Donation plug pulled and now PwC cuts ties with political access groups; Prodigal daughter returns

As if PwC illegally sharing the government’s tax plans wasn’t bad enough, now political parties will have to do without its donations. Picture: Damian Shaw

PwC Australia announced on Monday that it was effectively cutting off its donations to political parties, ending the ethical conundrum of funnelling large sums of money to politicians while receiving lucrative consulting contracts in kind each year.

Yes, all the big firms do it, but PwC was the deep-pocketed backer of this grift, according to research put out by the Centre for Public Integrity in May.

Its data crunching showed PwC gave more than $2m to the Coalition and Labor between 2012 and 2022. That’s double KPMG’s outlay of $1.1m and substantially more than what the scrooges at EY and Deloitte donated during the same period ($565,372 and $572,174, respectively). And while we’re at it, the same report showed the value of government contracts for all those firms steepened considerably during that period, so it wasn't all for nothing.

A loose strand remaining out of PwC’s decision was what it would do about its murky membership arrangement with the Federal Labor Business Forum and the Liberal-linked Australian Business Network. For anyone unfamiliar with these entities, they’re organisations that give corporate donors access to boardroom briefings, policy forums and private networking dinners.

The subscription costs are usually below the mandatory reporting thresholds, meaning the firms themselves decide if they want to declare them and the money itself flows back into the political slush.

But since Monday, there’s been much hand-wringing internally at PwC, and Margin Call has now established that it will be going even further than its previously stated position and end its association to the FLBF and the ABN.

“We can confirm we are cancelling PwC’s subscriptions to these forums,” a spokesman said. This decision wasn’t taken lightly, either, apparently given the perceived benefits among some of the partners of being party to these forums.

Of course, we’re yet to see the other consulting firms following suit on donations. No excuses left, eh?

Prodigal daughter

Meanwhile, just as everyone in the press – including us – went a bit gaga over PwC’s donations ban on Monday, the firm also tactically slipped out that Karen Evans-Cullen would be rejoining them on a secondment from Gilbert + Tobin as its acting head of the office of general counsel.

Evans-Cullen replaces Meredith Beattie, whose retirement was announced a week ago. Her reasons for leaving lie somewhere between actually wanting to go and being voluntold to vamoose in the wash up of the tax scandal fiasco.

Karen Evans-Cullen

Meredith Beattie

But there must be something sui generis about Evans-Cullen to receive such a prodigal return to PwC after she ditched the firm in August 2021. Not only did she leave but she gave a public and almost disparaging assessment of her time at the blurry pixels once she was safely ensconced in her new role at Gilbert + Tobin.

That was to the Fin Review, in the same month that she started her new job. Evans-Cullen told the AFR her time at PwC hadn’t gone as planned, partly because the firm no longer attracted the best legal talent, had shed partners, and wasn’t getting the big-shot M&A deals she’d hoped for.

Put simply, Evans-Cullen said she was “missing out” because PwC’s legal division “just weren’t regularly getting a look at the bigger deals”. That’s why she bailed, moving to G+T and starting on the same day that Square announced it would acquire Afterpay. “I was like, ‘Yes – that’s why I’m here’.”

It speaks to her talent that PwC’s taken her back – or maybe it just speaks to how desperate it was to plug a gap after Beattie’s departure.

 

Gone bush

And what about Treasury, where the boffins are working themselves into a frenzy, as always. The nation’s productivity is in the toilet. Jim Chalmers is redesigning capitalism. He’s handing down a scorecard on everyone’s wellbeing later this year, for some reason. Will that boost productivity?

At Treasury they’re bollocking on about gender pronouns, encouraging staff to put them in their email signatures, to deploy them in conversation, to avoid gendered language like mother and father and to opt for “partner, child, parent”. No sign of Secretary Steven Kennedy doing any of that, of course, even when he himself signed off on the guidelines. We’ll know soon enough if he’s to be appointed Reserve Bank governor, and if he is then that’ll solve the mystery of why Luci Ellis left!

Treasury secretary Dr Stephen Kennedy. Picture: Kym Smith

Perhaps it’s an extension of these well-intended detours that a contingent of staff, among them Treasury’s Deputy Secretary Sam Reinhardt, were on Tuesday taken for an “on-country experience” to learn about Aboriginal plant use.

“During the experience, staff learnt about indigenous plant use in the context of food, medicine and their cultural significance,” Treasury posted to LinkedIn.