The woman who oversees much of the running of Parliament House, Carol Mills, declared "I am not a martyr" as a catalogue of failures leading to millions of dollars in mismanaged contracts in her department were scrutinised on Monday night.
Ms Mills, secretary of the chaotic Department of Parliamentary Services, told the finance and public administration committee that many of her organisation's problems were legacy issues and that progress had been achieved at the expense of some sacrifices made by staff in the face of budgetary constraints.
The committee grilled Ms Mills following the Australian National Audit Office's finding that DPS had poorly managed $62.8 million of contracts.
Committee chairman and Liberal senator Cory Bernardi said "I don't buy the whole martyr regime, that you've somehow been hard done by" to which she responded "I'm not a martyr, I'm not suggesting there isn't more to be done".
The audit found paperwork had been lost or never existed, contractors had been overpaid and underpaid and most of the time were not paid on time and the department did not have business cases containing value for money arguments for most contracts.
ANAO said the department struggled to answer questions and provide documents during the audit. Auditor-General Ian McPhee said reforms at DPS had been slow since similar findings were made in a 2012 report by a parliamentary committee.
Independent senator Nick Xenophon called the audit's findings damning, Labor senator Kate Lundy said ANAO had exposed negligence and Greens senator Lee Rhiannon said she was trying to comprehend "the enormity of what we have before us".
The Zahalka contract
Monday's hearing revealed further potential holes in the contracting of a $40,000 photographic display to Ms Mills' Sydney neighbour Anne Zahalka - an artist at the centre of one of the most controversial contracts DPS has dealt with.
Zahalka took photographs of Parliament's workers going about their daily business as part of the building's 25-year celebrations in 2014. DPS maintains she won a limited tender, meaning the department selected Zahalka from a list of contenders which it was allowed to do for all contracts under $80,000.
Department staff could not locate correspondence from the former finance minister's office granting the funds. Other paperwork relating to the tender also cannot be produced. Other questions were raised in the hearing about whether DPS provided all available information for the audit.
The audit report's timeline detailed how the contract was awarded started in January 2013 but made no mention of an informal conversation Ms Mills had previously had with Zahalka.
Ms Mills has given evidence suggesting she told Zahalka about the possible looming contract perhaps as early as December 2012 at an end-of-year street party.
Nor did the report's timeline mention a May 2013 magazine interview with Zahalka in which she said she had been invited to do a commission about the public and private areas of Parliament House.
Ms Mills told the hearing she had no idea why Zahalka made this comment months before the contract was awarded. She has always said her comments to Zahalka at the street party were in-passing, that she promised no contracted work and that she at least verbally declared her acquaintance with Zahalka to public servants choosing the photographer for the contract. Senator Bernardi said the contract "stinks to high heaven".
"You've approached a contractor before you've decided to have one, then the artist announced it before you'd even made a decision and you've lost all the documents," Senator Bernardi said.
"Don't tell me it's a fair limited tender - I don't believe you."
Ms Mills said: "I think in hindsight I would have done it differently but at the time (the decision-making process) was fluid and it didn't seem to be problematic."
House of Commons job
Ms Mills said she applied for the job of UK House of Commons clerk last year - just two years into her job in Canberra - after she had been encouraged by advice from parliament's presiding officers that she would be "foolish not to put my hand up".
The Senate president and House of Representatives speaker are the presiding officers and their staff help run parliament alongside DPS.
Despite dysfunction within DPS which has since prompted heavy criticism from the national government auditor and a parliamentary committee, Ms Mills said the presiding officers at the time were aware of the breadth of changes she was making to the department.
The context
The contract debacles create another scandal heaped on top of a department under fire for allegedly spying on a senator.
There also have been complaints about the low morale of DPS' Hansard workforce, the poor quality of Parliament House's food and the department's decision to slacken its security last year which allowed hundreds of people to walk into the building unscreened just before terrorist chatter ramped up the security threat.
In December the parliamentary privileges committee found Ms Mills misled the senate when giving evidence about when she found out about the use of CCTV to spy on a DPS whistleblower's interactions with Senator John Faulkner.
Last week in a Senate estimates hearing Ms Mills rejected the finding on the basis she had been denied natural justice by the committee which had relied on advice from fellow public servant and senate clerk Rosemary Laing.
There is tension between the two women after Ms Laing wrote to British officials last year to say Ms Mills' appointment in the UK, if it happened, would be bizarre, embarrassing and an affront.
In the same estimates hearing Ms Mills rejected demands from senators to resign.
On Monday night she said she was struck by the entrenched challenges and lack of resources when she arrived in Canberra to head up DPS: " There was no staff with specialist heritage skills in a heritage unit. We had no (senior executives) to manage security. No branch of people doing strategic asset management. Lack of funding for some years meant systems were not upgraded."
In 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 the DPS had a deficit in its operating budget.
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