In a bizarre press release yesterday, even by Malcolm Roberts’ own standards, One Nation’s wackiest senator has found a miraculous invention that will solve all our travel rort woes.
How to stop the endless cycle of pollies misusing their expense allowances and being caught over summer and forced to repay them? There is a simple solution, as we suggested yesterday: easily accessible data and more frequent reporting. But the Senator from Queensland yesterday proposed a solution that could best be described as a press release relaying something someone told him at the pub. Roberts wants a “transparency portal”:
“A transparency portal is an inexpensive web-based computer programme that displays all government expenditure on the internet in real time for public view. It has been proven to pay for itself many times over with the expenditure it saves through higher accountability. The portal is used throughout the United States and Europe; now it’s Australia’s turn!”
[Pollie expenses are an easy fix, but don’t hold your breath]
This came after a briefing from Tim Andrews, from the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance. The group has been calling for such websites for years, and it is a laudable goal. Some of the sites listed on ATA’s website would be perfect models for Australia. However, Roberts’ proposal is scant in detail, and seems to conflate government contracts with politicians’ spending:
“Mr Andrews informed me that in the US the portal was used to uncover the fact that in one state government printer-cartridges were being double ordered, and a thrifty member of the public saved the government $500,000USD,” Roberts said.
“Within months of the portal being implemented overseas most governments departments immediately reduced expenditure significantly as they realised they were being watched by millions of people.”
[Taxpayers foot $2 million bill for jetsetting pollies during election campaign]
For a man so keen on empirical evidence, these claims were difficult to back up. There was one vague mention in an IPA piece about toner cartridges but nothing of the sort claimed by Roberts, and in a previous submission to the productivity commission, ATA makes a very different claim about printer cartridges:
“In Texas, the State Comptroller was able to utilise the transparency website to identify $4.8 million in savings directly attributed to the launch of the transparency website, and identified an additional $3.8 million in expected savings. This included $73,000 from combining printer and toner contracts and $250,000 from not printing a duplicate study from another agency.”
There is already a site where people can view government contracts. It’s called Austender. Here is a printer cartridge contract from Defence in November. It could definitely be improved, and a whole-of-government tracking of spending would be one way to improve transparency and accountability. One of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s promises when he came into government as the communications minister was to get the Digital Transformation Agency to have a dashboard for government IT contracts to not only show such detail but also the progress of the projects. Although, as we have reported, given the problems with the agency under its former leader Paul Shetler — now strangely the media’s go-to expert on Centrelink’s issues — perhaps it’s not surprising that there is very scant data on the dashboard so far.
Good on One Nation for giving it a go in the transparency fight (I look forward to them arguing for more transparency around the offshore detention contracts with Immigration), but without any detail in the announcement, Roberts’ mysterious one-size-fits-all “web-based computer programme transparency portal” just sounds like snake oil.
Ugh. “Transparency Portal” ? What a name.
Does Malcolm mean a glass door?
I think it’s named for what’s between his ears.
Well, I hate to burst everyone’s (Malcolm R and Crikey) but anything that allowed for all govt. IT contracts and and IT project progress to be reports in ‘real time’ would be a nightmare to implement. For a start, what ‘such detail’ of IT contracts are to going to report on? The only real time information available would be performance against SLAs and that information will be scattered through all sorts of reporting sources, from COTS service management tools to spreadsheets. Projects have similar problem, the information is readily and uniformly available and may not be need to be kept up-to-date to the extent that real time reporting would be able to make sense of it.
In my view, based on my experience, a real time reporting regime of this type would give rise to a significant administrative effort to provide information into a non-critical system that is really only there for discretionary use, it wood not be part of a formal governance programme. I think that these ideas seem appealing because non-IT trained people have an unrealistic impression of how IT in large organisations is organised. Often it’s not.
My understanding from the article is that Malcolm Roberts wants a website which would be for all government expenditures, which would be doable but of dubious value. How many people would genuinely be interested in (for example) stationery expenditure? And how much staff time/government money would have to be spent on standardising systems across government so that matching fields could be imported daily into the expenditure system? A decade ago, Centrelink’s system was on a mainframe written in a language so archaic they had to import programmers from Brazil to keep it running. So they aren’t all likely to be running an SQL database. Most, maybe. But some of the older systems, probably not.
Malcolm Turnbull wants the live tracking of IT projects. A way to do that would be to create a project tracking system which then collates task completion and outputs it to a website. So it can be done. But it adds an extra layer of administration, and it’s more likely to lead to blowback. “The system is showing we haven’t moved on this project. Why haven’t we moved on this project?” “Because when we tested the system under load it fell over and we have to fix that first.” “Can’t we start putting data into it anyway, to move the project forward?” “No.”
Keep him away from The Brothers Grimm.
The UK has Farrago, the US has the Drumpfster – we have our very own Roberts ‘realsoul’ Malcontent.
I’m surprised that Sen. Roberts would believe data from any source. He’s proven to be sceptical of scientific data. Why would he believe any other data that is collected in a systematic and standardised manner? Roberts is at least consistent at being inconsistent.