Consultants, contracts and costs
During 2005-06, we entered into 119 new consultancy contracts, involving total actual expenditure of $11 million. In total, 199 ongoing consultancy contracts were active during 2005-06 involving total actual expenditure of $61 million.
A full list of consultancies let during 2005-06 can be found at Appendix 12 to this Annual Report.
Consultancy costs have risen compared to 2004-05, as shown in Table 79. Table 80 shows the nature of the consultancy contracts for 2005-06.
Table 79: Consultancy costs for 2003-04, 2004-05, and 2005-06
| Year | Total consultancy costs |
| 2003-04 | $47.93 million |
| 2004-05 | $48.26 million |
| 2005-06 | $60.62 million |
Table 80: Consultancy expenditure and number of consultants for 2005-06
| Purpose | Total consultancy costs paid during the 2005-06 financial year (irrespective of when the contract was let) | Total number of consultants for 2005-06 |
| Involves specialist professional knowledge and/or expertise that may not be maintained in-house | $12 437 340 | 106 |
| Involves development of an intellectual output – eg research, evaluation, advice, and recommendations – to assist with agency decision making | $47 300 093 | 83 |
| Involves a one-off task, a set of tasks, or irregular tasks (making employment of permanent staff impractical or undesirable) | $882 056 | 10 |
| Total | $60 619 489 | 199 |