David Pocock is wasting no time in office. His interrogations might be genteel and his tone conciliatory, but the man expects answers. The 35-year-old first-time politician and former rugby international is striking terror into the hearts of the establishment. Who could have predicted it?
Pocock has the Department of Defence in his sights. The senator for the ACT has taken a particular interest in the department's spending habits and its heavy reliance on large consulting firms including KPMG.
Among many other contracts, KPMG has a $100 million job to build a Minority Report-like portal through which commanders can call upon every kind of data held by Defence — from satellite imagery to munitions shelf-life — to gain the edge on the battlefield. It's called One Defence Data.
Last year Pocock ordered the production of a review into the half-a-billion-dollar initiative which Defence had preferred would never see the light of day.
That review — undertaken by Anchoram Consulting — revealed the program was in deep trouble. A raft of serious governance failures and a weakening of the contract's milestones meant taxpayers were potentially on the hook for a (hideously expensive) dud.
Perhaps worse, however, was a shock finding by Anchoram that Defence had issued a six-figure payment to KPMG for work it knew had not been delivered.
Remarkably, it was a finding that Defence said publicly it flatly refused to accept.
Pocock won't stop now
At a Senate committee hearing in mid-February, Pocock was bemused. He said, "I don't know why it would be made up in a report," but nonetheless sought to check it with the Defence officials lined up before him.
Associate secretary Matt Yannopoulos was unequivocal. He said he'd been assured by his team and by KPMG that "no milestone payment was paid without the services being delivered to a suitable quality".
But Pocock did not simply accept this assurance at face value. He issued an order for the raw correspondence underpinning the controversial payment, which came back two weeks later.
Sure enough, Anchoram's finding was sound.
In August 2022, One Defence Data's governance officer had written to KPMG:
The Commonwealth is of the opinion that the Document Deliverables do not comply with the relevant Data Item Descriptions and are not of the quality or standard expected … However, in the interests of maintaining a collaborative relationship for the duration of the Work Order … the Commonwealth has decided to permit payment, on this one occasion only.
Pocock told me last week: "Defence appears to have provided misleading evidence to a Senate hearing and has failed to be transparent about the nature of its relationship with KPMG."
"This seems to me to be a potentially serious breach of responsibility by senior public servants and I will be taking it up through the Senate. The email also substantiates Anchoram's findings."
The very next day, Pocock issued another, far more sweeping order for documents, including all correspondence between the department and KPMG's director of cyber, former Defence official Peter Corcoran.
Those documents were due to be delivered 18 days ago, but so far there's no sign of them.
Still, if recent history is any guide, Pocock won't stop there.
A lack of transparency, accountability
Since his elevation to the Senate in May 2022, the former Wallaby has been on a mission to hold Canberra to account. He has been particularly focused on lobbyists.
The inadequacy of Australia's federal lobbyists register to properly capture the revolving door between government and big business is well known. For one, it identifies only a fraction of the influence peddlers roaming the halls of power, ignoring the many who are employed full time as in-house counsel to major corporates, often with less blunt job titles (government relations is a favourite).
Pocock's interrogation of parliament officials has turned up the extraordinary revelation that more than 2,000 people — an unknown number of lobbyists among them — have all-access rights to Parliament House, and yet the public is not allowed to know who they are, nor for whom they work.
These holders of so-called "orange passes" are sponsored by parliamentarians; one MP has provided passes to 45 people. We do not know who they are, nor the identity of their sponsor, and Pocock is appalled. "Transparency … is the bare minimum that Australians deserve and demand," he says.
And yet, this transparency is astonishingly rare.
The Joint Strike Fighter, for instance, made for brilliant photo-ops; less so the $17 billion paid for a plane of dubious value. A multi-billion-dollar plan to rescue the Murray Darling was, in 2007, a "national plan for water security"; the Darling River is now best known for ghoulish fish kills that routinely make international headlines.
The automation of welfare debt recovery was going to return billions to the bottom line by stamping out cheating; when the scheme was scrapped years later, instead of apologising, the minister responsible announced it was merely being "refined". In fact, it had been illegal from the beginning.
LoadingPocock's turn in the Senate
Accountability is in short supply perhaps because atrophy is breaking down the institutions which exist to protect citizens from abuses of government.
A campaign of deliberate neglect has effectively destroyed the Commonwealth Freedom of Information regime, where the extraction of real answers too often takes years of concerted effort. Question Time wields less moral and intellectual authority than American pro-wrestling. And our regulators — the competition tsars, the ombudsmen, the public accounts auditors — are under-resourced and have insufficient legislative power, or too often lack backbone.
The press, meanwhile, is busy dispatching its dwindling staff to shadow-box shrewd confections, many of them designed by vested interests for that very purpose.
So it is heartening to see Pocock in action in the Senate. Since the 1970s, the upper house has played host to a succession of robust inquisitors, whose take-no-prisoners style has been passed from one to the other like an inheritance.
Senators of major parties have occasionally emerged in this tradition — Labor's John Faulkner was surely the standard-bearer. But it is crossbench independents to whom this country owes a great debt of gratitude for forcing accountability upon the government.
The lineage traces its way back through the hands of Rex Patrick, Stirling Griff, Jacqui Lambie, Nick Xenophon, and even Brian Harradine, all the way to Don Chipp, who stole his motto from an all-female band who sang at an Australian Democrats rally on the night of April 28, 1980: "We'll keep the bastards honest."
Now, it's David Pocock's turn.
"We have a real chance to strengthen our democracy," he said in his maiden speech in August 2022, "and ensure Australians can trust in the decisions that are being made in their name."