NSW Finance Minister Victor Dominello wants to monetise the state’s Data Analytics Centre (DAC).

Mr Dominello says that with the right partnerships, the DAC could one day become self-funding.

He said that the DAC is currently acting like a start-up, while speaking at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney.

The agency oversees the sharing of public sector datasets between agencies, and has the legislative power to compel agencies to hand over datasets within a set timeframe.

“[The DAC] could have a joint venture in a beautiful blue sky world with a potential unicorn one day,” Mr Dominello said.

“I’ve got no doubt in the short-to-medium term that the DAC will pay for itself.”

However, he said the DAC would need to work closely with the state’s Privacy Commissioner to put privacy protections in place that would allow it to expand its work.

“It is all about anonymise, anonymise, anonymise,” the minister told attendees.

He said that the NSW Government was not necessarily looking to sell de-identified citizen data to private bidders.

Mr Dominello said the government was in control of several non-personal datasets that all had economic value, such as records of “wave patterns off Manly” or data on demographic trends.

He said it should be possible to get the “creme-de-la-creme” of data scientists and analytics experts at the DAC to undertake fee-for-service jobs to other government agencies.

“We could drive greater efficiencies, hypothetically speaking, in the planning department,” he said.

“If the DAC could design smarter algorithms that are far stronger in terms of making predictions than the ones that they currently have, they might say; ‘We’ll pay up to X-dollars for those services’. Government agencies currently spend a lot on these sorts of things.”

Mr Dominello  suggested that the DAC could even sell any successful data-modelling programs to other governments around the world.

The DAC is currently focusing on data related to the fight against childhood obesity, which has been estimated to cost NSW alone up to $30 billion a year.

“Childhood obesity is not just a problem for NSW. We could then sell that outward to the US,” Mr Dominello said.

“This is smart government. This is where we need to be.”