Heads must roll

The Post reports:

Immigration officials stand accused by their own minister of misleading her and her predecessors for seven years, engaging in creative accounting to dodge scrutiny and removing people from a $33 million IT project when they raised questions.

And ultimately, they achieved nothing. The entire project is now being written off with nothing to show for it.

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford is “furious” and says she has lost confidence in her officials.

I can’t recall a Minister ever so angry before, and stating she has lost confidence. But it is for good reason.

“The report is very clear that ministers were not given full information, that in cases we were misled, that people were removed from the project when they asked questions about its viability, and that whole-of-life costs were not put to ministers for proper approval,” Stanford told a select committee on Tuesday. …

The project began to unravel in March 2024, when officials sought to push the cost to $40m, which required Cabinet approval.

Advice to the minister at the time said the project was “well progressed”, with an approach that was “sound and robust”, citing a positive quality assurance review in September 2023.

Stanford says she was also not told that her predecessor, Andrew Little, had already declined the same request twice in 2023.

Stanford said she refused the increase and requested the 2023 review, which in fact said: “given the project’s poor delivery history and its inability to meet agreed milestones, we have doubts as to whether the project will in fact deliver at all and we question its continuation”.

“I was, as I’m sure you can appreciate, furious at being provided with advice that was diametrically opposed to the truth on such a critical project,” Stanford said.

So the review concluded the project was off course, missed milestones and doubted it should continue. Yet officials told the Minister that the review was a positive quality assurance review. That isn’t spin – that is deception.