Peter Cain | Chief Minister Andrew Barr needs to hold Chris Steel and all ministers to account

The ACT Labor-Greens government has spent $76 million on a human resources information management system that it has abandoned.

Yes - abandoned! $76 million of public funds completely wasted and down the drain.

Of this $76 million, $44 million was spent on 23 separate consultants - yes, 23! - with the balance being spent on public servants and other internal expenses including hospitality and advertising. As an example, expenditure included paying a contractor who was hired for change and communications services for six months and was paid $320,000.

This level of expenditure on these types of services on an IT system that was not yet complete seems hard to justify.

The remaining $31 million of this wastage was expended by the ACT public service.

As a former ACT public servant, I know firsthand the expenditure restraints that many teams in ACT directorates and agencies are subjected to. And yet $31 million has been blatantly wasted on staffing, labour hire, hospitality, and advertising costs for the development of a failed HR and payroll system.

What costs could possibly have been incurred for hospitality and advertising as part of the in-house development of a human resources information management system? How much of the $31 million was put towards costs that seem so out of place in this context?

There are so many questions that are begging to be explained by Special Minister of State Chris Steel, who has had ministerial responsibility of this project since becoming a minister in October 2020 but apparently only became aware of its dysfunction in December 2022.

The Chief Minister was on ABC Radio on June 29, 2023, one day after this story first dropped, and said about the abandoned HR system, "it was a bad mistake, that is clear" and will not happen again. If Mr Steel is unable to say what went wrong, then how could he or Mr Barr possibly know it won't happen again?

During his radio interview, Mr Steel said the Chief Minister and/or Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith had prior responsibility, but refused to confirm this during question time in the Legislative Assembly on Thursday last week.

This HR system farce is sadly not an isolated failure from the Barr-Rattenbury government.

The Canberra Institute of Technology $8.5 million leadership consultant debacle comes to mind, as does the Acton Waterfront which blew out from less than $10 million to $44 million. And this is what we know about to date.

It is becoming very clear that the path to a real budget surplus in the ACT requires a cleaning up of the procurement debacles in the ACT government.

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It is often said that an elephant is a mouse designed by government. This HR system debacle is a dead elephant.

What level of incompetence and wastage is required before Andrew Barr holds his minsters to account? What level of mismanagement would require Mr Barr to request Mr Steel to resign? $100 million? Maybe more?

The history of ACT politics shows that ministers, even chief ministers, have resigned for less. The significance of this squandering should not be underplayed or allowed to be ignored.

The historical figure that the movie Braveheart is based on, William Wallace, famously said: "Incompetence is often highly regarded in government circles." No statement could be truer in relation to the Barr-Rattenbury Labor-Greens government.