Under Labor, almost $1 billion of taxpayer funds have boosted funding for American investors and the Canberra bureaucracy.
The Albanese Labor Government’s Budget has allocated $466.7 million to American company PsiQuantum, following a deal cloaked in secrecy and lacking in transparency, with a further $27.7 million allocated for Canberra bureaucrats to oversee the controversial deal. This is in addition to the Queensland Labor Government also contributing almost half a billions dollars.
Labor says this spending will deliver 400 jobs. Even if this is true, that works out to $2.35 million per job - this is a very, very expensive subsidy.
If this allocation of taxpayer funding reflects the way Labor’s Future Made in Australia agenda will be rolled out, then we should all be very concerned.
Labor cannot claim they have a plan for a Future Made in Australia yet at the very first opportunity they spend half a billion dollars on a company based in Silicon Valley.
Concerningly, only a small number of companies were invited to participate in the expression of interest process. They were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, and some have indicated that they felt the specifications had been written so that only PsiQuantum could meet them.
There are no guarantees that PsiQuantum’s technology will meet expectations, and even if it does, it will not happen for years. The company itself says that today’s quantum computers remain “many orders of magnitude away from the size of system needed for fault-tolerance”.
There are serious questions to be answered about this use of taxpayer funds.
Alas, Albanese’s Labor Government have no regard for our money and are clearly not in the least bit concerned about the prospect of wasting a further billion dollars.
