A proposal for a $500 million data centre next to an ADF base has sparked fresh concerns about the behaviour of politicians after they leave parliament.
Controversial former Coalition minister Stuart Robert has been leveraging his work as Australia’s inaugural digital minister as part of a $500 million venture to build a giant data centre to store defence secrets and other sensitive government information.
– over allegations he used his political influence to help his friends win consulting work with government contractors who specialise in IT, data and national security, and whom Robert was dealing with as a minister or MP. Robert was Australia’s first digital transformation minister, a post he held from 2018 to May 2022, and was previously assistant defence minister.
“Coram Deo Capital is currently in confidential discussions with Blackstone Inc in relation to a direct investment in the development and operation of a Data Centre complex of circa $500M in CAPEX,” the letter states. An Australian military website states that HMAS Harman “enables Defence-wide communications, cyber, intelligence, and information warfare capabilities”.
But he stressed he had never used government information for personal gain and had abided by the 18-month cooling-off period that prevents former ministers from engaging in certain dealings with government and defence officials. Transparency International’s Australia director Clancy Moore said Robert’s post-parliamentary business dealings showed why Australia urgently needed to extend the cooling-off period to a minimum of three years “in keeping with international best practice”.“Ministers should be allowed to find jobs, but they shouldn’t profit from their work in parliament for at least three years to ensure their parliamentary work is focused on the public interest, not private gain,” Moore said.
“And so all I said was, do you know where this Harman military base is? … And he went, ‘Yep, know all about it’. And that was the end of the conversation.” “There were some lobbyists that have been working on it, and that’s it. Those lobbyists know Stuart, end of story,” Simonfi said. The contractors were seeking to profit from the Robert-backed efforts to modernise and security-proof federal government data and IT systems.
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