TRANSCRIPT - Sky News Sharri with Sharri Markson

PAUL FLETCHER MP

Shadow Minister for Science and the Arts

Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy

Manager of Opposition Business in the House

TRANSCRIPT

SKY NEWS Sharri with Sharri Markson

23 October 2024

Sharri Markson: Well, the minute that the Albanese Government announced its Future Made in Australia policy worth billions of dollars, eyebrows were raised, especially over the eyewatering $1 billion investment into American company PsiQuantum to build a quantum computer. Now, as my regular guest on this show, Cameron Milner, put it in The Nightly, there’s now a stench hanging over Labor’s signature policy. He says this is more appropriately known as Future Made for mates. He argues this because he says it’s become little more than a gravy train of easy money and taxpayer funds at that. He’s uncovered in this article he’s published in The Nightly a spider web of Labor aligned connections that PsiQuantum has, including an economics firm, Mandala, headed by a former Labor staffer, Amit Singh. He also says there’s links between Blackbird Ventures and various friends in the Labor Party. Well, someone else who’s been following this very closely is Shadow Minister for Science and the Arts Paul Fletcher, and he joins me now. Paul, thank you so much for your time. What can you tell me because you’ve already uncovered some of these Labor connections yourself. You’ve been on the case from the beginning. What can you tell me about some of the Labor connections behind this billion dollar grant to this quantum computing company that isn’t based in Australia?

Paul Fletcher: You’re right. PsiQuantum is based in the US and this extraordinary decision was announced in April this year that the Commonwealth and Queensland Labor Governments were jointly going to invest almost $1 billion of taxpayers’ money. Now, as Cameron Milner has pointed out, and of course, as a former Queensland Labor State Secretary, he knows the Labor culture very well. There’s a lot of very well connected former Labor staffers involved in providing advice to PsiQuantum. So, for example, there’s a company called Brookline Advisory, which was retained by PsiQuantum. Lidija Ivanovski is a former Chief of Staff to Richard Marles. Gerard Richardson is a former adviser to Chalmers. There’s the company you mentioned, Mandala, which are economic advisers. They produced a report saying what a great piece of economic policy this was paid for, of course, by PsiQuantum. What we also know is that two executives of Blackbird Ventures were appointed by Ed Husic to important committees. So the National Quantum Advisory Committee, a lady called Clare Birch, who’s a senior executive at Blackbird and a lady called Kate Glazebrook, was appointed to the Industry, Innovation and Science Australia Board in December 2022. Now, the importance of this is that Blackbird is a major investor in PsiQuantum. PsiQuantum has raised money over four funding rounds. They’ve got a lot of investors, no criticism of them for doing that. One of those investors is Blackbird, an Australian venture capital business. No problem with being a venture capital business. But the question for taxpayers is, in view of the fact that Blackbird is an investor in PsiQuantum, and that once this announcement of a big government investment was made, it was going to boost the value of the existing investments. What processes were put in place to manage any conflicts of interest in the decision being made by Minister Husic and his office?

Sharri Markson: The problem is this is actually a massive story. This is a very big story Paul, but it’s hard explain it, I think to people. I think one of the major issues as well, that I want to ask you about is the timeline for this. When did Blackbird start getting involved in these discussions compared to other firms?

Paul Fletcher: Well, what we know is that PsiQuantum approached the Australian Government in mid to late 2022, spruiking making an unsolicited offer for the Australian Government to invest. We know that Minister Husic met with them twice in 2022, including in December 2022, and then in January 2023 he visited PsiQuantum’s head office in California. Now, this is at that the same time that other Australian quantum businesses like Silicon Quantum Computing, Diraq, Quantum Brilliance, Q-CTRL, the industry generally was being told there is no money for quantum. You just to apply through the National Reconstruction Fund like everybody else. The big question is how did PsiQuantum get through the gates so quickly and be in a position where they were meeting with the Minister and all of a sudden the government was looking at making this investment.

Sharri Markson: We’re out of time. But very quickly, you’ve called for an inquiry from the Auditor General. Where’s that up to?

Paul Fletcher: So I’ve written to the Auditor General laying out some of these facts. The Auditor General has written back to say an investigation is being considered. So I’ll continue to press for that, because this is very important. And as Cameron Milner’s article points out, there’s a web of Labor mates here. And taxpayers would rightly be very concerned about the basis on which almost $1 billion of their money is being spent.

Sharri Markson: Quite aside from this, I personally don’t think that taxpayer funds should be going into startups like this anyway. There’s enough venture capital money out there. Why do we need taxpayer funds? 

Paul Fletcher: That’s right. There’s a big private sector venture capital sector in Australia. That’s good news. Let them get on with making these risk investments. 

Sharri Markson: All right Paul Fletcher, thank you very much for your time. That is a truly big story. We’ll stay on it.