Bees & honey

Our public services spent $1.25 billion on outsourced help last year. Are consultants worth their inflated price-tags and industry jargon?

- DANYL McLAUCHLAN

When you drive into Wellington from the airport, you travel along Cobham Drive, a windblown stretch of road with a school, sports fields and industrial buildings on one side and the choppy grey harbour on the other. Halfway along it, you'll drive over a new pedestrian crossing. It doesn't look like much, but its construction was a political car crash, partly because of the location (the airport claimed it would cause congestion and initiated a judicial review to halt construction, which it subsequently withdrew) but mostly because of the cost, which came in at an astonishing $2.4 million: $1.8 million to a private construction firm and $535,000 on consulting advice.

Once in the heart of Wellington, you'll arrive at the parliamentary precinct, a cluster of government buildings dominated by the Beehive. Two brand-new structures grace the area: opaque black rectangles of steel and glass. They're not occupied by public servants. Instead, they house EY and KPMG, two of the largest corporate consultancies in the world. They sit at the heart of New Zealand government - both figuratively and literally - alongside their fellow consultancy firms PWC and Deloitte. These companies were key players in the Covid response and they've had input into almost every major government policy over the past five years. During that time, the Big Four, as they're known, have earned nearly $370 million from the core public service alone - that's excluding fees earned from local and regional government, universities, hospitals and state-owned enterprises.

Unlike the capital's lobbyists, who cluster around the Beehive trying to influence politicians, consultants are endemic throughout the public sector. Seemingly every ministry, organisation and department teems with gleaming youngmen and women with advanced degrees and beautiful suits. What do they do? How much power do they have? Why does it all cost so much, and do they actually deliver any value?