The agency overseeing Australia’s $368bn Aukus purchase of nuclear-powered submarines which is facing a “ruthless” government-ordered review is paying consultants McKinsey $9.5m for management advice.
Details published on the Austender website reveal the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) has also paid for prestigious executive short courses at Harvard University, Oxford University’s Said business school and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where education and training services were provided between 24 July and 30 September at a cost of $701,392.
The MIT course was separate from a more specialised and targeted nuclear technology training course at the same institute, which cost a further $546,860 between July and December last year.
Other published contract details confirm that the defence department is also still paying off the more than $1.6bn it owes France’s Naval Group for the design of the conventional submarines Australia ordered and then abruptly and controversially cancelled after the Morrison government quietly forged the Aukus pact with the US and Britain in 2021.
Guardian Australia reported on Thursday that the defence minister, Richard Marles, has appointed former senior defence and foreign affairs bureaucrat Dennis Richardson to undertake an urgent review of the ASA amid growing concerns about its governance and priorities.
Guardian Australia also revealed that the agency’s deputy director-general responsible for policy and programs, David Hallinan, quit last month after raising concerns and being dissatisfied with the response.
Guardian Australia has learned that Marles wrote to the ASA’s director-general, Vice-Admiral Jonathan Mead, more than a month ago, laying out his concerns and indicating he intended to order a review.
Confirming the review on Friday after declining to do so two days earlier, Marles downplayed the seriousness of the situation, suggesting there was “a lot that’s going well” at the agency and that Richardson would simply be “kicking the tyres”.
“I do think that there are areas where we could be doing better and it’s really that which led us to think that it is a good time to be kicking the tyres, to be seeing what more we can do, make sure that we are getting it all right,” Marles told ABC Radio National.
He said the government wanted to “do this with the spirit of not being defensive” or suggest everything is perfect “because that’s never going to be the case”.
“But actually the opposite: making sure that the method that we apply here is to engage in complete kind of ruthless scrutiny of ourselves, to make sure that we are doing this in the best possible way. And that’s really why we’ve got Dennis involved.”
According to the Austender records, the ASA has issued 237 separate contracts over its 17-month existence, 110 of which are still current.
The Austender documents show the ASA signed a 10-month contract with McKinsey Pacific Rim Incorporated on 15 August. Described in the published contract summary as delivering “skills currently unavailable within [the] agency”, the McKinsey contract is the largest among a raft of management advisory contracts worth millions more.
The agency has separate million-dollar-plus contracts – in some cases multiple contracts – with consulting firms including Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, KPMG, EY, and Boston Consulting.
McKinsey Pacific Rim declined to provide details of the work it performed for the ASA. Guardian Australia has contacted the ASA and Marles’s office for comment.
