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Government contractors could face consequences if they poach IT workers from the public service under a Labor government, in a bid to protect against digital brain drain. Contractors would be watched carefully and action could be taken when reviewing contracts with companies seen to be luring away public servants with lucrative pay rises. The warning from Labor's spokesman for digital economy and social services Ed Husic is part of a bid to improve digital capability within the government and stem rising costs in the sector. "In government we will take a close look at the mechanisms available to us to track 'digital poachers' - and rein in their actions," Mr Husic said in a speech to the Australian Information Industry Association on Friday. "This may include reviewing contract terms and contract management approaches." A third of the government's 14,000 IT professionals are contractors, Mr Husic said, with that share growing over the past six years. And while public servants were entitled to make decisions about their own careers, aggressive moves by companies in the sector would be watched closely. "We are concerned about reports of large vendors to government actively poaching talented public servants to work on the very government ICT projects they were hired to complete," he said. While the average cost of a public servant working on IT is around $132,000, the average cost of a contractor is $214,000. "This over-reliance on contractors is unsustainable going forward," Mr Husic said. The ongoing issues with government digital projects are also reason for more IT work to be done in-house than by external vendors, the shadow minister said. "These capability gaps lead to an over-dependence within the public service on ICT contractors — particularly for complicated, high-value ICT work." Just one per cent of respondents to the State of the Service report for 2017-18 described their role as "digital," but that rate os expected to grow considerably in the following years and keeping up with and harnessing technological change is an area the Independent Review of the Public Service is examining. Better digital transformation strategies were needed in government departments, to improve experiences for those dealing with government more than for cost-cutting, Mr Husic said. "Long term effectiveness requires further development, management of implementation plans and ongoing monitoring and reporting arrangements to create an effective transition to digital service delivery." Mr Husic also labelled the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission's dumped biometric identification system project as "atrocious" and said higher levels of government needed to accept accountability for such failures.

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