Taxpayers MIGHT pay???
Josh Gordon has a little piece in the Age about the troubles facing an IT contractor that services government departments. It seems that all is not well with these guys and they might not be able to honour their service agreements which in turn means the government departments, paid for by taxpayers will have to pay more to find another service provider. Apparently “The contract can be traced back to the bungled $5 billion compulsory information technology outsourcing program introduced during the 1990s by the Howard government.”
Josh is being disingenuous. John Howards compulsory IT outsourcing project was a huge success, it managed to funnel $5 billion of taxpayers money directly into the private sector. As such it was typical of the neoconservatives idealogical approach, take money from the state and give it to private sector businesses. So everyone still pays the same taxes and arguably the work gets done but somewhere along the gravy train, some business presumably makes a profit.
Now this is not exactly in the spirit of a government service which is supposed to be delivered on a cost or subsidised cost basis, it is somewhat a tacit contract between government and taxpayers that government provided services are provided cheaply enough so that all can make use of such service if they choose and there is a strong argument that in areas where such services are essential they should be provided by government agency.
If such a service is provided by a profit making private enterprise then clearly it is not being provided at the cheapest possible cost. What’s more if the service is apparently cheaper than an inhouse service, which is often an argument advanced to support the outsourcing of IT work, then it is reasonably to ask how this is happening. Is the company providing the outsourced work employing monkeys or are they cutting corners?
All of this is below the surface of Josh’s story but it is quite important to the consideration that if a company contracted to provide an essential service to government defaults why does the burden of fixing the problem fall to those who have already paid whilst those who have profited from the situation hide behind bankruptcy. No doubt a few scapegoats will be found to hang out for public display, but the real villains are those that espouse such obviously flawed policies in the first place. It will be a significant test of the character of this government to see how they respond.