The consultants who advise government, and fund it

Why the Big Four are worth tracing across registers

PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young occupy an unusual position. They are paid by governments to advise on policy and to deliver programs, while also registering as lobbyists, meeting ministers, and donating to the parties that form those governments.

Between 2023 and 2024 that position was examined in public for the first time. A Senate committee spent eighteen months on the question and reported three times, after a PwC partner was found to have taken confidential Treasury information about laws he was helping to design and passed it to colleagues who used it to advise clients. The committee described what it found in the title of its second report, PwC: The Cover-up Worsens the Crime.

What that inquiry could not do was show the pattern across all four firms over time, because no single place holds it. Each activity these firms undertake is disclosed in a different register, kept by a different body, for a different reason: political donations go to the Australian Electoral Commission and its state equivalents, lobbying registrations to eight separate state and federal lobbyist registers, meetings to whichever ministerial diaries a government chooses to release, and gifts to public servants to departmental gift registers. They are published in different formats, on different timetables, and none of them refers to any of the others. Answering a question as simple as "which firms met this minister in the same year they donated to their party" has meant opening a dozen websites and reading PDFs by hand.

Influence Tracker holds all of them in one searchable database, which is why this page is possible. Each activity on its own is unremarkable and none of it shows wrongdoing. What the combined records make visible is the shape of the relationship: the same four firms advising, lobbying, meeting and funding the same governments within the same periods. The rest of this page sets that out, with the background needed to read it and every figure linked to the register it came from, starting with how the firms came to be advising government at this scale in the first place.

How much advice government buys, and from whom

The Australian National Audit Office found the value of Commonwealth consultancy contracts rose from $352 million in 2012 to 13 to $888 million in 2021 to 22, in its 2022 update on procurement contract reporting. Drawing on Department of Finance statistics, the Senate committee that examined this put the 2022 to 23 figures at 83,625 procurement contracts worth $74.8 billion, of which Management Advisory Services, the category most consulting work sits in, accounted for $3.272 billion, or 4.37 per cent of everything the Commonwealth bought. It also recorded that Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC "are in receipt of the largest number and value of consultancy related contracts", all set out in its chapter on how far government has come to rely on consultants.

Australia is an outlier internationally. The same chapter records that Australia has the world's fourth largest consulting industry, and that spending is "greater than that of any other country by population, and approximately double that of comparable countries like Canada or Sweden". Work once done inside the public service is now bought from four firms that also lobby government, meet its ministers and donate to its parties. The contracts themselves are published on AusTender and are not held here; what is held here is everything else those firms do with the same governments.

The PwC tax leaks, and what was actually found

In 2023 it became public that Peter-John Collins, then a PwC tax partner, had sat inside confidential Treasury consultations on new laws to stop multinationals shifting profits offshore, and had passed that information to colleagues. The Tax Practitioners Board terminated his registration as a tax agent and banned him for two years, finding he "failed to act with integrity". The same investigation found that PwC itself "had failed to properly manage conflicts of interest" and ordered the firm to put processes and training in place.

The Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee reported three times: PwC: A calculated breach of trust in June 2023, PwC: The Cover-up Worsens the Crime in March 2024, and a final report in June 2024. Its first recommendation was that PwC publish the names and positions of the partners and personnel involved.

PwC sold its entire government advisory business in response. Allegro Funds bought it for $1 and took on roughly 1,750 staff, relaunching it as Scyne Advisory as a company under the Corporations Act rather than a partnership, so that it files audited returns with ASIC. What made the leaked material valuable was not its content but where it came from: inside the policy process, before anyone else had it. Access is the asset, and that is why the meetings, registrations and donations recorded further down this page are worth counting even though none of them is an allegation.

What a conflict of interest looks like in this sector

The Senate committee set out the forms a conflict can take when a consulting firm works for government: staff seconded between firms and departments, public servants who go to work for a consultant after managing its engagement, firms acting for competing clients, recommendations that generate further work for the firm that made them, and public sector work that touches the same firm's private clients.

On whether the money itself distorts behaviour, the committee drew on the review PwC commissioned from Dr Ziggy Switkowski, which described a "tone from the top" emphasising revenue and growth, and found that "fear, competition, and high expectations for strong financial performance by partners have been apparent in recent years". Summarising it, the committee referred to a culture of "valuing profit over ethics".

There is also less regulation here than most people assume. Management consulting "is not a protected or regulated profession", so a consultant cannot be struck off the way a lawyer or an auditor can, and people providing consulting services to the Australian Public Service "are not required to uphold the APS Values and Employment Principles, or comply with the APS Code of Conduct", as the committee set out in its chapter on regulating the industry. The safeguard is the wording of each contract.

When the advice itself fails

With no professional register to strike anybody from, the public registers collected on this page are close to the only standing record of who met whom and who paid what. But it is worth pausing on what the advice itself is actually worth, because access is not the only thing at stake. Deloitte was paid about $440,000 to review the IT system behind the Targeted Compliance Framework, the machinery that automates penalties against welfare recipients. Academics reading the report found references to research that did not exist and a quote attributed to a Federal Court judgment that had never been written. The department's own page now records that the report "was updated on 3 February 2026 to address identified corrections", replacing the version it had published in October 2025. Deloitte acknowledged using a generative AI system in preparing it and agreed to repay the final instalment of the contract. Public money buys advice that shapes decisions about people's payments, and in this instance the checking that caught the errors was done by outside academics rather than by the department or the firm.

Which firms the records name

Records held against each firm. Each firm's names are combined: PwC covers records filed as PricewaterhouseCoopers and as PwC, and Ernst & Young covers EY Australia. Hover a box for what the firm is and what its count is made of. The records themselves span every Australian jurisdiction: national registers and New South Wales supply the largest shares, with Victoria and Western Australia next. Queensland appears in two dedicated sections further down because it publishes two things no other jurisdiction does in comparable form: a searchable gifts register, and ministerial diaries under each minister's own name.

Who in public office is connected to the Big Four

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

The most connected people and bodies in public office, with the organisations they are recorded against. Node colour is the entity type held in the database.

Meetings that are on the record

Released diaries record 263 meetings between these organisations and ministers or their offices, between 2014 and 2026. The same firms hold contracts with the governments whose ministers they are recorded meeting.

A meeting is the least formal of the four activities on this page, and the hardest to read. There is no requirement to record what was said, so a diary gives a date, a portfolio and sometimes a subject line, and nothing else. What makes the count worth keeping is that a meeting is the one channel available to everybody: a firm need not donate, need not register as a lobbyist, and need not hold a contract in order to sit down with a minister. The graph below puts the two non-financial channels side by side, registered lobbying and recorded meetings, so it can be compared with the donations graph further down. The players are not the same in both.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Registered lobbying and recorded ministerial meetings together. These are the two non-financial channels, and they involve a different set of players from the donations graph.

One state, one year: the Queensland diaries

Queensland publishes ministerial diaries under each minister's own name rather than by office, which makes it the most legible jurisdiction in this dataset. Its released diaries record 21 meetings with the four firms during 2025, across ten named ministers including the Premier David Crisafulli, the Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie and the Treasurer David Janetzki. Of those 21, 16 name Ernst & Young.

Not one of those meetings is improper, and a diary entry records only that a meeting happened. What the concentration shows is which firm was in the room during the first year of a new government, and how much of this picture depends on a state choosing to publish diaries by name at all. New South Wales publishes several diaries by office, so its entries read "Premier" or "Treasurer" with no name attached, which is why the worked example above is only possible in Queensland.

Showing the 120 most recent of 263. The full set is in the CSV download.

Gifts and benefits recorded against named officials

Queensland publishes a register of gifts and benefits received by public servants. These are the entries naming one of the four firms. They are a different act from a political donation: a benefit to an individual official, recorded because a register required it. It is the only gifts register this database holds, so this section covers Queensland alone because of what is published, not because gifts and hospitality happen only there.

Advising, gifting and funding at once

The distinctive feature here is not the volume of any single activity but the combination. The same four firms are recorded as advising government, registering to lobby it, meeting its ministers, and donating to the parties that form it. Each of those is ordinary on its own; the registers only show them together once the data is joined.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Declared donations from these organisations to party organisations. Node size is how many records name that entity; an edge is a declared donation, not a dollar total.

What this case study shows

The finding here is not any one activity but the combination. Government buys more advice from these four firms than it has ever bought: Commonwealth consultancy contracts rose from $352 million in 2012 to 13 to $888 million in 2021 to 22, and Australia spends more on consultants per head than any other country, roughly double Canada or Sweden, as the Senate committee on consulting services recorded. Over the same years the same four firms are recorded on the other side of the table: 2,871 declared donation records to the parties that form governments, 263 meetings with ministers or their offices, and registrations across eight state and federal lobbyist registers. Each of those is disclosed somewhere, and each is unremarkable on its own. No single register shows them together, which is what this page is built to do.

Where a state publishes its diaries by name, the picture sharpens. Queensland's released diaries record 21 meetings with the four firms during 2025, the first year of a new government, across ten named ministers including the Premier, the Deputy Premier and the Treasurer, and 16 of the 21 name Ernst & Young. Queensland's gifts register adds 39 declared invitations to lunches, breakfasts and industry events from the same firms to named public servants. Every one of those entries was declared, which is the system working as intended; what the entries make visible is routine, personal contact between firms holding government contracts and the ministers and officials who commission and administer them.

Why it matters is what the PwC affair showed: access is the asset. The leaked Treasury material was valuable not for what it said but for where it came from, inside the policy process before anyone else had it. Management consulting is not a regulated profession, so a consultant cannot be struck off, and consultants to the public service are not bound by its code of conduct; the safeguard is the wording of each contract. That makes the registers collected here close to the only standing record of who met whom and who paid what. Deloitte's $440,000 report, published with references that did not exist and repaid in part after outside academics caught the errors, is a reminder that the advice itself is not automatically worth its price. Whether advising, lobbying, meeting and funding the same governments at once is a problem is a judgement for the reader. What this page settles is that the combination exists, that it is documented, and that every figure links to the register it came from.