Life on the West Island - Consultancy cancer

A pandemic is sweeping the West Island – but this one is not caused by a deadly virus. Rather, it is an all-encompassing cancer which will be familiar to Norfolk Islanders – the quasi-religious belief that dealing with every type of public policy or management issue necessarily involves calling in a consultant to propose solutions. Islanders have seen countless millions of taxpayer dollars poured down the drain to a string of high-flying but low-achieving consultants – money that could instead have been channelled into improving services and developing genuinely democratic governance structures to benefit the whole island community.

The outgoing Morrison government exemplified this approach. It dished out small fortunes to its mates in the “big four” consulting firms to produce allegedly independent reports telling the government just what it wanted to hear. Even then, most of these shoddy reports simply gathered dust while the government did practically nothing during its three year term.

The consulting industry has grown like topsy in recent years, siphoning off into the pockets of wealthy directors and shareholders funds which should have gone into providing government services. For example, consultants were paid millions to plan and implement the summary cancellation of the West Island’s contract with France to build a fleet of submarines. That resulted in further huge costs to taxpayers and – a year later - the collapse of any firm plans to construct submarines elsewhere.

One flicker of hope on the horizon is that the incoming Albanese government has raised a red flag, announcing a review to look at the gross overuse of consultants instead of drawing on the expertise of the public service. It has identified that consultants cost much more, and achieve much less, than the traditional processes of examination, development and implementation of policy reforms through the public sector, rather than being outsourced to for-profit consulting corporations.

In reviewing a recent book looking at just one of those avaricious consulting firms, author Gideon Haigh makes some interesting observations under the heading of Amorality for hire:

In his 1971 play Don’s Party David Williamson introduced Australian theatre audiences to a new gallery of modern bourgeois types: a lawyer and a teacher, a dentist and a design engineer, an industrial accountant and an arts student. But perhaps the most exotic of all was Mal — “tall, good-looking, urbane, dressed casually but thoughtfully,” though also a blowhard and a know-all who boasted an acquaintance with Gough Whitlam and a flair for casual infidelity. What occupation would suit such a character? Mal, it’s revealed, is a “management consultant.” His wife translates this as “professional bullshit artist.”

It’s a rare enough representation of the genus to be notable, in terms of both its identification of this emergent class of knowledge worker and its creation of a popular image. Mal talks, expansively and emptily, but with the confidence of expertise and comfort with change. Williamson exacts on him a modicum of revenge, having the character kneed in the balls, physically by a female antagonist and metaphorically by the election result. But if you consider the arc of the times, Mal is the character whom the looming years will best suit, in tune with the managerial revolution, the permissive society and, eventually, the electoral cycle.

Nowadays you can imagine Mal on the north coast, the poorer possibly for a couple of divorces but still retired in comfort, looking back serenely on the pioneering days of an industry now worth around $45 billion in Australia and employing about 160,000 people. The global industry is valued at nearly a trillion American dollars.

In the intervening years, as it happens, nobody has really come along to update the original public conception of those now known simply as “consultants” — “management” was presumably discarded as too explicit or too dowdy. Their tasks have remained nebulous: after all, no business must employ a consultant in the way they regularly depend on a lawyer or necessarily appoint an accountant or auditor. Even the jokes remain pretty much the same. (“They borrow your watch to tell you the time.” “How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? Depends on your budget.”)

Haigh goes on to analyse the cringing dependence of managers on the holy writ of a consultant’s report – nobody was ever sacked for buying their services. When you lend them your watch, you’re making clear that you really want to know the time, with the precision of an atomic clock.

Eminent consultants of various types have issued reports about how to build a deepwater port for Norfolk Island over the space of the last 233 years – and what has actually been constructed? Most of the very costly reports and recommendations have long since been forgotten, and the idea of a proper port remains a pipe dream!

And that’s the worst thing about consultants - they produce huge volumes of reports, graphs, charts and recommendations – but they get paid princely sums whether or not their reports actually result in positive actions or reforms. Norfolk Islanders are resourceful and knowledgeable – they could readily advise the federal government on how best to establish democratic government and effective public services which would serve the Island community well. Perhaps the Council of Elders or the Chamber of Commerce should register as management, governance or financial consultants – then their voices might actually be heard in the West Island corridors of power!