Australians love a pie. We eat them at the football, at service stations and, in moments of poor judgment, one-handed while driving. So, if Canberra is going to create one more department – and God knows it rarely needs encouragement – let it at least be one every Australian can remember: the Department of Public Integrity and Efficiency. PIE.

PIE is my proposal for a powerful oversight department within the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio. Answerable to the Prime Minister and Cabinet but legally required to report publicly to Parliament, it would be staffed largely by outsiders and have real-time access to departmental budgets, contracts, staffing structures and performance data.

I first proposed it in What Happened to the Lucky Country?, where I argued that corruption is not always a man in a car park carrying an envelope. Sometimes it is something deeper: a system in which nobody owns failure, nobody pays for it and every disaster becomes the case for another round of funding.

Anyone who doubts that description should watch Senate estimates. Personally, I find the ritual physically sickening: a Minister or departmental secretary either doesn’t know the answer, isn’t across the brief, or knows precisely what went wrong and has no intention of saying so. A Senator presses, the witness prevaricates, the footage circulates on social media – and the only sanction is that it goes viral. Australians know that if they made a comparable mess at work, they could lose their jobs. Yet officials on near-million-dollar packages can smirk, take questions on notice and return to their offices while the same political class lectures households about tightening their belts. That is not accountability. It is accountability theatre. I, for one, have had enough of it. Judging by the comments online, so have plenty of Australians.

PIE’s purpose would be prevention: identifying waste, unnecessary delay, conflicts, and procurement failures before they hardened into scandal, pausing spending on projects that had gone badly off course, and referring suspected corruption to the National Anti-Corruption Commission or police. It wouldn’t arrive after the money disappeared to explain what went wrong. It would watch the meter while it was still running.

The case for PIE is no longer theoretical. Canberra keeps making it for us, one budget blowout at a time.

Take the Bureau of Meteorology’s new website. Australians first heard a figure of $4.1 million attached to its design. Then we learnt that the website and supporting systems had cost about $96 million. The Bureau says that included rebuilding security and technology after a cyber intrusion. Fair enough. A national weather service is more complicated than putting a few rain clouds on an iPhone.

But for $96 million, the website shouldn’t merely forecast a change in the weather. It should be able to negotiate one.

Snowy 2.0 offers the same lesson on a grander scale. Its estimated cost went from $6.1 billion to $12 billion. By March, $11.1 billion had been spent, yet the Auditor-General found Snowy Hydro still lacked a robust understanding of the forecast cost to complete it. At the other end, the Health Department spent $8.74 million on its Future Fit program for Meals on Wheels. The Auditor-General found the program ineffective, its objectives unachieved, and its procurement short of ethical standards.

These cases may not involve any actual corruption or criminality. That is precisely the point. The NACC should not investigate every badly managed contract or idiotic project. But somewhere along the way, ‘not technically corrupt’ became Canberra’s principal performance benchmark.

The latest ABS figures show 2.657 million public-sector employee jobs and an annual cash wage bill of $266.1 billion. That includes nurses, teachers, police and many other essential workers. Still, the federal Australian Public Service grew from 153,571 employees in June 2021 to 198,529 in June 2025 – nearly 29 per cent. Most departmental secretaries are now assigned remuneration of between $828,550 and $983,910 a year.

Good people should be paid well. What is absurd is pretending that a near-million-dollar package should come with no near-million-dollar accountability when things go wrong.

Mike Newman, a former NSW senior trade and investment commissioner and now One Nation’s NSW leader, made the broader point to John Anderson on his podcast earlier this year: the public service can become bloated, inward-looking, and detached from the households and businesses it exists to serve. PIE should be led by someone of Newman’s type – commercially literate, familiar with government but not shaped by a lifetime inside it, and acquainted with the private-sector custom of being expected to deliver something.

Donald Trump was right about the disease and, as usual, predictably Trumpian about the cure. His Department of Government Efficiency arrived with Elon Musk, a chainsaw and savings estimates with the structural integrity of wet Weet-Bix. The US Government Accountability Office later found some claimed savings were wrong or unsupported, including a $1.7 billion saving on a contract that was never reduced or terminated.

Australia should steal the instinct and reject the circus.

We already have an alphabet soup of accountability. The NACC investigates serious or systemic corruption. The Australian National Audit Office audits programs, but departments are not compelled to implement its recommendations. The Commonwealth Ombudsman can recommend action but cannot force compliance. Finance runs Gateway reviews of major projects, yet these are designed as confidential, non-attributed ‘self-help’ for the responsible agency.

Each performs a useful role. None is charged with continuously entering departments, examining what they are doing and stopping failure before the money disappears. Everyone can diagnose the corpse. Nobody owns keeping the patient alive.

To prevent PIE becoming part of the problem, its staffing should be capped and its senior ranks drawn primarily from outsiders: forensic accountants, project engineers, procurement specialists, turnaround managers, software architects, and people who have run businesses where running out of money is regarded as a problem rather than a request for a supplementary appropriation.

It would take over and harden the Gateway process. A red rating would pause spending. Cabinet could proceed – elected governments must retain the final say – but only after publishing its reasons. PIE would measure delay as seriously as cost. Major projects would have to justify their timetables against comparable private-sector work, because taking five years to do what could reasonably be delivered in two is another form of waste. A quarterly dashboard would show every major project’s original budget, current cost, original deadline, revised completion date, responsible executive and promised benefit.

Artificial intelligence should be central to its work. It could compare contract rates, detect duplicate payments, identify unusual variations and expose repetitive work ripe for automation. Canberra showed enormous enthusiasm for algorithms when chasing welfare recipients. It might try the same enthusiasm when checking its own invoices.

The obvious objection is that creating a department to reduce bureaucracy sounds like hiring another mouse to supervise the cheese. So, PIE must practise what it preaches. Its savings should be independently verified by the Auditor-General, its performance reviewed every three years, and its legislation contain a sunset clause. If PIE becomes bloated and useless, the first department it closes should be itself.

This is not about sacking nurses, teachers, or police. Nor is it about importing Musk’s chainsaw. It’s about restoring consequence to government: protecting public servants who raise concerns, holding senior executives accountable for results and forcing ministers to put their names to decisions that ignore warnings.

For years, Canberra has gorged itself at the taxpayer’s expense. It’s time we served it a slice of PIE.