 subcategories: accounting, assurance, audit, business change, finance and economics, human resource, marketing and public relations, operations management and risk, policy research and development, procurements and logistics and taxation.
Providers are split into three tiers (which are publicly available) within the sub-categories based on their current government spend and their ability to provide services in multiple sub-categories.
For example, those in Tier 1 for the audit sub-category are Deloitte, EY, Grant Thornton New Zealand, KPMG and PwC.
“Businesses apply to join AoG panels through a fair, transparent, and competitive process. Opportunities to join panels are published periodically on the [GETS] and include details of what is required to join the panel,” Sherborne said.
The AoG consultancy service does not cover contractors.
APS commissioner Gordon de Brouwer visited, when he was APS reform secretary, vNew Zealand in 2022 to learn about other jurisdictions’ public sector reform.
“Australia can learn from the NZ experience of capability building, investment in technology and data, improving service delivery, working in partnership with others, performance management and strengthening integrity,” a PM&C spokesperson said at the time.
