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

I'm pleased to rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2024-2025 to make some observations about the impact of the Albanese Labor government's third budget, which was brought down recently. This budget was a missed opportunity that failed to address the multiplicity of challenges facing Australian households, families and businesses. Whether it's the poor design and strategy underpinning this budget which is a missed opportunity to address the inflationary pressures that continue to surge in the Australian economy, whether it's not providing sufficient support to address the cost of living, or whether it's risking billions of dollars of taxpayers money on subsidising businesses chosen by politicians and bureaucrats, on every front, this budget raises very serious questions.

An aspect of the budget that I want to focus on in my remarks today is its impact in the government services portfolio and in the science portfolio. Both government services and science are very important areas of endeavour. The government services portfolio is all about supporting Australians who need the assistance of government in a range of ways. The science portfolio in many ways is not about this year, next year or the next five or 10 years; it's about the next 50 or 100 years. Activity occurring as a result of scientific research can deliver and repeatedly does deliver fundamental benefits to humanity. That's why every government funds and supports scientific research, and the Australian government is no different. However, I'm sorry to say that in the areas of both government services and science this budget has been a considerable disappointment, and I want to delve into some of the ways in which it has been a disappointment.

Let's start with government services. I want to draw a sharp contrast between the philosophy underpinning the management of government services, if it can be dignified with the term 'management', under the present Minister for Government Services, the member for Maribyrnong—the tension between the approach he's chosen—and the demonstrated historical behaviour of Australians to adopt technology enthusiastically and early in the growth of particular technologies. Consider the way that consumers in Australia have embraced the digital offerings of banks, telcos, supermarkets and airlines. As customers, Australians have demonstrated with their behaviour that they consider the digital option to be a fast and convenient one and one that can sometimes save you money.

Australians bring similar preferences into their dealings with government. Around 90 per cent of Services Australia's customers choose to interact with the agency via digital means. Yet, curiously, in this budget we've seen an approach that, rather than bolstering the digital capability of Services Australia, instead takes away digital capability and re-weights capability towards person-to-person interactions. In many ways the Albanese government is taking Services Australia back in time by adding more Canberra based bureaucrats while allowing the digital capabilities of Services Australia to languish. Over three years, Labor will spend more than $1.8 billion on more than 7,500 additional Public Service positions.

The justification for this is that there is a need to address a backlog in claims. Of course, that backlog in claims, which has exploded over the last two years, reflects the grossly incompetent management by the Minister for Government services. Let's look at the facts. Based on the most recent published numbers, at December last year, Services Australia takes 82½ days to process a claim for a low-income card. Under the coalition, by contrast, it was 16 days. If you call Services Australia while it's under the care of the member for Maribyrnong, you need to be patient. For example, if you call the Disability, Sickness and Carers line, whereas under the coalition you needed to wait for 21 minutes—too long, it must be admitted, but that was the time under the coalition—now you will wait more than 48 minutes when you call this Services Australia telephone line.

The premise of the changes made in this budget is that, after Mr Shorten created this catastrophic decline in service levels, the way to fix it is to put on more staff. But actually, if you look at the numbers, it's very clear that there is no correlation between staff numbers and service levels. The evidence of that is that under the coalition in 2021-22 the average staffing level at Services Australia was 26,838. In February 2024 that level was 28,570. So, staffing levels have gone up from 26,838 under the coalition to 28,570 under Labor while service levels have gone down. Far from a positive correlation between extra staff and better service levels under the member for Maribyrnong, as Minister for Government Services, we've seen the extraordinarily perverse outcome that staff levels have gone up and service levels have gone down. Yet Mr Shorten's only solution to this catastrophic cratering in service levels is to put in more people.

Who has said that they are pleased with this decision? You won't be surprised to hear that it's the Community and Public Sector Union. They are a big winner out of this. More public servants means more union members. It's all too typical of the Albanese Labor government to put the interests of the union mates ahead of the interests of the Australians that Services Australia is there to serve.

A major contributor to the dismal and worsening performance of Services Australia has been the antipathy of the Albanese Labor government towards the use of technology. The minister, the member for Maribyrnong, has the wrong priorities and has made a series of bad decisions. The digital capability of Services Australia has been left to stagnate, and the recent budget continues that stagnation. Over the forward estimates, funding for Services Australia's technology and transformation program will decline. They're cutting money from technology and transformation. Automation processes for key Centrelink payments have been turned off. The guts have been ripped out of the agency's digital program suite. More than a thousand specialist ICT—information and communications technology—workers have been let go, and an axed contract with specialist outsourcing firm Serco has reduced the telephony capacity of Services Australia. These are the decisions that underpin the catastrophic reduction in service levels that I've spoken about.

Labor has announced some spending for myGov, but that spending is doing nothing more than keeping this vital platform on life support. The myGov user audit—commissioned, as it happens, by the incoming government—recommended that there be a road map for the future of myGov. There has been no road map released, and it's unclear when new features of myGov will come online. This is, sadly, very consistent with the record and the form of the member for Maribyrnong. He's got form in promising big and delivering little when it comes to myGov. In February 2023, he promised that the Commonwealth's digital Medicare card would be available within the Service NSW app by mid-2023. Here we are in May 2024, and New South Wales residents are still waiting for this feature to show up. The efficient, simple, safe delivery of government payments and services depends critically on the effectiveness of the underlying technology platforms. The failure to transform and uplift Services Australia's core ICT systems by this current Labor government risks turning the current myGov platform into an empty shell.

This budget was, equally, a missed opportunity for Australia's very impressive—indeed, world-renowned—scientific and research sectors. Technology and innovation are absolutely key to our economic performance and to our future, and scientific research underpins technology and innovation. We have seen in this budget a boost in funding for bureaucrats in Canberra and for American technology firms at the expense of basic scientific research activity. The Albanese Labor government proudly trumpeted the decision to invest almost a billion dollars of taxpayers' money to an American quantum computing company, with no similar funding in the budget for the many promising Australian based quantum computing companies. Labor's science funding priorities are bizarre. The government is cutting resources from Australian science while spraying around hundreds of millions to enrich American venture capital businesses which are investors in the American company, PsiQuantum.

The deal between the Australian and Queensland governments and PsiQuantum has been cloaked in secrecy, but we do know that there's a further $27.7 million allocated for bureaucrats in Canberra to oversee it. There's no question that quantum computing has enormous potential, but it also presents daunting scientific and technical challenges in getting to the point where there's a robust, proven, commercially viable quantum computer in existence that is able to do a better and more cost-effective job than existing supercomputer technology of deploying large amounts of computing power to very quickly solve very big problems. Yet, despite this uncertainty which is acknowledged by all in the field, the Albanese Labor government has chosen to bet a very large amount of money on one particular company pursuing one particular technology path, and it must be said that there are many potential parts in quantum computing being investigated by a whole range of companies and researchers in Australia and around the world.

The Albanese Labor government has made this investment at a stage when, on any view, it will be at least several years and very possibly longer before the technology being developed by PsiQuantum is proven to work, and the decision to make this investment follows a highly questionable process which has failed to meet normal standards of transparency and contestability. Australians deserve to know why this deal was cloaked in secrecy, why there was no public, transparent expression of interest process to call for applications, why only a small number of companies were invited to participate and were all required to sign non-disclosure agreements, and why the terms of the process made it look, according to many who participated, as if it had been written so that PsiQuantum was going to be the winner. It would be particularly concerning if this decision by the Albanese Labor government to invest so much money in a foreign quantum computing company ends up making it more difficult for Australian based quantum companies to compete for global investment because of a perception which will arise on the part of investors that their own government does not believe in these Australian based quantum computing companies.

All this is happening while, at the same time, we've seen funding cut in a range of other areas of the science budget. Labor has axed funding in the space sector by terminating the $1.2 billion National Space Mission for Earth Observation, which had been scheduled to launch four satellites between 2028 and 2033. CSIRO is having its staffing cut, and CSIRO is having its funding cut in 2024-25 by $14 million. The fact is that there's little good news for science in this budget and, where there has been significant funding allocated, it has been allocated in a highly questionable decision to make a single big bet on one untested and unproven technology. There has also been extensive criticism of a lack of attention to the importance of artificial intelligence in this budget.

This budget has been a disappointment on many fronts. It is certainly a disappointment when it comes to both government services and science.

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