Address by The Hon Lindsay Tanner MP
Minister for Finance and Deregulation
Sydney
13 May 2009
Good morning and greetings to CEBIT 09, I am delighted to be able to join you virtually this year, to open the discussion on some very important issues regarding the Australian Government and its role in the ICT sphere. Unfortunately because CEBIT is occurring right at the heart of our budget season I am not able to be present physically but as it is such an important event I’m really gratified to be able to at least make this contribution.
There are two things that have been of great importance in what the Australian Government is currently doing that I just want to mention again after raising these in our discussion at CEBIT last year. The first is the Gershon reforms to the way the government purchases, manages, deals with ICT. We spend between 5 and 6 billion a year on ICT products and services. In the previous arrangements we were doing this in a very inefficient, uncoordinated and di18 May, 2009ut it was leading to longer term problems and making life difficult for suppliers in many areas.
We had Sir Peter Gershon, an efficiency expert, with a lot of experience in tackling these problems in the UK come and do a major report for us and we are now well advanced in implementing many of the aspects of that report. The Government adopted his report virtually completely, with one minor change that the process of reducing our reliance on contractors, rather than in-house employees, will now take place over three years rather than two years. Other than that we have picked up the entire report and are in a process of implementing it.
We are reducing our expenditure on business-as-usual IT, getting greater efficiencies, greater collaboration and investing more in major new projects. We are also underway with the process of developing a whole-of-government data centre strategy, previously our approach to data centres has been extremely fragmented and inefficient and we believe we will save a lot of money and get better outcomes on power usage and rational use of capacity as the result of having a more collaborative across government approach on data centres.
So there is a lot of work happening, it’s very challenging for agencies, for the Government and for suppliers, and a lot of change is occurring but that will be very beneficial for the longer term outcomes for the Australian community. Better services, lower costs than otherwise would have been the case and a more efficient approach to using ICT.
The second area which is an area of some passion on my part, is using web 2.0 technologies to enable us to change the way the government functions and the way that government relates to ordinary citizens and to interest groups that have a major involvement in particular areas of policy. The opportunity is now opening up for the nature of dialogue between the Government and the wider community to be completely transformed.
Previously we have had traditional methods of public meetings and hearings and submissions and one-on-one contact. Of course there are lots of instances of one-on-one contact through email and various other IT-based technologies of course but until now we haven’t been able to have a wider public discussion using ICT, but of course web 2.0 technologies give us that possibility, that opportunity, and I am very keen as are some governments in other parts of the world to try and maximise the value that we deliver through using these technologies. So we have instituted several very important trials for public consultation through web 2.0 platforms and I would just like to mention a couple of them today.
One is a public discussion about policy for the digital economy that is being run by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in collaboration with my department. That is examining all of the options for new regulatory arrangements, new policy ideas for the digital economy and we have had around 1500 online contributions to that discussion.
Second, we have a major public consultation online with Maxine McKew, the Parliamentary Secretary for Childcare Services and myself with respect to the Early Years Learning Framework, the issues of regulation associated with Childcare and ensuring that we have got a greater educational component in our childcare system.
That is also progressing well and it won’t be long before the government and I are engaged in evaluating how these experiments went. We have also got another process where online consultation forms part of a wider process and that is the broader community consultation about the need for human rights legislation or a bill or rights.
So all of these things will merge into an analysis that we will undertake about how effective these mechanisms are, what we have done right, what we have done wrong and what opportunities that arise for governments to have a very different and much richer and more deep collaboration with the community and with sections of the community than has previously been possible.
I am very excited about these possibilities, there are similar big things happening in other countries. We know that Barrack Obama has appointed the first Chief Information Officer in the United States, in order to pursue opportunities for greater use of public information and public consultation and of course we have similar developments in the United Kingdom, some very exciting things being done there which we are endeavouring to learn from as well.
There a great opportunities here, there is great scope for new ideas, there is big challenges because resources are required and because there are questions around who can speak on behalf of the government; who can engage in a continuing process of discussion with a wider group of people on behalf of the government; what leeway do we give to public servants to speak for the government in a discussion about things like childcare regulation? All of these issues area things that we have to address that we have to tackle, and determine just how we should best use these very exciting opportunities for much more substantial engagement with the wider community.
I am not sure where it will end, I am not sure what the shape of the new processes will be but I am very strongly committed to driving change, to driving reform, to making use of these opportunities to deliver better government. If we have continuous dialogue between those who are being regulated for example and regulators, where you have particular section of the community, for example childcare providers and parents with kids at childcare, of which I am one, then there is every prospect that we will get better regulation, better feedback, quicker responses from government, we will get a more robust understanding of the issues than we would be able to get through the traditional means of submissions to enquiries or one-on-one dialogue. This is because not only will people be communicating with the government they will be communicating with each other at the same time. That is the great beauty of these technologies, the great beauty of the opportunities that they open up.
So once again my congratulations and good wishes to everybody involved in CEBIT, it’s a great event. I know that my colleague Senator Conroy attended the CEBIT event in Germany not so long ago. It’s great to see that CEBIT is moving onwards and upwards and I am really proud that the Australia Government has a significant role in the process.
I know that the Australian Government Information Management Office, or AGIMO, which is a significant part of my department, will be contributing to the discussion later on in the event. My best wishes to everybody, have a great CEBIT 09 and I look forward to further engagement with all of those in the ICT sector as we look to make better use of ICT to produce better outcomes for Australians and better government processes and better contributions to making Australia a better country.
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