Deloitte Australia CEO tells Senate committee his work not worth $3.5mAUD salary
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Like a good CEO for the big 4 consulting firms that no one else can compete with he wants all the good PR he can get right now, but the question still remains whether paying this man egregious amounts of money is more expensive than paying some boffins in Canberra to do the same job.
lol, please tell me you're not talking about the "Future Fund".
> the question still remains whether paying this man egregious amounts of money is more expensive than paying some boffins in Canberra to do the same job.
this is an extremely bizarre take, given the Big 4 have been fleecing the government for a very long time, partly due to no interest in stopping them.
What other sovereign wealth fund is there?
It's not even capable of meeting future public servant pensions, this is unequivocal and openly talked about in the 2023 budget. The Future Fund is $70B short to simply break even on it's liabilities.
> given the Big 4 have been fleecing the government for a very long time, partly due to no interest in stopping them
Again, you are making the claim that the public service can do it cheaper? Do you have any evidence to back that up? I don't disagree that the Big 4 consulting firms are making out like bandits with taxpayers money but it's fair to ask whether the public service can do it for cheaper. Simply assuming that is the case comes across as very ideological rather than an evidence based opinion. Public servants have much higher wages and super costs than the hordes of young employees at consultancies, it doubtful they can produce more per hour to make up for the difference.
Hard to tell.
Relatively easy to get rid of consultants and contractors. A lot harder to get rid of permanent staff even if they don't perform well. This means you may need 2-3x the headcount in comparison.
You save some. You lose some.
And it leaves out the main point: most of these consultants are blame shields for officials -- "we moved to technology X because Bain & Deloitte told us to". But when you look at the numbers, the spreasheets don't add up, and it's clear that a VP decided this was the course and needed ammo to back it up.
What you CAN do is hide the spending under separate line items so it looks cheaper, don't mind that all these government projects got more expensive by an amount 20% higher than we saved on the public service.
EDIT: I think I maybe interpreted your comment as the opposite of what you meant.
Singapore has a unique philosophy when it comes to civil servant pay
Capitalism is simply the economic system for the extraction of wealth from the poor to the wealthy where once it was from the poor to the monarch and the artistocratic class (ie feudalism). That's it. Someone will be tempted to pipe up with something about "free markets". Markets are commerce. They happen in every economic system.
So you see a lot of people flounder in this area in a way that is curable with the barest introduction to Marxism, specifically the labor theory of value [1].
So profiteering off government contracts is nothing more than the extraction of wealth from the poor to the rich via the government. Yet you'll find many who say we're simply not doing enough capitalism.
This is also why culture war issues are manufactured: to stop the development of class consciousnes and solidarity. It is an intentional distraction so you won't pay attention to the wealth transfer going on through tax cuts, deregulation and, of course, government contracts.
I would agree with this statement. However I wouldn't call this capitalism. It doesn't seem like "free-market" anything when the government is footing the bill. There's an enormous amount of cronyism... was the work actually bid out, and evaluated fairly? Is the work even something that actually needs to be done, or is it more of a make-work project, or a spend-to-justify-our-budget project? Were small, non-connected firms allowed to bid, or was it an add-on to a pre-existing engagement? Private companies, especially large ones, are guilty of the same but government usually tops the list for wasteful and inefficient spending.
So yes, it is indeed profiteering, and these huge consulting firms have perfected it. But it's only because the government keeps rewarding them over and over, so who can blame them for scooping it up? But this is not capitalism.
First, "free market" itself is a myth. Second, that's a tenet of libertarianism or neoliberalism. In reality, "free markets" is a stalking horse for deregulation and privatization, which is wealth extraction from the government to the wealthy. Like I said, capitalism has nothing to do with markets. It's merely how capital is created and accumulated.
You talk about cronyism and the process and have skipped right passed the most important question: why is this even being outsourced in the first place? Why is public transit privatized (eg the UK)? It's needless wealth transfer under the guise of "efficiency". European democracies are starting to discover they're on the same path of the USA: starving national healthcare and then using those "failures" are reasons to privatize it. Reportedly, with Brexit, the US administration wanted the NHS to be privatized as part of any favorable trade deal with the UK. Think about that.
Now we see a cost-of-living crisis because of restricted supply and institutional buyers buying up the supply. Mortgages are massively bigger than even a generation ago. The cost of college education is out-of-control, as is healthcare. Debt is being built into every facet of your existence to extract as much wealth as possible from you and to keep you a compliant worker.
Also quite funny to see people going on about "class consciousness" when almost everybody in the first world is living a life of luxury unimaginable one hundred fifty years ago.
Making you the owner of the means of production. Trad Marxist theory sees that as one important goal in abolishing capitalism, but somehow capitalism remains just as strong. Curious...
That you need others to work as well is true of all production, it is obviously true under marxism as well and marx certainly did not argue against it.
Capitalism is buyer, seller, marketplace, and sufficient regulation to prevent sellers from buying the marketplace.
Materialism, not captialism, leads to the class distinctions that the Marxists fetish (as they boost themselves into aristocracy while shrilly claiming to give a French frigate's fo'c's'le about the workers).
The proper remedy for the excesses of capitalism is ensuring competition in the marketplace, to stabilize the system.
> The meaning "political/economic system which encourages capitalists" is recorded from 1872 and originally was used disparagingly by socialists.
Impostor syndrome is real