Conflicts of Interest

Question

Senator BARBARA POCOCK: My last line of questioning is around the cooling off and the revolving door issues in the sector. In my question to you in estimates on 12 February, I sought details on the rules regarding personnel who move from the department to working for managing contractors or from managing contractors to the department and whether DFAT keeps track of employees who are subject to such a cooling-off period. I'm reiterating my request for details on how the behaviour of employees is tracked during the cooling-off period. Those details weren't provided to me, so I'm still looking for them-on how you keep track. Ms Casson: Obviously, some of the evidence from Ms Cohen has touched on some of the work we're doing at the whole-of-enterprise level, and I acknowledge there's a big body of work that happens between our respective areas. We've recently put some additional advice out to staff and managers to better articulate some of these issues with staff not just coming into the department; I think it's on departure from the department that we had some work to do. We have done some advice to staff recently to try to draw out these issues a bit more clearly. The policy setting is that all employees have to inform the department immediately if they're approached with a formal offer of employment or if they apply for employment where a real or apparent conflict of interest between their current official duties and the proposed future employment could arise. Then we go through implementing a plan to manage access to official information, resources et cetera. That goes particularly, as you'd expect, to working on or advising on contracts or grants to which DFAT is or is proposed to be a party, in particular, for staff who've been substantially involved in the design, preparation, appraisal, review or daily management while they've been at DFAT. Another point of clarity is that anything that substantially involves any employee of DFAT with whom they had a significant contact in the course of their employment-again, trying to really improve the advice that goes to staff to manage that. We've touched on, in the response to the question on notice, what those policy parameters are. As I've said, we've recently updated the department's Ethics, integrity and professional standards policy manual-which is available on the internet, as well as internally to staff-to raise awareness of those updates to the policy. The other thing that we've done with those updates is make very clear the requirements under the Lobbying Code of Conduct, which is an important thing for us to cover in that advice. That information has been circulated to staff recently, and I'm happy to take any further questions on the detail of that. Senator BARBARA POCOCK: I would like to seek details of any such conflicts over the last five years, with the details of the position of the staff member at the time of the conflict arising; their employment status, whether APS, SES, contractor or LES; and the nature of the conflict, including whether and how it was mitigated. If you could supply that on notice, that would be great?

Answer

Please see attached answer.

Documents

• Question with answer (PDF) (opens in a new tab)
• QoN 203.pdf (opens in a new tab)