TONY EASTLEY: The Federal Government's Razor Gang, which has already promised to inflict pain come budget time, is now looking at a second wave of big cuts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, says Government procurement of goods and services got out of hand under the Coalition Government. Mr Tanner says the result was a litany of disasters, and inefficiencies, and he plans a much more centralised approach.
The Finance Minister, who heads Labor's Razor Gang, spoke to Alexandra Kirk.
LINDSAY TANNER: The former Liberal Government ran an ultra-decentralised model of organisation in the Commonwealth Government, so individual agencies pretty much were left up to their own devices, to do whatever they liked. What that meant in information technology in particular was $6 billion a year spent in a very haphazard and fragmented way, a lot of inefficiency, the Government not mobilising its buying power, as a buyer, and in many cases agencies not really handling things very well.
We've had a litany of disasters, people will remember the customs fiasco of a couple of years ago, we're dealing with major problems with the Immigration Department's IT arrangements at the moment, we had projects in Defence and Family Community Services, four or five years ago that had to be abandoned, with $60 million, or $65 million out the door in both cases.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: So how much in your view did the decentralised model, actually cost the taxpayer?
LINDSAY TANNER: Look, it's impossible to estimate, but I would certainly hope that in net terms, we can get very substantial savings, and that over time, they'll end up being in the hundreds of millions a year, not the tens of million a year ...
ALEXANDRA KIRK: Possibly billions?
LINDSAY TANNER: It's conceivable, but I certainly wouldn't want to assert that, because to be honest, the answer is we just don't know what's possible. Change in this area can only happen slowly, we're not going to suddenly go away and scrap a whole heap of existing IT systems, and put in a whole lot of others, that clearly would be ridiculous and incredibly expensive, so it's only from time to time that you get these things emerging in individual departments, so there's an enormous amount of work to be done.
We've just got to get the model right, so that we get some of these disasters completely out of the system, and ensuring that we've got a pool of serious top level expertise within Government, that all agencies are able to use, so they can get it right.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: But in some cases some individual departments have five or six different types of IT systems, does that have to end?
LINDSAY TANNER: Clearly there is a major problem. We've got 164 different IT systems across the Commonwealth for processing individual grant applications, that's ridiculous, we've got 800-odd websites, we've got eight different secure networks for all the kind of national security and defence and policing arrangements.
The list of inefficiency and fragmentation just goes on and on and on, and every time somebody wants to do something fractionally different from the agency down the road, instead of being able to use the same system, and cut the costs, they have their own system. That's crazy, so we reckon we can get a lot of efficiencies, a lot of savings, over time, which could be a number of years, by having a much more centrally coordinated process.
TONY EASTLEY: The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, with our reporter, Alexandra Kirk.| Media Contact: | Website: |
|---|---|
| Nardia Dazkiw - 0418 144 690 | www.financeminister.gov.au |
