David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Digital transformation is such an important issue for government. The reality is that, for too long now, the public sector has been way behind the private sector in adopting digital technologies and in making the most of those technologies for consumers. This government is very committed to addressing this challenge head-on and really transforming Australia's infrastructure in the digital space in government.

It is particularly important that the government is looking very closely at the issue of platforms and creating platforms that are scalable, that can be used by multiple agencies, so that we do not have a situation where we have these silos in every department that are very much standalone, that do not talk to each other and that cost millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars and are sometimes far from best practice. So creating these scalable platforms is particularly important.

I also want to note that, in the context of digital transformation, it has been very important that the government has recently announced that it will be requiring the Australian banking and financial services sector to open up access to consumer data. This is something that came out of our recent House of Representatives inquiry into the banking sector. Effectively, digital technology enables a situation where there is all of this consumer data—which, at the end of the day, is your data, as the customer; it is data about your transactions and so on. At the moment it is sitting behind proprietary walls of the banks. What that means is that that asset is not being used by the consumer. It is not available to potential competitors of the banks. As a consequence, we have this latent asset which is not being exploited as it should be.

What the government said is: 'By the end of this year, a detailed road map will be published which will require the banking sector to open up access to that data at the request of consumers.' That is going to be a very big deal. It is going to seed a whole range of new opportunities in the financial services sector. It is going to encourage new start-ups in the financial services sector. Most importantly, it is going to increase competition. So that is another example of this government's forward-leaning disposition when it comes to things digital.

We saw something similar in the reforms the government put in place in relation to investments in start-ups, many of which, these days, are digital in nature. The government's initiatives to significantly reduce the tax burden on investors in start-up companies have already paid huge dividends. We saw the total amount of venture capital in Australia between 2013 and 2016 more than triple. So it is very important to continue to focus on these digital initiatives.

The platform funding that is outlined in this bill, Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018, is particularly important: $33.6 million over three years for the work of the DTA in the platform area. This is going to enable the agencies to learn, to test and to have shared platforms that will enable greater collaboration across the government sector, because the last thing we want is government agencies being islands unto themselves, each focusing on their own little environment. We want the best practice in technology to be adopted across government, and it may be that one department has a particularly smart way of doing something in the digital space and that that should be adopted across government. That is precisely what this program will identify. The 'Tell us Once' beta will also deliver on the government's election commitment to make it so much easier for people to update their details online, because it is very frustrating when you have to say the same thing over and over again. This is an important initiative in the appropriations bill.

I do have a question for the minister, and that is: can the minister please outline how the government's funding of core digital and data programs will increase the effectiveness of our projects, deliver better services and drive efficiencies in how government does its business?

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