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March 25, 2011 -- NSW Labor has vowed to beef up the state's fraud squad to combat identity theft and cyber-crime if it wins the election tomorrow.

Labor's IT policy was revealed on the eve of the election, with Premier Kristina Keneally focusing on the two areas, which she dubbed "the fastest growing crimes in Australia".

If re-elected, the Police fraud squad would hire another 20 officers to fight cyber-crime and identity theft, she said.

Ms Keneally repeated claims that a Coalition government would outsource public sector IT jobs, a move that could cost up to 5730 positions.

Labor's election advertisements have focused on the outsourcing aspect of a Barry O'Farrell-led government.

However, Labor inaccurately uses the terms outsourcing and offshoring interchangeably.

A spokesman for Ms Keneally could not provide the government's definition of IT or say if its numbers included call centre staff using technology as part of their jobs.

According to Treasury figures provided by the spokesman, the departments of Health and Education have the most IT workers at 1260 and 1105 employees, respectively.

Transport and Infrastructure, Human Services, and Police and Emergency Services filled out the top five with 755, 651 and 539 technology staff, respectively.

The Services, Technology and Administration Department has 416 employees looking after IT.

Justice and Attorney-General has 295 people compared with 249 tech workers at Treasury.

The Environment, Climate Change and Water Department has 124 technology staff while Planning has 101.

Elsewhere Industry and Investment has 98 tech staff while Communities has 93 such workers and Premier and Cabinet 44.

Ms Keneally said she would continue to support the $36 million digital economy strategy for NSW.

The Premier said Opposition financial management spokesman Greg Pearce had already let slip his secret plans to move NSW jobs overseas and used Mr Pearce's quote to The Australian "clearly we've got to do more outsourcing" to back her case.

Ms Keneally's confusion between outsourcing and offshoring was pointed out to the spokesman, who did not comment.

In an interview with The Australian last March, Mr Pearce made the distinction between outsourcing and offshoring when he said: "We are open to looking at what we can do with outsourcing, but the big problem is actually getting down to what the NSW government is actually doing.

"On a general plane, clearly we've got to do more outsourcing. Offshoring raises all sorts of political concerns but I don't think that the way NSW is operating is either efficient or productive or in the interest of anybody."

The Opposition has several plans for ICT if it wins on Saturday, including establishing a high-level governance body to oversee $1 billion-plus ICT programs in NSW.

Mr Pearce said an O'Farrell elected government would look to setting a deadline for government departments to comply with minimum standards for electronic information security.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au

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