It’s easy for observers to forget the past work of various government institutions when an issue begins trending and the hounds on social media begin to howl about not being told earlier about person X, grant rort Y or the consequences of program Z more than a decade or two earlier.
Going back in time requires some work in assembling a mosaic with enough tiles for a reader to see as complete a picture as possible.
A full picture would never be able to be provided because it relies on access to documents and people that departments may be reluctant, for whatever reason, to provide.
There will also be legal obligations related to confidentiality and privacy, so the quest to know everything needs to be tempered with the reality that not everything will be available on demand.
This is certainly the case with public queries about what happened at Tourism Australia almost two decades ago that were stimulated by recent remarks reported in The Age by former Howard government minster Fran Bailey, relating to the recent controversial revelations that former prime minister Scott Morrison was appointed to five ministries in addition to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Anyone who is sufficiently curious could and would, with a little bit of sleuthing, be able to identify public documents – open-source intelligence – that would provide insight into what happened at Tourism Australia without having to break a sweat or use social media channels to ask why nothing was said at the time about the management of the government agency.
The truth for those who bother to look is that an Australian National Audit Office performance audit of Tourism Australia released in 2008. The audit details a review of operations of the agency between 2005 and 2008. Two years of the period under review were relevant to Morrison’s time as managing director.
This report opens the door ajar and allows Australians a glimpse — albeit through the eyes of auditors – of what kinds of issues the audit engagement team found as it poked, prodded, kicked, ticked, and bashed its way through the joint.
That report notes that much of Tourism Australia’s marketing work at the relevant time was delivered via contracts for creative development, media placement and digital services. Three contracts took up 35% of the agency’s budget between 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007.
“Tourism Australia’s policies and guidelines provide a sound framework for undertaking complex procurements and managing its contracts. However, relevant guidelines were not followed when procuring its global creative development and media placement services and, to a lesser extent, digital services,” the 2008 performance audit report says.
“In particular, procurement plans were not developed and the risks to the successful completion of these procurements were not assessed.”
The ANAO gave the tourism agency a green tick for assessment and selection processes for digital services but there was some additional poking and prodding done by DPM&C on other matters.
“The creative development and media placement tenders were re-evaluated at the request of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet following concerns raised by the former Minister about the evaluation process for short listing submissions,” the ANAO report says.
“The documentation to support the original assessment was also not comprehensive and, as a consequence, the selection of these service providers lacked transparency.”
The report contains more detail relating to information gaps and what the agency did over time to address issues that pointed out by the audit engagement team.
There is little point in relitigating everything that appears in the ANAO’s report that is easily found online but its existence and its content are evidence that the performance of Tourism Australia during a period was examined by the ANAO.
Questions on Notice and Hansard transcripts of Senate Estimates hearings that were held at the relevant time are also publicly available and can be used to corroborate themes and issues raised in the ANAO’s performance audit.
A careful reading of publicly available sources such as the ANAO report on Tourism Australia and related materials provides greater insight into the agency and the management in charge at the time.
It does not mean, however, that every single thing is open and transparent — as various researchers and journalists have found out over time in attempting to access additional documents using Freedom of Information laws — but enough tiles of the mosaic are present for intelligent and perceptive readers to get an understanding.
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