NSW Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight has a policy of sending IT jobs offshore?
With the
national unemployment rate running at 5.4 per cent nationally in June 2018 and
the New South Wales rate sitting at 4.8 per cent or 192,000 people, is the Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight & Nationals MP for Oxley Melinda Pavey secretly closing off employment opportunities for Australian information technology workers as a departmental cost-cutting measure?
These are not exactly the highest paying jobs in this country, averaging $46,000-$100,000 pa and, with the IT worker pool standing at est. 600,000+ nationally it is not as though there is an obvious scarcity of skilled workers available for hire.
So at first it was not easy to explain this......
The Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2018. P.2:
Leaked details of a
meeting between Roads and Maritime Services and seven companies bidding for a
$100 million IT contract contradict state government denials that it mandated
a 30 per cent quota of cut-price overseas workers.
The February 13 meeting,
convened by chief information officer Rob Putter, came six days after the RMS
called for tenders to provide IT services, on the condition that a “minimum” of
20 per cent of jobs would be sent overseas in the first year
and 30 per cent in the second year.
Three Indian firms, Tata
Consultancy Services, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra, attended the meeting along with
Fujitsu, Datacom, Accenture and Wollongong company itree, with 25 people in the
room and 18 dialling in.
A source who attended the
meeting said Mr Putter showed a PowerPoint slide titled RMS Pricing Principles
which stated the RMS was “seeking to achieve the lowest possible cost” to
provide the IT service.
The slide stated RMS’s
“target offshore resource utilisation” required 20 per cent of jobs offshore
in year one, 30 per cent in year two and a “measured ongoing approach
to increase offshore efforts” over the rest of the seven-year contract.
Photocopies of the slide
were provided to attendees, who “discussed at length ... the need to offshore
resources (jobs)”, the source said.
“The RMS personnel
stated that it was mandated by the (Roads) Minister that to achieve the lowest
price they need to seek offshore resources,” the source said.
“This clearly
makes a joke of the Minister’s denial that this tender mandated offshoring.” As
The Daily Telegraph revealed last week, the RMS had called for companies to
provide “development, testing, maintenance and service management for
transport-related software applications and in-the-field hardware”.…..
The RMS announced Mr
Putter’s resignation last week.
Despite NSW Government denials, the fact remains that it is highly likely that jobs were to be sourced overseas as the RMS IT operational budget blowout had reached $80 million in the 12 months to June 2018, following a $40 million blowout in the operational budget in the previous financial year.
It appears that Roads and Maritime Services has bungled its $1 billion IT systems upgrade with more bad news expected.
Dollars for mates?
Dollars for mates?
Crikey.com.au, 2 August 2018:
is under fire after six government
contracts, none of which went to public tender, were awarded to the company after
it hired former state roads minister
Duncan Gay.
The Daily Telegraph ($)
reports that the firm has been awarded contracts from the Roads
and Maritime Services agency worth over $4.46 million after hiring the former
department head as an “executive adviser” just weeks after Gay left parliament
in late 2017. The firm has reportedly hired at least 11 former Roads and
Maritime Services staff members, including two as directors, however Gay says
he has “not been involved in any RMS contracts that MU have won”.
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