By Noel Towell and Kishor Napier-Raman
News out of the United States that blue-chip consulting giant McKinsey is under criminal investigation over its alleged role fuelling the country’s opioid epidemic shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s kept an eye on the firm’s recent history.
Over the last few years, McKinsey has paid out nearly $US1 billion ($1.53 billion) to settle various lawsuits over its work for Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of OxyContin, the drug that got Middle America hooked on heroin. And that’s without even going into the firm’s work for Big Tobacco and autocratic governments in Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
The Defence Department extended a $28 million contract with McKinsey for “computer services”.Credit:
But it seems like none of this bad PR has reached the ears of bureaucrats in Canberra, who remain firmly hooked on the firm’s services, even after the scandal engulfing PwC injected some much-needed scepticism around calling in the consultants.
McKinsey is a particular favourite with the Department of Defence, which recently extended a $28 million contract with the firm for “computer services” until this June. Defence also paid McKinsey $5000 a day during a three-month period last year to conduct an “inclusive leadership review” – whatever that means.
Home Affairs, meanwhile, entered into a $1 million, five-month contract with McKinsey for “delivery of strategic policy deliverables”.
The firm charged the Department of Climate Change $1.6 million for two months work last year, the purpose of which was to “produce a robust evidence-base to inform and guide the Department to develop a cohesive package of policy measures”. Sure.
A Home Affairs spokesperson told us the Department “is committed to ensuring its contractual arrangements uphold the highest standards of integrity,” and that it undertakes regular due diligence of contracted suppliers
The other departments didn’t respond to CBD’s questions.
And that’s just the recent stuff. In 2021, McKinsey was paid millions to help with the vaccine rollout. We know how that went. The Morrison government paid it $6 million to help model its largely detail-free net-zero plan that same year.
And while the public service is up to its eyeballs in McKinsey contracts, the firm’s alumni keep showing up in the corridors of power.
New Liberal member for Cook Simon Kennedy was a partner there, and Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and his Coalition frontbench colleague David Coleman and Wentworth teal MP Allegra Spender have all come through its doors.
While CBD isn’t suggesting any of that crew worked for any nefarious clients, it goes to show that McKinsey, which has a habit of recruiting young high achievers, is a bit of a training ground for people aspiring to a life of power and influence.
As long as that lasts, we reckon it’ll remain a player in the Canberra Bubble.
POSTER ROY FOR NEOM
CBD couldn’t suppress a guffaw at the news that Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s eye-catching vanity project NEOM – a 170 kilometre “line city” in the middle of the desert – would be cut in scale by a whopping 98 per cent.
Wyatt Roy, head of innovation for NEOM, in China.Credit: Instagram
But MBS’s shrunken dream clearly hasn’t affected the job prospects of one enterprising young Aussie. Earlier this year, Wyatt Roy, famous for being the youngest ever elected MP, packed his bags to take up a role as NEOM’s head of innovation.
Wyatt has always been an adventurous sort. In 2016, shortly after losing his seat in parliament, Roy travelled to Iraq for some reason, where he found himself on the frontlines of conflict between ISIS and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
That thirst for adventure has taken Roy, one of the first Liberals to back same-sex marriage, to work for a regime that treats gay people with medieval barbarity. And now, it’s taken him to China, where he was off spruiking NEOM at a roadshow for business leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
One image in particular stood out – of Wyatt at a lectern in front of signs advertising China’s Belt and Road Initiative. We can’t imagine a sitting Australian politician being seen dead with that in the background.
TALKING PHILOSOPHY
Melbourne’s leading neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell has developed, we think it’s fair to say, something of a reputation in the community, but is not known as a philosophical thinker.
Melbourne neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell at the Shrine of Remembrance on Thursday morning.
But the leader of the extremist Lad Society group surprised one of our informants who came across Sewell and a group of companions at the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on Thursday morning.
The lads, most of whom were in Peaky Blinders-style flat caps, were discussing the work of Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, whose work in recent years has, in fairness, taken him closer to Sewell’s end of the political thinking spectrum.
Other topics under discussion were less surprising. CCTV cameras got a mention and at one point Sewell – apparently trying to keep a low profile – had to remind one of his mates not to call him Tom in public.
Makes sense.
Clarification: This story was updated to include comments from the Department of Home Affairs