The federal government risks making the same old expensive mistakes as it spends nearly $10 billion a year trying to bring the its IT infrastructure up to date, Labor has warned.
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The opposition's digital economy spokesman Ed Husic says there are insufficient safeguards in place to ensure taxpayers will get proper value for money on the spend, which has grown from $6 billion just two years ago.
Mr Husic says the "doubling down" on the IT spend by the government ignores the"debris" of a succession of high profile "stuff-ups" over recent years, including the Census debacle, the Tax office's systems melt-down and the notorious Centrelink "robo-debt" recovery program.
The Labor frontbencher reacted to news, reported by Fairfax on Monday, that the government was spending an extra $3 billion a year on tech projects, with a stark warning.
"Ignoring the digital debris piling up as a result of repeated IT stuff ups, the Turnbull Government has doubled down and added $3 billion to its IT upgrade spend," Mr Husic said.
Minister for Digital Transformation Angus Taylor says the spending is needed to allow the efficient and effective services that citizens expect from government in the digital age.
Mr Taylor, who concedes that mistakes have been made and that improvement is vital, argues the government's approach has changed and the role of the Digital Transformation Agency as a gate-keeper for projects valued at more than $10 million will greatly improve the quality of the public service's IT effort.
The new approach will also see big projects broken up into smaller components to avoid large-scale mishaps and more work outsourced to small, local firms in a shift away from the multi-national tech giants that have dominated the Australian government IT sector for decades.
But Mr Husic is skeptical, accusing the government of not learning from mistakes.
"With the total budget climbing to nearly $10 billion, the Turnbull government has rarely stepped forward to acknowledge its previous mistakes in digital transformation," the Labor spokesman said.
"And it's failed to show the concrete steps taken to improve digital program management.
"Here's an important question for the Turnbull Government: how will you guarantee the extra $3 billion on IT projects will be spent well - and managed well?
"This is not a small issue at a time when the government is ripping billions out of the hands of families through changes to childcare, family tax benefits, health and school funding."
Mr Husic was dismissive of the idea that the DTA's involvement in new tech spending would be a game-changing innovation.
"This is the same agency that admitted in Senate Estimates last month it hadn't been involved in - or helped clean up after - any of Turnbull tech-wrecks that stuffed up the delivery of services to the public," he said.
"The pile up of Turnbull tech-wrecks can't be ignored.
"It includes the Census failure; the Centrelink robo-debt debacle, the unexplained crashing of the ATO website, with massive loss of data and the inability of the government to deliver on a project to trim down its 1500-plus government websites to just one web portal."
