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Independent MPs will push for all large government grant schemes to have parliamentary oversight, so potential cases of politicisation or conflicts of interest can be caught in real time, after this masthead reported billions were being spent on non-competitive contracts.
The move comes as the Greens introduce their own legislation to ban political donors – including the big consulting firms – from being awarded Commonwealth contracts.
Questions are being raised about the Medical Research Future Fund.Credit: Richard Giliberto
The Age revealed last week that the government’s $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund had spent more than half a billion dollars on ad hoc or non-competitive grants, including to projects in or near marginal seats.
Since then, reports emerged of a non-competitive contract worth $30 million given by the Health Department to a PwC-backed company to trial a digital mental health platform.
On Monday, independent MP and former medical researcher Monique Ryan will deliver a letter to the government calling on it to amend the MRFF’s governing legislation to make it unlawful for the health minister to allocate grants that do not meet published selection criteria.
She argues legislation should be introduced to set the same rule for all government grant programs over $100 million.
Member for Kooyong Dr Monique Ryan argues legislation should be introduced to set the same rule for all government grant programs over $100 million.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Successive governments have promoted a culture of spending that permits ministers to allocate extraordinarily large grant pools, without any real-time oversight from their parliamentary colleagues,” the letter reads.
“Instead of finding out about the misuse of taxpayer dollars when the [government auditor] publishes a scathing review five years after the fact, we should be ascertaining wrongdoing when grants are made.”
The letter is co-signed by independent MPs Zali Steggall, Kate Chaney, Zoe Daniel and Sophie Scamps, who is a former general practitioner.
“The revelations of the politicisation of medical research grants are incredibly concerning,” said Scamps. “The allocation of medical research grants should be above politics and decided by scientists not politicians who are subject to lobbying. ”
Innowell
In 2017, the Department of Health entered into a services contract with Innowell to trial an online mental health platform. The $30 million contract was awarded without competition.
Innowell is part-owned by PwC, the accounting firm embroiled in scandal over using confidential government information to help private companies dodge tax.
The company hoped to build an online mental health platform that incorporated both face-to-face and online treatments, encouraging users to self-manage their mental health care.
Professor Ian Hickie, an internationally renowned mental health expert who co-founded Innowell, said the company was spun out of a government cooperative research centre.
Hickie remains a part-owner of the company, along with PwC and the University of Sydney, company documents show. Other groups have also taken up investment positions.
A 2019 independent review of Innowell, funded by the company, raised concerns about the small number of users on the platform. Psychologists and counsellors were often quite resistant to using an online service, and patients without smartphones struggled to access it altogether.
There also was not enough data to show if the project was actually improving mental health outcomes, said Professor Ilan Katz, the lead author of that review.
But overall, the review was pretty positive, said Katz. “On the whole, people were saying it was an improvement on what they had before.”
It was not clear if there were “teething issues … or whether there will be significant challenges to the uptake of the Innowell platform in the medium and long term”, the report said.
The project concluded in 2021, and no further investment has been made, the department said.
Hickie said that had always been the expectation.
“The Turnbull government expectation was that the $30 million was a one-off grant to establish a for-profit entity with capacity to compete commercially in Australia and internationally, and that the company would not be dependent on further national government investments for its ongoing operations,” he said.
Hickie said Innowell continued to operate despite receiving no further government funding.
“The notion that it has ‘failed’ is nonsense and the attribution for that ‘failure’ — ‘due to administrative burden’ — is also nonsense,” he said, referring to a Guardian article that said the project was scrapped because health workers found it an administrative burden.
In a statement, the company said it had more than 100,000 users, with revenues expected to reach about $50 million over the next three years.
Professor AJ Brown, head of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy’s public integrity and anti-corruption research program, said there was a place for non-competitive government contracts, but only when there has been a legitimate process with independent input to confirm that an open, competitive approach could not possibly yield a better result.
Such contracts should also come with extra assurance and transparency mechanisms “to ensure that its probity is beyond doubt”, he said.
The Greens’ leader in the Senate, Larissa Waters, said on Friday she would be introducing a private members bill to stop political donors, such as PwC, from receiving government contracts.
“The Big Four donated more than $4.3 million to both sides of politics over 10 years, and secured $8 billion in government contracts over that same time period — work that could and should largely be done by a strong, independent public service,” she said.
Liam Mannix’s Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.
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