WHO: Associate Professor in Northern Australia Development at the Northern Institute Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Charles Darwin University (CDU), Pascal Tremblay.
Associate Professor Tremblay is an expert in applied economics and policy evaluation analysis, related to Northern Australia and remote Australian regions.
TOPICS:
- Manipulation of public procurement rules to connect major projects with achieving complex social and economic goals costs the public and rarely advance anything.
- Co-author of report for the Regional Australia Institute (2018) that found deliberate attempts to assist various groups internationally have usually led to significant costs to the public purse, enhanced risks of corruption and fraud, and produced very limited demonstrable or sustainable improvements in economic participation of the vulnerable cohorts they targeted, often resulting in increased dependency on those programs.
CONTACT DETAILS: Call +61 8 8946 6721 or email media@cdu.edu.au to arrange an interview.
QUOTES ATTRIBUTABLE TO ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR PASCAL TREMBLAY:
“The initial policy design of the Indigenous Employment Provisional Sum (IEPS) (and some subsequent proposals) based on government meddling with public procurement and contracts that led to the currently mediatised debacle appears to have been rushed, poorly assembled and lacking transparency, as stated in both the KPMG independent evaluation as well as the comprehensive 2017 analysis by the NT Auditor General which contained all the necessary forewarnings.
“Our Northern Institute literature review - based on international debates, case studies and evidence - showed that manipulation of public procurement rules to achieve a variety of disparate goals by repackaging them was becoming increasingly attractive to governments, and mainly encouraged by public policy advocates rather than analysts.
"In the case of the NT’s IEPS, this amalgamation of objectives within the procurement function leads to ‘passing on’ some of the thorniest policy challenges to various major project contractors expected to resolve them on top of their core building or construction business functions. The notion that those private operators, inexperienced and ill-equipped to address delicate socio-economic challenges, would perform better than governments agencies (with experts and traditional partners), who in their own admission struggled to address them, is puzzling.
“Also, the international evidence on the topic of procurement linkages (aiming to address multiple objectives in a single contract) suggests that those result in inflated project costs for the community, increase the risks of corruption (by mingling objectives in imbedding local politics and incorporating increasingly subjective decisions in the procurement process), and weaken the integrity of public procurement authorities when disputes eventually arise over the delivery of these increasingly complex outputs.
"In other words, policies creating administrative and political interferences with conventional procurement processes are not harmless and lead to weaker government delivery performance and substantial risks.
“As a general rule, it is preferable for any government to retain the separation between different policy objectives and maintain goal clarity and support evaluation processes necessary to maximise value to the public as well as improve accountability. Distinct policy objectives requiring dissimilar sets of expertise, involving distinctive competences and technologies, necessitating disparate consultation styles, and entailing disconnected time frames ought to be procured separately and focus on different experts in their respective domains, while the appropriate government agencies retain the final responsibility for demonstrating progress towards clear-cut policy objectives.
“Although research on small jurisdictions is lacking, procurement packaging across policy objectives appears particularly hazardous for the latter as they are exposed to lower levels of competition (due smaller numbers of potential bidders capable of handling complex contracts).
"Smaller states or territories, as well as regional and local governments, are also less equipped to engage in legal disputes against large and well-resourced private contractors. They are often more exposed to corruption risks due to the commercial proximity and political closeness of all parties; bureaucrats, communities and stakeholders, contractors and sub-contractors found in small places."
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