Public Relations folks! Be excited! The World is our Office

ASIC chair Sarah Court told Senate estimates on 5 June 2026 that ASIC had commenced a formal investigation into KPMG, and Reuters reported that ASIC said it had moved from a preliminary probe to a formal investigation earlier that week

A whistleblower alleged partners misused confidential Lendlease board papers. The papers, it was claimed, helped KPMG secure audit work with Westpac and Dexus.

Finance officials later told parliament they had to chase KPMG multiple times for information the firm should have volunteered.

That detail matters more than the apology that followed. It describes an organisation that let its golden hour pass, in what appeared to be a deliberate cover-up. It then spent months trying to buy it back.

For decades, organisations could contain a misstep within a market, a jurisdiction, or a single newsroom relationship. That containment barely exists anymore. Deloitte operates across more than 150 countries. An error inside its Australian arm instantly became a story about Deloitte everywhere Deloitte does business. A Canberra contract turned into evidence in a worldwide conversation about whether professional firms can be trusted to check their own AI generated work.

This is not a uniquely Australian problem, though it is an urgent one for Australian leaders. Local firms increasingly serve offshore investors, list on international exchanges, or supply multinational customers. When something goes wrong here, it rarely stays here. However, most crisis planning still assumes a local audience, a local media cycle, and a local regulator. That assumption has become the biggest blind spot in Australian reputation management, and it is exactly the gap our issues management work is designed to close.

We have argued before that trust now equals truth, transparency and traceability. The Deloitte case is traceability in its rawest form. An academic could check the citations because the citations were checkable, and AI made the original error easy to produce while making the correction impossible to hide.

That cuts both ways for any leader relying on a crisis communications consultant in a crisis PR agency Australia relationship. If your organisation is accurate, traceability protects you. If it is not, traceability finds you out, often somewhere you never expected to be answering questions. The practical implication is simple. Assume every document, statement, and AI assisted output will be checked by someone outside your organisation, and quite possibly outside your country.

Three shifts matter here, and none of them are optional anymore.

First, treat every public document as a global document. If it can be found, it will be found, whether by a journalist, a regulator, or an academic on the other side of the world. Draft accordingly, and assume the audience is wider than the addressee.

Second, build verification into the process itself, not just into the response afterwards. Corporate affairs, not marketing, will lead organisations by 2030, largely because corporate affairs is the function built to manage exactly this kind of borderless scrutiny. Marketing sells a message. Corporate affairs protects the organisation that stands behind it.

Third, prepare before the story breaks, not after it does. Clients already working with senior counsel have monitoring in place, tested protocols ready, and access to experienced practitioners before an issue escalates. The gap between an emerging problem and a global headline is now measured in hours, not weeks. Organisations that invest here face fewer crises, and recover faster from the ones they cannot avoid.

None of this means Australian organisations should be more cautious about publishing, or more fearful of AI. It means reputation management consultant Australia work has quietly become a global discipline, whether or not the client operates offshore. The firms that understand this build their trust framework for a worldwide audience from the outset. The firms that do not tend to discover the difference the hard way, in headlines they never planned for.

If in doubt about who might be reading your next report, assume everyone is.