Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2022-2023, the Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2022-2023 and the Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2022-2023. I want to focus on the digital economy and the approach that this government is taking. First, I want to touch first on why the digital economy is so important and on the lack of a clear policy framework from this government. Second, I want to touch on the particular challenge of skilled migration and the role it can play in bringing people with needed high-tech skills into Australia, and the government's mismanagement of that issue. Third, I want to talk about digital government services and, again, the lack of a plan from this government.

I want to start with the proposition that key to our prosperity is technological innovation. The rise of the digital economy over the last 20 years or so has been associated with and a driver of significant increases in prosperity, increases in productivity and increases in efficiency. It is no wonder that governments around the world have a very strong focus on this. We can look at a country like Singapore, which has enacted measures to attract and boost start-up companies. We can look at Israel as a leader in defence, water and communications technology. We could look at Estonia, noted around the world for digital delivery of government services.

It is very important that we recognise there is intense global competition and, when it comes to our digital economy strategy, it is important that Australia plays to its strengths. The former coalition government quite explicitly laid out a digital economy strategy. Our goal was for Australia to be a world-leading digital economy and society by 2030, and elements of that strategy included helping to support small businesses to go digital, to grow the digital workforce, to create homegrown tech start-ups and to build our digital infrastructure. And I am very pleased to say there were quite a number of initiatives being driven pretty hard by the previous government. I would certainly hope, in Australia's national interest, that the present government would show a similar commitment to the digital economy. But, unfortunately, that is not the case.

We know that one of the key success factors in the digital economy is vigorous competition. Technology businesses are disrupting older businesses, be it Wikipedia disrupting Encyclopaedia Britannica, be it digital photography disrupting Kodak, be it streaming video-on-demand services disrupting traditional television. All of that delivers great benefits to consumers, and consumers are voting with their feet. But, if we look at the approach this government wants to take, we've seen efforts by minister for industry to increase union involvement in the technology sector and in start-up businesses. We've seen the minister for industrial relations waging a war against the gig economy, calling it a 'cancer' through the economy. This government has not appointed a minister for the digital economy, unlike the previous government. We can also look at some specific measures. like the budget measure cutting a $3.9 million program established by the coalition to assist more mid-career women to transition into the technology sector workforce. All of these are approaches that are going in the wrong direction. That is particularly troubling because of the importance of the digital economy to increase productivity.

We know Australia's economy has a productivity challenge. In this budget we've seen the government reduce the long-term-productivity growth assumption to 1.2%. A government that was serious about lifting productivity would be driving reforms to grow Australia's digital economy. What did the Productivity Commission find in its recent interim report? The report, titled 5-year productivity inquiry: Australia’s data and digital dividend: interim report, found:

Digital technology and data will continue to shape global economic growth and social change over the coming years.

But, the Productivity Commission warned:

Whether Australia fully realises the productivity dividend arising from these opportunities depends on how effectively governments, businesses and individuals can recognise and safely harness these changes for our own benefit.

Well, unless we see more focus from this government, the opportunity to capture the productivity dividend from the digital economy is at risk of being lost.

Let me turn then, secondly, to a specific issue where we've seen a pretty disappointing approach from this government, which is the question of the role of skilled migration in bringing in key people with critical skills that are needed in the tech sector. It can often be the case that one or two people with key skills, brought in from overseas markets, can then be the linchpin of a team of 50 or 100 people—employed locally, developing software, taking new software to market and project managing all of that. We know that there is a forecast employment shortfall of over 650,000 workers in the tech sector. Much of this, indeed most of it, should be met with workers trained and developed in Australia. But there is a key role for people with those technical skills and experience, and by bringing them in from overseas, we catalyse jobs growth for Australians.

Unfortunately, Australia's visa processing times under this government are lagging behind those of our key competitors. That is a disincentive in attracting talent into Australia. The Tech Council of Australia makes the point that currently there is no clear time frame given by this government for the processing of talent visas. If we compare that to France—which is not normally a country that is cited for efficient government operations—the French, to their credit, have a special tech start-up visa for skilled workers that includes processing within two to five days. In Canada, a visa through the global talent program in tech takes ten days. So we need to do better.

Astoundingly, the government has gone in the wrong direction: it's making things worse. A new ministerial direction, signed by the Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Cyber Security, came into effect just a few days ago, effectively de-prioritising visa processing for cybersecurity and critical tech occupations. That direction removed 27 job roles from the priority migration skilled occupation list, including ICT security specialists and tech workers. The CEO of the Tech Council, Kate Pounder, met with me, and she's met with many other stakeholders and parliamentarians on this issue. The Tech Council had this to say:

It is a surprise … the government has decided it was the opportune time to de-prioritise these skills in our migration system.

The relevant ministers should meet with key business stakeholders like the Tech Council and they should agree to a plan to support Australian companies, including small businesses and start-ups, in accessing critical cyber and software engineering skills in a timely way so that they can access the skills they need—often it can be that one or two people with key skills that you want to bring in from overseas.

By contrast, we have in effect a go-slow on skilled tech visas. That is really not all that surprising when you look at the underlying hostility of the union movement to skilled immigration. We saw that on full display in the lead up to the Jobs and Skills Summit. The Australian Workers Union said that it wanted all new migrants to be automatically signed up to a union on arrival. It also wanted employers to pay a fee of at least $10,000 to hire a migrant. The peak union body, the ACTU, wanted to get rid of employer-sponsored visas. Instead, it wanted sponsorship to be done by an industry-wide body with, of course, union involvement. Inevitably, this would be slower, more bureaucratic and less responsive to business needs. All of these ideas would be a disaster when it comes to meeting the huge need in Australia's rapidly growing tech sector for people with key skills. Bringing in from overseas people with key skills—likely in relatively small numbers—could catalyse the employment of very large numbers of people locally, because when you can get one or two key people with critical skills—in a major project to implement a new software system, for example—it can allow the rest of the team to be built around that key person or those key people. So this government's approach to immigration to support the needs of the technology sector is very, very disappointing.

The third area I will touch on is the use of digital technology to deliver better services to citizens. It is clear that citizens want to interact with the government digitally, just as people are used to dealing with their bank, their insurance company and their airline digitally. Many people prefer that, finding it a smoother and more efficient way to operate.

In the last financial year 1.2 billion online transactions occurred between Australians and the government. That is powerful evidence that Australians find this an efficient and appealing way to deal with government. When the coalition was in government we had a clear focus on improving digital service delivery to citizens. Unfortunately, we see no such clear focus from the present government. One of the first actions of the incoming government was to take the Digital Transformation Agency out of the centre of government, out of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and plunge it into the bowels of the Department of Finance. The government also has an approach of closing the eyes of Services Australia to the latest service trends in digital service delivery from the private sector. Instead, we're going to have a more inward looking and bloated public service that is not up to speed with the best practice of the private sector in the delivery of digital services.

Recently, for example, the Minister for the Public Service spoke to the Institute of Public Administration, but there was no vision for the use of digital channels to serve citizens better. Instead, she talked simply about the need to have more public servants. Of course, that so-called reform is occurring in lockstep with the union movement. Minister Gallagher said the government was talking openly with the Community and Public Sector Union, and no doubt it is, because more public servants means more union delegates. What really stood out was what was missing from Minister Gallagher's speech. There was nothing about digital service delivery. There was no enthusiasm for how technology could be used to give Australians interacting with their government a more efficient, reliable and seamless service experience.

By contrast, when the coalition was in government, we worked hard on these issues. We upgraded the myGov app, we oversaw an expansion of the digital identity system, and we rolled out digital assistants to cut the time that staff had to take to deal with simple customer inquiries. We worked on a fundamental mind-shift within government, focusing on Australians as customers. When governments do this, they can, in turn, help citizens have a much better experience in dealing with government and using digital tools to facilitate that engagement.

Certainly the New South Wales government, also a coalition government, has done an extraordinary job in this regard, and Service NSW is really a benchmark around Australia, and, indeed, globally, for having a customer-service focus within government and using technology to support citizens and the way they interact with government. The New South Wales government has led the way on so many things, such as a digital drivers licence.

The contrast between that kind of thinking and what we saw recently from Minister Gallagher was really quite striking. The words 'customer' and 'digital' appeared just once in the entire speech.

Now, of course, Australians are rightly concerned about the recent severe data breaches involving Optus, Medibank Private and other companies. But, again, there is a tool available to the government, should they choose to use it. An enormous amount of work, done by the previous government, is ready for this government to take up. The development of a digital identity system, which the coalition government commenced in 2015, has stalled significantly under Labor. This is a huge missed opportunity, because this system would enable a customer to use a trusted identity provider, with verification achieved through electronic checks against secure government records, such as those of the Australian Passport Office or the Australian Taxation Office. This in turn would mean that, when you, as a customer, sought to establish your identity, to establish an account with a bank or a telco or another organisation, that organisation would not need to store your data. Instead, your data would be stored with the trusted identity provider, and the computer systems of the two organisations would interact so that a certification would be provided digitally to the organisation you were establishing the account with, to confirm that you were the person you said you were. That would mean that we would not have large numbers of identity documents being stored by a whole range of private sector businesses. So there's huge potential here.

I certainly call on the Albanese Labor government to show much more enthusiasm in this area. Unfortunately, the Minister for Government Services is much more interested in political payback exercises than in using technology to deliver citizens better services. But that is just one of the many ways in which a greater focus on the digital economy would deliver much better outcomes.

See this speech in context