Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

In other words, for every employee in the Commonwealth, including military employees, including some who have no particular need to have their own computer, there are over 1½ computers. Indeed, there are some agencies that have more than two computers per employee. I note that the member for North Sydney says, ‘Give them to the schools.’ Now we know why we have to invest in computers for schools. Now we know why the Howard government did not do anything about computers for schools—because they gave them all to the public servants.

The government is putting in place a new framework to deal with these issues. There will be a ministerial committee, as part of the ERC, to deal with overarching government decisions, and business-as-usual spending that was allowed to grow like Topsy under the member for Higgins will be cut by almost $400 million in a full year, and half of that will be returned in investment in new projects to upgrade IT systems and to enable the legacy systems, the mess that we have inherited, to be improved. A whole-of-government data centre strategy will be developed. There will be a reduction in the proportion of expensive contractors being used in place of full-time employees at, in some cases, double the cost, and there will be a whole-of-government IT sustainability strategy developed.

I am delighted to be able to indicate, as I announced this week, that the government has adopted all of Sir Peter Gershon’s recommendations and will be implementing the report in full. We will continue to work hard to have every possible efficiency to eliminate all the waste that we can from the budget we inherited from our predecessors, because the Liberal Party were asleep at the wheel. We are committed to maximising value for money for the Australian taxpayer. For those on the opposition benches who have suddenly got very excited about the prospect that the global financial crisis could conceivably push the budget into deficit, I ask this question: given all of the uncosted promises you have made—given all of the uncosted promises about fuel excise, about pensions and about capital gains tax for small business—where would they leave the budget position if you were in government? The Rudd government are committed to delivering efficiencies and savings and to eliminating the waste and mismanagement that we inherited from the previous government.

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