Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to turn the attention of the House to the growing concern becoming evident within the digital economy sector at the indifference of the coalition government. Time and again we see evidence of either a lack of care, a lack of effort or outright belligerence from this government. It is not, to be completely frank, being spearheaded by the Minister for Communications or his parliamentary secretary. They are quite aware of and sympathetic to the issues facing the sector but what is becoming clear to people within the sector is that these two individuals are not calling the shots. The whip is being well and truly cracked by the Prime Minister's office and they are cracking it in the face of the sector. The sector does not like it and now they are starting to speak out. On 29 September in the Sydney Morning Herald in an article written by Sylvia Pennington titled 'Federal government accused of neglecting the digital agenda', the Australian Information Industry Association had basically matched up action against a claim in coalition policy and their CEO said:

The government had failed to appoint an ICT advisory board, progress its plans to offer most government services online by 2017, produce a dashboard for government ICT performance and investment, improve the transparency of its technology spend or provide an update on teleworking targets.

In fact, the CEO of that organisation said:

It's a year of nothing that is transparent and obvious to us to.

That is from the sector. Then you go on to cloud computing and what the government is doing or not doing in that space. OzHub, which represents the cloud computing sector in this country, said:

Basically we've been in the starters' hands in the race for the take-up of cloud computing for too long.

On 8 October, their chair Matt Healy said:

The updated Information Security Management Guidelines released today by the Attorney-General—

not the Minister for Communications—

may not promote cloud adoption.

The United Kingdom has a goal of shifting half its new government IT spending to cloud based services by 2015, yet in Australia only a tiny proportion of the federal government's annual ICT budget of nearly $6 billion has been spent on cloud projects. So you see data retention proposals being put forward by the Attorney-General, another person who is now championing copyright reform, again the Attorney-General, not the Minister for Communications, and in terms of data retention the government wants to turn the telcos in this country into a massive external hard drive and make them pay for it.

On industry policy, which is supposed to support innovation it actually ignores the innovators. It does not even target the technology sector. The only thing they did is that they finally got around to addressing the employee share ownership program. We had kicked off the review in government to start that process of change. They talked for ages about doing it but did not do anything in the budget. Finally they got around to it.

But then you look at for example, the crowd source equity funding issue—and this issue is something that we again in our national digital economy strategy said we needed to get moving on. We authorised CAMAC, the Corporations and Market Advisory Council to look at this issue and to start putting in the rules. We had a report that was handed up to the government in May to legalise, to allow for start-ups to get access to capital through crowd sourced funding.

I have met with organisations, start-ups, who are moving to New Zealand because they do not have the regulatory framework to allow them to raise that capital. These start-up entrepreneurs are innovators. They are creators of economic wealth. They are not criminals. They should not be exiles; and yet we have a government that is dragging its feet on putting in a regulatory framework on crowd sourced funding for this sector

What they have done is they have flicked it to Treasury. You can imagine what Treasury is going to do. They will slow it right down, be as conservative as they can, and we are going to be waiting for ages to see something happening on crowd sourced funding.

The sector is actually calling for a statement from this government saying: 'Tell us where we are at in terms of fixing up the regulatory framework on crowd sourced funding. Stop talking, stop giving us promises, and stop giving us the words that we are in the innovation statement—we only had one paragraph and total inaction.' This government says it is pro small business It says it is pro entrepreneur; yet its actions continue to fail to live up to expectation and our small businesses, our entrepreneurs and our digital economy are the worse for it.