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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 424 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

If you are in a local business you get known in your area. There is competition because there are lots of small local businesses all doing that same sort of work, so there is a real incentive to produce the goods. When you get a couple of big players, a couple of big international, multinational or national players, because they do not have to be so accountable locally because they basically have a monopoly, you will not necessarily get the best service delivery. That has been seen to be the case in several areas.

There is another very serious issue in outsourcing information technology, and that is security of the information. We have not heard very much about that in this debate. It has certainly come up in South Australia, in Hansard. They have discussed the whole question of what is happening there in the area of information technology. Security of information is incredibly important. In this day and age we do not have an Australia Card; but we now have so many links through so many different departments, and now private enterprise, that I think all Australians should be very concerned about the real implications of these sorts of movements out into the private sector. We need to have very strong accountability mechanisms if this is not going to be of concern.

Another concern about this, that has come to me from various people working within the government service, is that certain areas have particular or special needs in their information technology and they have a special expertise in their area. There is a concern that, if you bring in people from one large company from outside, once again there are going to be real costs because you could not possibly expect this one company to have necessarily the flexibility to deal with all these individual needs. This is not to say that we should not outsource at all; but, once again, in support of small business, we need to understand that they would have, through the diversity of the service, something very important to offer.

The question of jobs has been raised already. There is disagreement about how many jobs would be lost and what the impact of that would be. This is also coming out in discussions in other areas as well about cost shifting and what social costs of this need to be considered. I think it is something that we are going to have a lot more discussion about because it is not going to go away. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have outsourcing, but it is a bad thing if we are going to have very serious consequences as a result of the fact that no-one was prepared to look ahead before we committed ourselves to these sorts of contracts. We have to have open contracts. We have to be very wary of how much commercial-in-confidence is used as a method of stopping the public having a look. As Mr Moore mentioned, we apparently cannot even see this initial report on the whole topic, and that does not stand as a good beginning to this discussion. We need to have very accountable systems and we need to be able to monitor.

I noticed that in South Australia they are entering into a nine-year contract. There was really nothing in place between the first year and the ninth year to see what was going on. All these sorts of issues need to be looked at very carefully. For that reason, I would hope that there is a lot more openness in what occurs now, so that all members here and the community can have an input and so that we do not end up in 10 years' time saying, "Oops, we did not think of that".

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