An auditor has claimed the Western Australian government did not consider the public interest or value for money when spending $600m on rapid antigen tests during the pandemic.
The Western Australian government failed to sufficiently consider how many rapid antigen tests it needed to procure during the Covid pandemic, according to Auditor General Caroline Spencer.
The state ended up purchasing nearly 111m rapid antigen tests (RATs) for a population of just 2.7m to fight an anticipated wave of Covid cases that never materialised.
The costs of the tests amounted to nearly A$600m – the price of two hospitals.
She said she had never witnessed such an escalation of costs and that the state should have considered the impacts.
It was vital that the right lessons were learned from this period, she noted.
“While it is accepted that being in a pandemic environment creates uncertainty and pressure on government to ensure they are providing what is required, there needs to be a point where we take a step back and assess if the ongoing decisions being made are sound, in the public interest and represent value for money.”
She questioned whether the decision to purchase such a large number of tests was “indeed necessary in the circumstances”.
While admitting that a global shortage of tests created a “panicked environment for procurement” she criticised the lack of methodology behind deciding what was considered enough tests.
“Therefore, the situation now is that the state has arguably purchased too many tests, at great public cost,” Spencer said.
When responding to an emergency, it is important to strike a balance between taking decisions quickly and “adequate consideration of the costs and benefits, risks and opportunities, and across multiple timeframes and policy objectives”, she pointed out.
“Every public dollar spent is money that could alternately be allocated elsewhere in servicing the community or public debt obligations,” she added.
Spencer said the Western Austrlian government should have given more consideration towards determining a realistic number of tests to buy based on the current environment in the RAT procurement.
It should, for example, have looked at usage of tests in communities that had been living with the virus circulating. “For ongoing purchases, reversion to standard procurement processes should have occurred at the earliest opportunity,” she added.