The federal Health department has been locked in a year-and-a-half long legal battle over whether it owns software developed by subcontractors, after the consultancy that sat in the middle went into liquidation.
An audit of the troubled ‘Future Fit’ project to revamp Meals on Wheels makes damning findings on how the department managed it, including the procurement of Miles Morgan Australia (MMA).
The boutique consultancy was single sourced in 2021 through a panel to run the heavily outsourced project aimed at preparing the sector for changes to how Meals on Wheels providers will be funded and operate.
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To the seemingly un-responsive and unaccountable ‘echo chamber’ that is the Department of Health and Ageing: What impact has this had on service delivery to clients? Have elderly and vulnerable people not been fed? Have temporary contracts been in place where the service to deliver the meals is five time more expensive than that the meal itself? How is this unresolved after four years? After emergency funding of five times the initial $5.5M is provided to (99% certain) ‘one of the big four’ (on pretty much the same basis), the lawyers have been paid, the reports produced and filed under ‘no further action’ and the procurement team have been found to have ‘worked within guidelines’ and therefore are not responsible or in any way accountable for what is so generously called a ‘SNAFU’ in the title of this article, will the clients (elderly and vulnerable people) be better served or will it simply be budgeted as $100M efficiency dividend and cake be ordered for the tea room at 4 on Friday? Is it just me or is anyone else sick of this cruel, arrogant and blatant nonsense?