Has the Department of Finance entirely lost the plot? Has its thinking about the PriceWaterhouseCooper scandal — that the matter can now be swept under the carpet and PwC brought in from the cold — infected a police force itself compromised by its relationships with PwC?

It’s not an idle question, nor an exhuming of ancient history. Particularly in the week ahead in which politicians, business leaders and others debate how national productivity is to be improved. One can be sure that the business lobbies will be suggesting, as they always do, that the biggest barrier to improved productivity is government, over-regulation, high taxes and poor management of the public sector.

Normally such statements can be dismissed for the self-serving nonsense that they usually are. In any event, the government complacently says to itself that any disasters of poor management or maladministration occurred during the Morrison years, that the public sector has since been reformed and could not be in better fettle. Wasn’t this the popular verdict when Labor was returned in a landslide earlier this year?

Yet there are clear signs that the Department of Finance itself, and perhaps the public sector generally, has not changed in any significant way, and brings to bear on problems of good and honest government much the same mindset that it applied during the Morrison years.

Years when the department was aware of fundamental illegalities in various grant programs — including sports rorts — but chose to ignore ministerial and prime ministerial breaches of the law. Years when people associated with the department devised a scheme for handouts to business on demand but somehow neglected to establish rules for return of money not spent or not spent on the purposes for which it was given. This, at a time when the government was implementing a cruel and merciless, and fundamentally illegal, program of demanding the return of any welfare benefits its computers believed (wrongly) to have been overpaid. Finance did not implement Robodebt but ran its ruler over and approved the plan.

By contrast the business welfare scheme saw billions handed out to businesses who claimed that their turnover was down by at least 30% because of COVID lockdowns. That may have been good so far as keeping the economy lurching along. But the lack of government scrutiny, or proper stewardship of the money meant that at least $30 billion was not spent in the way intended. Some businesses claimed it but did not have reduced turnover and were not eligible. Some spent some of the money for proper purposes, but still had much money left over when the music (and the business festivities) stopped. No one was asked to return money. Indeed, the government was itself embarrassed by the lack of checks and balances and devised an alibi which let the architects of the scheme off the hook: apparently, it was always intended to be a straight handout with no thought of ever asking for the money back.

Always ask who is paying for the independent review

It is one of the rich ironies of life that departmental secretaries under the new regime commissioned a former Finance secretary to examine whether the new (post-Morrison) public service was now reformed and that the multiple sins could not occur again. No doubt most of the secretaries, (heads of department in the Morrison era) are very relieved. At least they now know that the public service commission will hold all its inquiries in secret, so they are safe from criticism or discouragement.

Although most of what was involved in the PwC scandal occurred during the period of Coalition Government, managing its aftermath was a problem for the Albanese Government. Up to now, at least, ministers have managed reasonably well, in part because of popular outrage at the barefaced lack of integrity and........

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