[Peetwo]

Higgins lifts lid on the OneSKY trough fund -

Via that man & the Oz:

---

Flying off course: how OneSKY failed to launch



The federal public expenditure watchdog has delved into OneSKY and found it to be running grievously late, bursting at the budget seams, and in danger of not delivering value for money to either Defence or Airservices.

The Australian 12:00AM February 8, 2018


EAN HIGGINS
Reporter Sydney
@EanHiggins

In 2013, Jason Harfield was barely into his 40s and felt really proud of how far he had come since his days as a young knockabout air traffic controller who got his licence at the age of 20 in 1991.

He had risen through the ranks of Airservices Australia, making his last transmission as an operational controller in 2000 before moving into management.

He still remembers it.

“It was the last shift, it was about 8 o’clock at night, I was working the Perth inner sectors and my last transmission was ‘Hotel Yankee Delta roger continue descent to flight level 140’,’’ he recalled in an interview for an Airservices publication.

Thirteen years later, having known no other life than in the public sector with federal government-owned Airservices, which runs the country’s air traffic control and navigation system, Harfield found himself in the same league as big private sector executives, in his case in charge of a hugely ambitious new $1.5 billion project called OneSKY.

OneSKY would do something no other country had attempted: fully integrate the civilian and military air traffic management systems, bringing in state-of-the art equipment and tailoring it in a bespoke fashion to make it the most complex and high performing in the world.

In July 2012, Defence and Airservices announced they had reached agreement to procure a new joint air traffic management system which the then Airservices general manager ATC future systems, Nick King, said would “successfully harmonise civil and military air traffic management to deliver a wide range of benefits, including greater airspace efficiency, better investment in personnel and infrastructure, and seamless systems compatibility”.

In his LinkedIn profile in those days, Harfield heralded the importance of his role, and how it was exclusively his.


Airservices Australia's Chief Executive Jason Harfield at the organisation's headquarters in Canberra.

“I have the accountability for the leadership, acquisition and delivery of Airservices’ next-generation services and harmonised Australian Air Traffic Management system,” Harfield trumpeted on LinkedIn. “This role also has the responsibility of the Senior Responsible Owner.”

Harfield clearly loved it; he got to mix it up with the top executives from the preferred prime contractor, the massive French aerospace and defence systems company Thales. It would not be long before he would periodically fly to Paris, the City of Light, for discussions with the Thales high-flyers, accompanied by Airservices chairman (and former RAAF and Defence Forces chief) Angus Houston — one of several facts Airservices was not prepared to volunteer to The Australian, but which was revealed when the newspaper put in a freedom-of-information request.

Harfield knew his and his lieutenants’ limitations, both time-wise and in terms of skills. Rather than conduct the detailed negotiations with Thales himself or get his subordinates at Airservices to do so, he turned to an obscure group in Canberra, the International Centre for Complex Project Management, which calls itself a “not-for-profit” organisation.

One of the ICCPM consultants, a dashing former RAAF pilot turned high-level project management consultant, Harry Bradford — who was an old fly-boy mate of Houston’s back in the day — was engaged as lead negotiator, working towards a contract with Thales with a target signing date of October 2015. Harfield moved even higher up the management rank; the air traffic controller who as a kid liked planes became chief executive of Airservices.

At about the time of his appointment to the top job two years ago, one of Harfield’s media flacks told The Australian everything was going just hunky dory: “The OneSKY Australia program remains on track for completion in 2021. Work currently undertaken is within the approved budget.”

In fact, it’s all gone horribly pear-shaped. As revealed by The Australian this week, the federal public expenditure watchdog has delved into OneSKY and found it to be running grievously late, bursting at the budget seams, and in danger of not delivering value for money to either Defence or Airservices.

The Australian National Audit Office reported that OneSKY won’t even get near the 2021 completion target — full operational capability is tentatively put down for 2025, but even that remains in doubt because that contract with Thales was not signed in October 2015. In fact, it still has not been signed, though Airservices says it will be by the end of next month.

“The offer and negotiation process has been protracted, in part due to misalignment of customer approval processes through two separate governance structures, but also due to Thales not yet producing an acceptable offer that represents value for money for Defence and Airservices,” ANAO says. It notes that there is no way Defence will get what it wants out of OneSKY on its current budget, and it would need “a significant real cost increase” bailout from the federal government.

A big part of the problem, ANAO found, was that what Airservices and Defence were attempting had never been tried before, anywhere. “The joint civil-military acquisition originally intended to procure a largely commercial off-the-shelf (or military off-the-shelf) system; however, the only compliant and viable solutions tendered all required significant development and integration effort to deliver the specified capability.

“Furthermore, there are no similar civil-military air traffic management systems fielded elsewhere in the world.”



Australian Minister for Defence Marise Payne. Picture: AAP

Last August, Defence Minister Marise Payne and Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne placed Defence’s participation in OneSKY on the government’s Projects of Concern list. Payne’s office did not answer The Australian’s questionsabout OneSKY.

The cost blowouts and delays in OneSKY were headaches for Harfield, but that sort of thing is common in big projects, and as long as they can be kept below the radar they can be dealt with quietly through further budget allocations and just extending the timeline. The real problem here was that it was all exposed by whistleblowers.

There was at least one mole, clearly fairly senior, at Airservices, and possibly more, who leaked what was really going on, to this reporter and to senators on the committee responsible for grilling public aviation organisations at Senate estimates hearings.

One day in 2015 a big, solid envelope arrived in this reporter’s pigeonhole at work, with no return address. In it were confidential Airservices documents about OneSKY.

Among other things, they showed something Harfield’s flacks had refused to divulge when The Australian had asked: the total expected cost of the project, over the course of its operation and allowing for inflation. It was $1.5bn, about twice what had been touted by industry estimates.

Airservices immediately moved into damage control and containment mode, calling on the Australian Federal Police to investigate the leak and try to find the culprit. This newspaper got a threatening letter from the AFP, but by that time had already published the most juicy elements of the leaked documents. The police did not pursue this reporter ­further.

It is instructive to note that if the federal government’s proposed foreign interference laws are enacted as they are currently drafted, the risk of publishing material from those sorts of documents in the future could be prohibitive. Just possessing such documents would be a crime, which means this reporter and the senators who also received the unsolicited leaked material would be criminals from the moment the envelopes arrived in their mailboxes, and if prosecuted they could be jailed for up to 15 years.

While there are some defences for journalists, veteran media lawyer Robert Todd has warned that the onus of proof is on them, and the bar is high.

“The structure of the legislation is chilling in its nature, in the sense that making out a defence will be extremely difficult and fraught,” Todd says.

Another really sinister aspect of the proposed law, Todd says, is that the people who have the biggest interest in it are senior public servants, who would use it to try to suppress such leaks to protect themselves from embarrassing public exposure of their organisation’s failings. If the same sort of leak happened again with the proposed new laws in place, senior public servants such as Harfield could command the police to investigate journalists and senators with far greater effect.

There were also leaks that show what a cosy and lucrative little club the aerospace bureaucracy and consultancy world is.

In August 2015, senators from every political party on the rural and regional affairs and transport legislation committee fell over each other to interrogate Harfield about the revelations.



Harry Bradford at Adelaide Airport. Picture: Kelly Barnes.


It turned out that while Bradford was one of the ICCPM consultants, the chairman of ICCPM, Chris Jenkins, was at the time also the managing director of Thales Australia, the organisation Bradford was supposed to be negotiating with on behalf of Airservices.

“The perception of conflict of interest is all over this,” said Labor senator Joe Bullock at the committee hearing.

The committee chairman, Liberal Bill Heffernan, described the arrangements as “incestuous” and said the whole thing “sounds dodgy”.

Harfield told the senators “it’s a small community”, but insisted it was not a case of “just being a web of mates”.

However, his problems were to get even worse.

Heffernan, with Labor support, decided to sic the ANAO on to the dealings between Airservices and ICCPM, and later more generally on to the administration of the OneSKY project.

That, in turn, revealed a lot.

In 2016 the ANAO tabled a report finding that a lack of probity, competitive tendering and cost control meant the organisation was not getting its money’s worth.

Among the findings, Airser­vices paid individual ICCPM consultants up to $5000 for an eight-hour day, and Bradford’s fee had been $1 million, earning him the sobriquet in the media of The Million Dollar Man.

“Overall, Airservices’ approach to contracting ICCPM to assist with the delivery of OneSKY Australia was ineffective in providing value-for-money outcomes,” ANAO determined.

Bradford feels the media focus on the consultants is misplaced — he says they took on the difficult job they were asked to do by the clients, did it well, and for normal commercial rates.

The attack was “unfair, asymmetric and unproductive and acts as a disincentive for capable people to do difficult things,” he says.

“I took all issues of substance to joint Defence and Airservices governance for decision-making and then operated in a manner consistent with direction I was given.”

Bradford this week decided to reveal to The Australian his own frustrations with the project, which he said led him to quit in late 2015. “Obstacles were many,” he says. “The requirements were complex and often the interests of Defence, Airservices and Thales diverged — as was expected.

“Defence was used to dealing with large and complex programs and their inputs and responses were usually coherent and well-considered; Airservices was an organisation that was very good at simultaneously operating and incrementally developing a running ATC system, but it was not practised in managing development projects of scale and complexity.”



To this was added Thales, a French company with a different culture, Bradford says.

While Thales had been good at the “low-risk process of progressive upgrade” of the existing air traffic control system, he says, the ambition of what Airservices and Defence were trying to do was another matter.

“The fixed price development of a fully integrated civil and military ATC system capable of addressing many evolving tech­nologies is a much bigger and very much more difficult undertaking,” Bradford says. After 18 months as lead negotiator, Bradford decided he couldn’t fix the impossible — there was no way, he estimated, that the project could attain the standard sought within the allocated ­budget.

“I was not prepared to continue being paid to work on a program that I felt was unlikely to achieve Defence’s and Airservices’ required outcomes,” he says.

Businessman and aviator Dick Smith has always believed it would never be possible, for an acceptable price, to fulfil the very different needs of the military and the civilian aviation industry through a single system.

“It’s like trying to build an airliner that will carry passengers and also have a bomb rack on,” he says.

Harfield has never made himself available to this reporter for telephone or face-to-face interviews about OneSKY, and would not answer questions including how much responsibility he took for the project’s problems.

But in terms of his LinkedIn posts and the utterances of his flacks, it looks like he now thinks he may have overestimated how much he was in charge of OneSKY after all.

Rather than the original claim “I have the accountability for the leadership, acquisition and delivery” of OneSKY, a couple of years ago, Harfield has changed this part of his LinkedIn profile to, “I had the accountability for the delivery” of the project.

When he was first grilled by the senators in August 2015 in the then role of acting chief executive, Harfield maintained his staunch insistence that when it came to OneSKY, he was their man, telling them he had been “leading and running the OneSKY Australia program”.

The following year, after the ANAO came down with one of its blistering reports on OneSKY, The Australian asked Harfield if he would deny he was the prime executive responsible for the project during what Heffernan called the “dodgy” period.

His flack responded:

“A number of Airservices and Defence executives have been jointly responsible for the One­SKY program.

“No one person within Airservices has prime responsibility for the introduction of OneSKY.”

---

Trouble afoot for MT & BJ me thinks...


MTF...P2