INQUIRY INTO VACCINE ROLLOUT WILL BE LOOKING AT SECRET DEALS BETWEEN GOVERNMENT & PRIVATE CONTRACTORS 

MAKE A SUBMISSION

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) is carrying out a performance audit of Australia’s vaccine rollout, with a focus on the rollout’s delays, supply issues and lack of transparency.

According to the ANAO, the audit will look at whether the vaccine rollout was “effectively planned, if effective governance arrangements have been established to manage it and if the rollout has been effectively implemented”.

It will also scrutinise the “significant” agreements the Department of Health made with numerous labour hire firms and private contractors ‘to assist’ with the rollout.

Some of those companies included, PwC, Accenture, DHL, Linfox, Amazon, Healthcare Australia, International SOS, Sonic Clinical Services and Aspen Medical.

By contracting out work they are meant to do themselves, politicians and high level officials draw an impenetrable barrier over whole swathes of governance in Australia today.

Private entities are not ‘accountable’ to the public and are also exempt from Australia’s FOI laws.

Any agreement the government enters into with a private company is governed by ‘commercial in confidence’ secrecy, adding another ironclad layer protection shielding our governments from scrutiny or accountability.

It is a deeply undemocratic and potentially corrupt practice, that provides none of the transparency so foundational to a democratic system.

ANAO will also be looking at the concerns around data collection having been carried out by private contractors, and what has happened to this data.

Why has this data never been made available to Australians, whether healthcare professionals, doctors, hospital administrators or the general public?

One of the points governments use to try and “sell” these public-private partnership deals, is that they are “efficient and cost-effective”.

Well they were neither in this case.

All last year, we heard countless reports of chaos, confusion and delays around the rollout.

If you want to make a submission to the ANAO’s Review, the deadline is 27 February 2022.

Link here: https://www.anao.gov.au/work/performance-audit/australia-covid-19-vaccine-rollout