Here’s where shadow minister for efficiency Price should start

To paraphrase my mum, if Donald Trump jumped off a cliff, would Peter Dutton do it too? The CTRL-C and CTRL-V buttons are working overtime in his office reformatting MAGA policies for local use. But at least in appointing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency, Dutton has stolen an idea worth using. 

“Jacinta will be looking closely at how we can achieve a more efficient use of taxpayers’ money, where possible, at a time when a major cause of homegrown inflation is rapid and unrestrained government spending,” Dutton said on the weekend in his long-awaited reshuffle.

To play such a role effectively, Price will need to become the gatekeeper for all proposals going to shadow cabinet, vetting them to ensure they deliver the most bang for taxpayers’ buck, with a broader remit than shadow finance minister Jane Hume to determine how proposals coming from shadow ministers could be improved. (Indeed, Price’s appointment is a humiliation for Hume, who has been trailing her coat with the right-wing media as the would-be Musk in a Dutton government, but clearly her leader doesn’t think she’s cut out for it.)

Such a task is unlikely to make Price many friends among colleagues, but it will give her something to do given the near-complete absence of Indigenous issues from the political agenda in the past 16 months. What’s more, there are ample opportunities for Price to focus on governmental efficiency, because the Albanese government is replete with wasteful spending, as Dutton says.

Here are eight areas where Price could make a real impact if she is minded to.

Future Made In Australia

According to last year’s budget, the government has committed $22.7 billion over a decade to its manufacturing protectionism project. The flagship PsiQuantum handout ($466 million, matched by the Queensland government) is only the most egregious example of wasteful spending committed without proper analysis. Ditch the lot.

AUKUS

Like Future Made In Australia, AUKUS is rotten industry policy without any rationale, or the workers to achieve it. Costed at nearly $370 billion over the operational lives of the submarines in coming decades, we’re already wasting $2 billion a year on the trouble-plagued Australian Submarine Agency, which is blowing tens of millions on consultants.

Far better, if we’re going to go nuclear, to approach the French again to ask if Naval Group can build half a dozen Barracuda-class subs in France at around $18 billion, before operating costs. Or the Japanese could build diesel- and battery-powered Taigei-class subs — the successor to the Sōryū-class that Tony Abbott wanted to buy in 2014 — at around $700-800 million each, with substantially lower operating costs.

Defence protectionism

Buying off-the-shelf from other countries is an idea that needs to be reimposed on the Defence Department. By one estimate, there’s a 30% premium to build complex defence projects in Australia versus buying them from other countries. Put another way, we could be obtaining 30% more ships by buying them offshore. Given the Coalition wants to increase our defence spending, what better way to deliver more weapons with which Australia can defend itself than taking advantage of greater efficiency in defence manufacturing?

Home Affairs

The creation of Home Affairs under Peter Dutton was supposed to deliver a quarter of a billion dollars in savings in 2018 — $256.3 million, to be exact. Instead, under Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo, the departmental budget immediately blew out $300 million the following year and a strategic review to find savings was axed. The Home Affairs budget is now $4.3 billion — $1.1 billion higher than when it was created, despite the Federal Police being moved back to the Attorney-General’s Department. Securing those big efficiencies that Dutton could never produce would be a big win for Price.

Infrastructure

Labor cut back on infrastructure spending in November 2023, but, in campaign mode, it is once again opening the spigots — with suitable encouragement from the Nationals for regional infrastructure projects. Price could establish a hard-and-fast rule: no infrastructure spending on projects that aren’t the subject of a positive benefit-cost analysis, using final cost estimates, by Infrastructure Australia. And she could tell her Nationals colleagues the time for regional pork-barrelling is over.

Small business

Every year, governments of both sides spend hundreds of millions of dollars “supporting” small business. Last budget, Labor boasted of $640 million in small business spending. This is on top of $3.5 billion a year in foregone revenue from a lower tax rate for small business, $1.3 billion lost on the 50% reduction in the capital gains tax for small business, and hundreds of millions more in various tax discounts and exemptions.

But as Saul Eslake has long pointed out, small business is not the job creator it’s claimed to be, and it’s not particularly innovative, except when it comes to avoiding tax. As Eslake observed in relation to Dutton’s ridiculous taxpayer-funded business lunch idea, such business fetishism ends up hurting productivity because small business is significantly less productive than other areas of the economy. There’s no purer case for improving government efficiency than ending small business fetishism.

Fossil fuel mapping

In an extraordinary handout, Labor is giving oil and gas companies half a billion dollars worth of Geoscience Australia seabed mapping data for them to exploit for profit. This is on top of existing data that companies are charged only a token fee to access. Whatever happened to user pays? Time for a Price signal to spur efficiency.

Nuclear power

The self-evidently least efficient form of power is ripe for efficiency improvements. If the Coalition is insane enough to push ahead, Price could demand a condition: commit to building just one reactor, to a mature design widely approved by regulators in other countries, and if that’s delivered with anything less than a 50% cost blowout, go ahead with others. Skip the SMRs, which will end up costing the same amount but for far less power, and which make traditional large-scale reactors look like paragons of efficiency.

But all that, of course, is based on the assumption that the Coalition is genuinely interested in “efficiency”, and not an ideological exercise in attacking spending it doesn’t like.

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