The new Queensland government will review its near-$500 million investment in PsiQuantum in partnership with the federal government, with the Prime Minister defending it as an “enormous opportunity”.

Earlier this year the federal and Queensland governments announced a shared $940 million funding deal with PsiQuantum, which will see the US-based tech firm attempt to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane.

The deal has been mired in controversy, with concerns over a lack of transparency, the significant amount of funding going towards an American-headquartered company, and whether the state timeframe is achievable.

The newly elected LNP government in Queensland has this week revealed it will review the $470 million funding deal made by the previous Labor state government, after it was highly critical of the process behind it while in Opposition.

Treasurer meeting

It was reported earlier this week that Queensland department officials will conduct a briefing with new Treasurer David Janetzki on the investment, including on the due diligence conducted and the current state of contractual arrangements.

The Queensland government is then expected to make a decision on whether it will commit to the funding deal in the coming weeks.

“We know that PsiQuantum had the inside running with the current federal and former state government,” Janetzki told The Australian.

“Throughout the year we have raised our concerns about the complete secrecy of the tender process and the way it sidelined expert advisers.

“We will examine the details of this deal in full.”

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli also commented on the PsiQuantum investment on Tuesday.

“We said before the election we would make sure there was transparency with the agreement and that is what we will deliver,” Criasfulli told the media.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked about the Queensland government potentially backing out of the quantum deal at a press conference this week.

“This is about positioning Australia for the future,” Albanese told the media.

“There’s a first-mover advantage in areas such as this and Australia can’t afford to sit back and watch other countries get ahead of us in an area where we have this enormous opportunity.

“We went through an extraordinary amount of diligence before we made this announcement and it’s a good announcement that sets up Australia, but Queensland in particular, to have an enormous advantage going forward.”

Opposition labels the deal a ‘sham’

The joint investment in PsiQuantum was unveiled in April this year, with the company to base its attempt to build the world’s first utility scale quantum computer in Brisbane as part of the federal government’s flagship Future Made in Australia policy.

It was later revealed that the Industry department had issued a confidential expression of interest in August last year to “explore the maturity of the market around quantum computing”, while it was already in high-level discussions with PsiQuantum and conducting due diligence on the company.

The ongoing management of this contract will cost about $2.5 million annually, with this year’s federal budget allocating $27.7 million over 11 years for this.

The PsiQuantum deal was also debated in Parliament last month, with Manager of Opposition Business Paul Fletcher labelling the process behind it as a “sham” with taxpayer funds “put at risk in what is a remarkably speculative venture”.

“This was nothing but a reverse engineered sham in which a minister who had been dazzled by the particular technology promises of one particular company took a decision that money was going to be spent and directed his department to reverse engineer a process to try and construct some kind of veneer of respectability,” Fletcher said.

In response, Industry Minister Ed Husic accused Fletcher of donning a “conspiracy tinfoil hat” and of “trying to retrofit smoke into a gun that never fired a bullet”.

“He used his whole moment here to make a series of allegations, none of which could stack up,” Husic said in Parliament.

“We went through a complex legal, technical, commercial probity process to make the decision about the investment…

“We are investing in one of the most powerful computers on the planet, which is to be based in this country, will be able to be used to benefit our economy and national security, and will create a lot of important jobs in Brisbane.”

State of quantum

The inaugural State of Australian Quantum report was released by the federal government this week, finding that the Australian quantum tech industry could be worth almost $6 billion and employ 19,400 workers by 2045.

The report found that the Commonwealth is far more significant funder of local quantum companies than the private sector, with the federal government committing billions of dollars to Australian quantum companies in the last 18 months, compared to $179 million investment in private capital.

The federal government has also announced the recipients for Round 1 of the $36 million Critical Technologies Challenge Program, which focuses on the commercialisation of early-stage quantum technologies.

Fourteen consortia will share in $5.2 million for feasibility projects tackling a wide range of challenges as part of the funding round.