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

I thank the member for Lyons for his question. The opposition seem interested today in debating their economic management record in government. I am delighted to oblige, because, when we took over, we had government spending running at five per cent real growth. We had growth of approximately 35,000 additional public servants within about five or six years and astonishing scandals like $457 million being spent on government advertising within the last 16 months of the Howard government. In addition to this, we inherited a structure of government that was totally, absolutely decentralised, where government departments and agencies were essentially left to their own devices to do whatever they liked in managing their resources and their activities. They were virtually without any overarching scrutiny or coordination from central government. But this government is committed to tackling the inevitable waste and inefficiency that flows from that ultra-decentralised structure and is ready to address these problems. This government has put in place over $5 billion worth of spending cuts, savings in the budget for this year, a major clampdown on abuse of government advertising, new rules with respect to discretionary grants and a process of reforming procurement in order to ensure that aggregated buying, collective buying, can get better value for money for the taxpayer.

But the area that has had some of the most appalling problems has been ICT—information and communications technology—where the government spends somewhere between $5 billion and $6 billion per year. In the past, we have seen problems such as the rollout of the new Customs systems, the integrated cargo system, which we and countless small businesses remember with some degree of horror. We have seen FaHCSIA and the Department of Defence waste $50 million, $60 million, $65 million on projects that were ultimately abandoned, and we have seen a general problem with the lack of coordination of spending and the lack of aggregation of government buying power.

In order to tackle these problems, the government commissioned Sir Peter Gershon, a world-renowned expert, to advise the government on putting in place a new strategy. His findings about the current deficiencies in the way the federal government deals with IT were very interesting, and they were released recently by the government. The first was that there is virtually no across-the-government strategy to deal with purchasing or management of information technology; that there has been minimal scrutiny of business-as-usual spending by agencies and departments; that the purchase of desktop computers and associated elements ranged from $1,500 per desktop to $3,500; that costs per transaction with respect to members of the public from different systems ranged between 10c and $30 per transaction; that costs of human resources systems in various government agencies ranged from $10 per employee to $500 per employee; that, if the current fragmented arrangement with respect to data centres that prevails in the Commonwealth were left in place, this would cost the Commonwealth an additional billion dollars over 15 years more than it should; and that there should be an aggregated arrangement, a coordinated arrangement, with respect to data centres. But, most amazingly of all, the report from Sir Peter Gershon indicated that the ratio of public servants to desktop computers in the Australian government is one to about 1.6.

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