[neetle]

I don't think it's corruption so much as the public sector getting harvested for parts via privatisation and outsourcing to contractors.

The usual cycle goes like this:

- "We need to decrease costs in public organisation A because $reason"

- "Hey look, public org has growing wait times and growing infrastructure issues. We should reduce their budget because they're not doing their job!"

Rinse & repeat until you're left with Centrelink's current state. They don't have enough money to make the changes needed to clean up legacy systems AND process the work loads they have now AND maintain the current systems, so a choice is made by people in a sinking ship. Around 2014 the amount spent on "admin" was gutted by half with the election of the Liberal party (small govt party in AU), with funding only recovering to the previous levels during 2017.

edit: formatting (bullet point lists and newlines are hard)

[jiggawatts]

I don't believe this was the problem in this case. As mentioned, they were blowing $billions on individual IT projects, and hiring vendor specialist consultants at $4-$5K per day in many cases. Similarly, their kit was over-specced to a ludicrous degree.

I asked their DBA team to deploy a ~100 MB "system configuration" database and they gave me four dedicated(!) physical quad-socket servers in a 2+2 HA configuration. The active server showed 1% load, the three replica servers rounded the load down to 0% in Task Manager.

All that for that one tiny database!

Their excuse was that this was their "standard pattern", and that everyone gets the same spec, irrespective of need.

In any private org, you would be walked out the door if you spent nearly half a million dollars on kit+licensing for something like that because you were too lazy to have more than one option for database hosting.

PS: There was a huge database team. You can't tell me it was a staff capacity issue either. This particular product had it's own sub-team dedicated to it.

[jimmux]

I'm wondering if the consulting company I used to work for is behind this. Hardware sales were behind many decisions, because that's where the sales team made commissions.

[mission_failed]

> Around 2014 the amount spent on "admin" was gutted by half with the election of the Liberal party (small govt party in AU)

Inaccurate if not misleading. The Liberal party are firm believers that private companies do everything better than Government. Pretty much the UK conservative party in function and form

[stephen_g]

Yeah, the pattern has been a massive increase in spend in consultancies (especially the big 4) for things that the public service used to do itself. I believe it's over a billion dollars per year to the big 4 now, from tens of millions p/a back then.