When a prime minister, or any politician, starts talking about making “bold investments”, taxpayers need to start worrying.
The latest sector to benefit from Labor’s firehose of industry interventionism under the slogan “A Future Made In Australia” is quantum computing, with US company PsiQuantum receiving $940 million from the Albanese and Queensland governments (notice all these “Future Made in Australia” announcements are around $1 billion, obviously the amount agreed to be required to generate an appropriate headline).
Note that we won’t actually get a quantum computer for that money, just access to one if and when it’s built in Brisbane. Maybe that’s what a “Future Made In Australia” will look like — foreign companies paid vast amounts of money to build things here but keep ownership of them. Who knows where the forthcoming quantum computer, should it ever be built, will end up if another country makes a better offer?
PsiQuantum has already secured access to hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial funding (as well as US defence research funding), starting back when it was promising a computer by 2025 (that now seems to have slipped to 2029). Why taxpayers need to join that investment has not been explained. Indeed, very little has been explained by the government, which dropped the story to the press gallery yesterday but waited until Tuesday afternoon for a formal announcement.
That lack of detail is of a piece with the whole project. James Riley and his team at InnovationAus.com have been tracking the PsiQuantum deal — the result of a secret expressions of interest process — since at least last November, while Labor has stymied efforts to secure some transparency around its dealings with the company — and why it passed over local contenders.
What the auditor-general makes of committing $940 million this way will be interesting.
We do know that the Queensland government has been talking to PsiQuantum and federal government representatives since at least August 2022, according to Queensland ministerial meeting diaries — the kind of basic transparency Labor and the Coalition refuse to accept at the federal level — while Queensland premier Steven Miles met with the companies’ representatives in August last year.
The US company is represented in Canberra by some heavy hitters. Last year Brookline Advisory, made up of veteran Labor staffer and former chief of staff to Richard Marles, Lidija Ivanovski — who was a senior staffer in the Bligh government in Queensland — and former Bill Shorten and NT Labor adviser Gerard Richardson, listed PsiQuantum as clients. Earlier this month, the famous, conservative-aligned C|T Group listed them as well. Local quantum computing firms, take note of what is needed to get access to serious funding in the world of Labor’s “Future Made In Australia”.
Instead of detail about how the Californian company was selected, what meetings were held with the firm and its representatives and how taxpayers’ money will be protected, we’ve only been given spin from Albanese about how “it takes great partnerships to build new industries. We need to make bold investments today if we want to see a future made in Australia.” The prime minister even invoked a Boston Consulting Group report — about as rigorous as slogans like “Future Made In Australia” — on how it could all lead to 240,000 extra jobs by 2040. Thank goodness we have so many spare workers.
And while Albanese’s new era of throwing money at manufacturing received a rough reception a couple of weeks ago from economists and sections of the media, this announcement has been given a sleigh ride, with glowing coverage not just from Nine newspapers (including an enthusiastic, cliché-riddled piece from Peter Hartcher, who seems to exist in a permanent, befuddled state of discovering things most people knew about a decade ago) but, sadly, the Financial Review as well, and even The Australian. Is the tide of government cash overwhelming justified scepticism about how it’s being used — not to mention basic requirements for transparency?
