A senate bid to access key documents relating to PsiQuantum’s $940m funding deal from government has drawn a blank, with some refused release and others heavily redacted.
A small cache of documents was published late on Friday, seemingly after a deadline for their release expired.
However, almost anything substantive that was requested is not in the cache, and what’s left is devoid of detail, comprising some limited talking points amid large-scale redactions.
The federal government made a “public interest immunity claim” – essentially that publishing documents would not be in the public interest –
PsiQuantum secured government funding after making an unsolicited pitch for it in 2022.
The senate had sought copies of this “unsolicited proposal”, along with a non-disclosure agreement between the parties, a list of “technology milestones and timeframes”, and a Deloitte analysis that informed investment by the federal and Queensland governments.
None of this information was released.
Officially, the senate listed [pdf] the order for the production of documents as being “partially complied with”.
But its treatment, including the eleventh-hour timing to coincide with a holiday period, will add weight to criticism that the deal would not stand up to scrutiny, were its terms aired.
Shadow minister for government services and the digital economy Paul Fletcher said that taxpayers “ought to be able to see” details of the investment.
“Evidence unearthed during senate estimates and through freedom of information requests reveals this deal to be a reverse engineered sham designed to benefit one American company,” he said in a statement.
Fletcher has previously pushed for details of the deal to be released, and also for a parliamentary inquiry.
The current federal and former Queensland governments backed PsiQuantum in April, under a deal that would see a regional HQ for the company set up in Australia, and a quantum computer hosted in Brisbane.
The computer has an ambitious operating target of 2027.
The state government in Queensland has changed since the deal was struck, and the new government there has put the investment under review.
A federal audit of the investment into PsiQuantum is also under consideration.