Adjournment - PsiQuantum

Mr FLETCHER (Bradfield—Manager of Opposition Business) (18:51): The Albanese Labor government's decision to invest almost $1 billion of taxpayers' money into the American company PsiQuantum raises several serious questions which warrant scrutiny. The opposition has sought to hold up to appropriate scrutiny this extraordinary bet with public money. The government has trenchantly resisted that scrutiny.

What we see is a very large amount of public money being bet on one particular company pursuing one particular technology path within the broad field of quantum. People who have worked in the field for 20 or 30 years cannot say with certainty which of the many paths being explored is likely to achieve a successful outcome.

A very poor process was followed to get to this decision. The Albanese government agreed to assess an unsolicited proposal from PsiQuantum as early as November 2022, two months before external probity advisers were engaged. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources entered into a non-binding agreement with PsiQuantum in June 2023. Yet the government tells us that all was above board because there was an expression-of-interest process available to a wide range of companies, even though that only commenced in August 2023. Companies were invited, by one email only, to participate. There were no follow-up phone calls; there was no second email. Those who were invited to participate were told they could not speak with Australian government officials. This was after PsiQuantum had been speaking for more than eight months with Australian government officials, up to and including the minister, and the minister had met with them at least twice and had visited their premises in California.

We now know the terms of the expression of interest essentially asked respondents to match the promise made by PsiQuantum to build a fault-tolerant error corrected quantum computer by 2030. Many in the sector are very sceptical that this can be done. In this regard, a very interesting article has just come out in Nature, the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal. The journalist, Elizabeth Gibney, has this to say:

"Yet compared with its competitors, PsiQuantum has shown very little. Rather than building up gradually, as others have done, by debuting systems of tens or hundreds of quantum bits, PsiQuantum is aiming to jump to a machine that will require something in the order of one million qubits … To do that, it will need to overcome technical challenges it has not proved it can solve, says Chao-Yang Lu, a physicist working on photonic quantum computing at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai. He is one of several scientists who worry the firm is promising things it will struggle to deliver."

"My impression is there's a lot of scepticism about how much progress PsiQuantum has made," says Shimon Kolkowitz, a quantum physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. 

He calls a bet on them — that is, PsiQuantum— "extremely high risk".

You've just heard an assessment of the credibility of the company's claims from respected global scientists. This is a company on which the Minister for Industry and Science has chosen to bet almost $1 billion of taxpayers' money. He's set himself up as the biggest, most risk-loving venture capitalist of all. The problem is that he's not putting at risk private money; he's putting at risk the money of Australian taxpayers. It's interesting to note that this article in Nature goes on to say:

"… some of the numbers are not as good as they need to be, says Graeme Smith, a quantum physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. For example, he says, the likelihood that a heralded particle is detected is reported as 26%, when it needs to be more than 50%. "It is not encouraging that, after many years, they are still struggling with good single photon sources, since it is the most basic building block of their proposed architecture," he says.

This is further troubling evidence that the Minister for Industry and Science has put almost $1 billion of taxpayers' money at risk on what is a very high-risk bet.

For these and other reasons, I have written to the Auditor-General requesting that the Australian National Audit Office undertake an investigation into the Australian government's investment in PsiQuantum. There are many aspects of what happened here which are very concerning. As a result of this decision, Australian taxpayers are now exposed to almost $1 billion of their money being at risk in a remarkably speculative venture. Australians deserve to know the truth.