Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) congratulates the Government for pursing an extensive technology reform agenda that will change the way Australians interact with Government services for the better;

(2) recognises the:

(a) actions the Government is taking to renew Centrelink's aging information technology system through the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation program, which will improve the user experience for the many Australians who access these services each week, and ensure the long term sustainability of our welfare system;

(b) actions the Government is taking to upgrade and modernise the health and aged care payment system, and improve the services offered by Medicare to all Australians; and

(c) investment the Government is making in digital services such as myGov, to further improve this service which is now used by more than ten million Australians; and

(3) congratulates the Government on pursuing a courageous reform agenda which is sorely needed to correct six successive years of under-investment by Labor.

The world has changed, and the coalition is ensuring that government services change with it. The Prime Minister has been at the forefront of spreading digital innovation in Australia for more than two decades. The PM's success in business came from his recognition that the future lay in digital communications and from his peerless ability to encourage the growth and expansion of the medium in our country. It is, therefore, no surprise that it is this coalition government which has put innovation at the centre of its agenda.

Those opposite call themselves progressives, but the real progress is happening out there in the community and in small businesses, where emerging technology is changing the way that people live their lives every day. Through six years of Labor government, while the number of internet users in Australia rose from seven million to more than 12 million and while Facebook and Twitter grew and new platforms like Snapchat and Instagram were launched, Labor shut their eyes and pretended that none of it was happening. The Australian people did not close their eyes, however. What they saw was six years of Labor underinvestment and neglect.

In contrast, under the coalition, take-up of the myGov platform has doubled every year. With more than 10 million accounts, the service now has 10 times more users than the UK equivalent. Already, the success of the myGov platform under this government has saved the taxpayer more than $100 million in postage alone. The Prime Minister and the government, however, are not satisfied with this success and will always push for further improvements. That is why we are investing a further $50 million to update security, improve the digital mail service and further improve user experience. This kind of constant improvement is what the Australian people rightly expect from their digital service providers, and this government is delivering.

Medicare transactions are, of course, one of the most common ways that average Australians interact with the government. Under the coalition's improvements, 97 per cent of all Medicare transactions can now be completed with no action from the citizen beyond swiping their card at the doctor's clinic. In the case of those surgeries that will not install a card machine, the government has created a Medicare app that patients can use to transmit their information for processing in real time. Perhaps the most important action the government is now taking is the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation—or the WPIT—Program. Put simply, this is the biggest improvement in how Australians interact with Centrelink in a generation. The system will be built across the next five years and will deliver a digital claims process, simpler processing and greater sharing of information. It will meet Australians' expectations for a 21st-century user experience.

The example of youth allowance applications illustrates what a dramatic difference this system will make. Currently, a student applying for youth allowance can make their application online, but, once their application is submitted, it disappears into an administrative vacuum for more than five weeks. The only way to check the status of an application is to telephone a call centre. That process costs taxpayers millions of dollars every year. At the end of this opaque process, two students in every 10 are informed that the application has been rejected for a simple and avoidable reason. Each rejection costs the taxpayer $28, but there are nearly 100,000 of these every year. In the future, due entirely to the government's reform agenda and the WPIT, students will be able to track their application online and many will know in real time if their application has been approved. The Centrelink system will interact automatically with relevant databases, while more errors in applications will be instantly picked up. Eventually the system will even automatically update payments if a student's circumstances change. The savings to the taxpayer and improvements for users will be considerable. The government will continue to pursue an extensive technology reform agenda and has taken action to embed this agenda for the future. The Digital Transformation Agency set up by the Prime Minister when he was Minister for Communications is still part of his personal portfolio and will provide strategic and policy leadership in this area in the years to come.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and I reserve my right to speak.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there is one area that highlights the complete inability of this government to deliver effective services, it is the rollout call of IT fails that we have had from the Turnbull government. I have to say that the member for Fisher is a brave man for opening up this topic of discussion. I am astounded that he got approval to do so from the Liberal powers that be. In fact, this government have been so phenomenally bad in this area that Mr Turnbull's own hand-picked digital guru and the former head of the Digital Transformation Office, Paul Shetler, resigned last November. Mr Shetler has since revealed publicly the extent of the mess in which the government's Digital Transformation Agenda rests: public service cuts are hitting hard, costly projects are running late and some are falling over completely.

Let's look at a few of the more memorable failures from the past six months alone. Who could forget 9 August last year when the census website notoriously crashed spectacularly across the nation, wasting millions of hours of Australians' time and threatening the integrity of this important national data? Shamefully, the government knew about the impending disaster in 2015 when the head of the ABS penned a crisis memo, warning, 'The program will not be able to deliver on the current scope, timetable and/or budget.' Well, nothing could have been clearer, but for those opposite the choice was to sit back and do nothing to fix the problems.

The next serious IT fail came only four months later when the critical ATO systems crashed, taking down the ATO website, the tax agent portal and the case management system for days, causing havoc for hundreds of businesses and individual alike. Almost two months on, the problems continued with another crash at the end of January. Still, government members have failed to provide an explanation for the mess.

Barely two weeks after the first ATO crash we heard the first screeches of the slow train wreck of one of the worst IT failures in our history. Of course, I refer to the Centrelink robo-debt data-matching debacle, which has seen thousands of Australians falsely accused of debts they did not owe. In its great wisdom the government removed human oversight from the process and left the robots, with their crude algorithms, to deliver the debt recovery system. They, in turn, were coming to ridiculous and erroneous conclusions about job seekers' incomes and working circumstances, and then using the flawed assumptions to raise the bogus debt notices. Make no mistake, this is a fail so serious and so colossal that we will continue to see its impacts hitting vulnerable Australians for months, if not years, to come.

Of course, we need to recognise that these stuff-ups were not just technical issues. The widespread IT mess is a completely predictable outcome of the government's gutting of the public service. Since those opposite came to power the public service has lost 18,000 staff. Those that are left are forced to survive on 2013 salaries, as the government's regressive enterprise bargaining system is stuck and has guaranteed nothing but bad outcomes for those workers. The Bureau of Statistics has lost 700 staff since the last census in 2011, the ATO has lost 3,500 staff in the same time frame and Centrelink has been crippled by years of budget cuts and massive increases in the casualisation of the workforce and has had a loss of 5,000 jobs across the department. To compensate for the damaging staff and budget cuts, the Turnbull government has gone on to waste millions of dollars on what Mr Shetler described as an 'eye-watering' level of contracting to the private sector.

The IT messes that the government has created have fundamentally betrayed the trust of the Australian people, tainting future digital projects for years to come. If Australians do not trust the integrity of digital services it will be nigh impossible for governments to secure the social licence needed for the nimble, agile service delivery that our Prime Minister likes to talk about so much. From the botched census to the ongoing MyGov failures, the ATO crashes and the Centrelink robo-debt debacle, this government has lurched from disaster to disaster, all under the watch of the man whom the Liberals like to believe invented the internet. The fact that this government has chosen to highlight the digital programs area they are particularly proud of should concern us all greatly. (Time expired)

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like the member for Newcastle, when I first saw this motion I wondered what the member for Fisher was up to. Does he like poking the Labor Party bear? Was he trying to get you guys opposite into some sort of frothing fit of rage? Such is the member for Fisher's sense of humour, it is difficult to know what he was up to. However, as I listened to the member's speech I was reminded that this government has done an extraordinary job of fixing a mess that you blokes left behind. As the member for Fisher pointed out, do we get thanks or even gratitude from you guys? I would go for just a modicum of humility from you blokes, but we get none of it. Ungrateful is what you guys are.

We are the party that in New South Wales turned what used to be a day-long excursion down to the RTA to renew your licence or car into an over-the-net experience. Dom Perrottet had to do this over the objections of your paymasters in the public sector unions to make New South Wales a better place. Russell Cassar, who is an old friend of my wife's and who happens to be the CTO of JP Morgan, says that Wall Street runs on technology. There is no earthly reason why government cannot also run on technology to improve the experience that our citizens have interacting with us.

This government established the Digital Transformation Agency. The importance of this agency cannot and should not be underestimated. The DTA has focused on three key things: reducing barriers to the adoption of online transactions by encouraging the uptake of digital interaction; fully utilising and embedding open data; creating marketplaces for more efficient tendering for government supply and materially improving access that small businesses have to government contracts.

The DTA has been spending just over a quarter billion dollars this year to help government agencies create digital portals that are easy to find. We have all had the experience of using government service websites where finding the service you are looking for is almost impossible and the search functionality does not produce any meaningful results. The private sector knows that consumers are not patient these days and, if they cannot find what they want within a minute or so, they move on. That is why companies like Amazon, Domain and Seek ensure that the number of clicks between you entering the website and transacting is as small as possible.

The second need is security. Long before private mail servers became all the rage, the biggest resistance to online transactions was people's innate fear of losing control of their information. For government agencies to increase online interaction, people need rock-solid assurances that their information is safe. DTA has been introducing standards for security across agencies to ensure security is front and centre of any design and software architecture. As the head of Trend Micro told me recently, the average personal computer will be subject to over 900 attacks per year.

Finally, DTA has set out a digital service standard similar to what Microsoft does for its Office suite of programs, so all government agencies will have similar directories and functionalities. When you go to the ATO or to DFAT, you will be able to navigate the sites more easily.

In my view, the most exciting initiative of the government has been open data. The benefits are multifaceted. Sure, it can save money, but, more importantly, it can save lives and even potentially improve policy debate. But let's first deal with the practical before hoping for miracles. Ian Burnett's team at UTS and the Centre for Big Data and Analytics have been helping the New South Wales government better direct their resources to what works and, more importantly, helps improve people's lives. In the UK, open data is estimated to have saved the government nearly 100 million pounds, in one instance eliminating the purchase of 75-pound mops. But, as Laure Lucchesi of Etalab has said, the biggest beneficiaries of open data are consumers, because start-ups can now better target their resources, providing better competition.

Under this government, data sets that are open to the public have increased from 500 to 23,600. In health the cost savings are huge. The information for improving your own health is huge. Hackathons are now using open data to make serious, innovative and real contributions to public policy.

Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a brave member who puts forward a motion congratulating the Turnbull government on information technology changes given its debacle of the census in 2016, let alone when thousands of Australians have received incorrect debt notices from Centrelink thanks to an automated system. But the member is not that brave; he is not even still in the chamber. He must instead be what Sir Humphrey Appleby would describe as 'courageous'.

The flawed data-matching program recently implemented by Centrelink has been spitting out thousands of debt notices to people who have done nothing wrong, who do not owe Centrelink a cent and who have been forced to spend hours following up Centrelink over false accusations. Any member of this place who says that their electorate office has not been inundated with constituents distressed by these accusations clearly has not been paying attention at home. Labor has repeatedly called on the Turnbull government to suspend this program until its flaws can be fixed, but the Turnbull government has simply doubled down and refused to own up to its problem.

But the Centrelink debt-recovery debacle is just the latest of a series of disasters for the Turnbull government in the tech space. Let's go back to that census fail. After an extensive campaign encouraging all Australians to fill out their census online in what was supposed to be the first time a majority would complete the form digitally, a 40-hour system crash left millions wondering how the Turnbull government could possibly have messed it up so badly. The Prime Minister himself described the attack that caused the crash as 'not particularly clever, utterly predictable and utterly foreseeable'. In perhaps my favourite piece of evidence to the inquiry, the contractor IBM admitted the whole thing could have been avoided if they had simply turned the router off and on again—the most timeless of all IT advice!

But this government still refused to step up and take responsibility for the stuff-up, blaming the contractor, refusing to acknowledge its own culpability, despite its almost three years of preparation time for the census. The Prime Minister's cybersecurity adviser, Alastair MacGibbon, said the census fail was a serious blow to public confidence in the government's ability to deliver on public expectations.

But that is not all. Then we have the ongoing issues at the Australian Taxation Office. A data storage system crash in December cause the ATO website, tax agent portal, and the case management system to go down for two days, which the Commissioner of Taxation, Chris Jordan, described as the worst unplanned system outage in recent memory. Earlier this month, the same issue reared its head again, knocking out the ATO website for another four days.

I note that the member makes reference to myGov in his motion. MyGov is a fantastic idea, do not get me wrong, but has there ever been a less user-friendly system created? Even I, someone who worked as an IT technician, have trouble linking my services on myGov. Anything useful requires you to actually call the agency involved, and you cannot do that at 10 pm, defeating its purported usefulness in the first place.

Last year I visited an employment services provider in my electorate with the member for Chifley. The work they do at this service is fantastic, but one of the biggest issues faced by their clients is just navigating myGov. Logging in is a headache. The former head of the Prime Minister's much vaunted Digital Transformation Office —we are well into the 21st century by now, I might point out—Paul Shetler, has slammed the culture surrounding IT within the government, calling out the digital deskilling of government departments under the Turnbull government's watch.

But these individual agency issues pale in comparison to the biggest joke of all from this government, that in an era when government insists that we move most of our interactions with agencies and the public service online, the same government trashes the infrastructure rollout needed to ensure that every Australian has decent internet access. I am, of course, talking about the NBN, the rollout of which was supposed to be finished by the end of last year. In my electorate we are finally seeing the first homes connected just now, but already I am hearing stories about poor speeds and connection issues, thanks to Malcolm Turnbull's flawed fibre-to-the-node model. I would ask members opposite, what is the point of pursuing this technology reform agenda if you are going to saddle Australia with the 20th century broadband. I would welcome a federal government with a genuine commitment to modernising the way the public interacts with government, but you cannot force all government interaction online if you cannot guarantee that those systems work, let alone you do not make sure everyone can get online to access them. But, as with so much else, the Turnbull government has well and truly proven that it is all talk when it comes to tech.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must confess that this resolution completely and utterly perplexed me. After the census fail, after the ATO website was down today, after the Centrelink robo-debt fiasco, after concerns have emerged about the CSA's IT system, the member for Fairfax moved 'to congratulate the government for pursuing an extensive technology reform agenda that will change the way Australians interact with government services for the better'. Seriously! My question to the Deputy Speaker is, is there a provision in the standing orders for either irony or grand self-delusion? Because that is the only way this resolution can be debated here now. You cannot be serious! It is such a bizarre resolution.

I want to make these two points. First: the mover of the resolution retreated. He is not even here to listen to the debate. He left straight away. The member for Mackellar, who, in his Young Liberal days, was widely regarded as a very smart operator, in a lapse spoke on this motion but in a recovery also retreated. He was not here either to finish it off. What was also interesting is that I am now speaking after my good friend and colleague, the member for Burt, when another government member should be speaking, but they are not. Because they have heeded the wise words—I love that HBO show, Silicon Valley, where Erlich Bachman said, 'Don't touch anything—failure is contagious.' This is why they have no other speaker in relation to this resolution.

The member for Mackellar, in his defence of the federal government, opened by relying on what the New South Wales government is doing on digital transformation. Successes on the digital transformation front are so sparse and unavailable that he had to quote another Liberal government because, as I said, 'Don't touch anything. Failure is contagious. Don't mention the federal government.' That was interesting.

Do you know who else is missing? The Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation, Angus Taylor.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hear my colleagues say, 'Who is he?' They are right to ask this question. He has been completely missing in action with the census fail, the Centrelink robo-debt, the ATO tax office website failure and the child support agency failure. The only great thing I can say about Angus Taylor is that he has literally become the government's telepresence within the ministry. He is nowhere to be seen. He is a mere telepresence. He is not available, and it is disgraceful that he is not here.

The ATO website went down for four days. The transmission of information back and forth went down for four days. The ATO came out and said, 'We don't know anything about what's going on.' So we do not know if this was a cyber attack. We do not know exactly what was going on. They do not know how to fix it. No-one has stepped up. When the assistant minister is not present, when the revenue minister does not step up and when the Treasurer does not step up you know there is a problem.

The second thing I will mention is this: if the member for Fairfax is so confident about this resolution, I invite him to post his speech on Facebook, on his own page, and then advertise the heck out of it in his own electorate. I tell you what: no-one in his electorate will support him, and, in fact, they will probably suggest that he go and have a lie down. After all the problems they have had—

Ms Burney interjecting—

'A Bex and a good lie down,' as the member for Barton rightly interjects—because no-one could be serious. If he does not do it, I extend to him this offer: I will not only post his speech; I will post my response and I will advertise it in his electorate. People in his electorate should hear that when he comes to Canberra he defends the government. He does not come here to stick up for his constituents who have problems with Centrelink, the ATO, child support or the census; he comes in to defend the government. It is wrong.

Labor supports, and has always supported, the digital transformation push by the government, but this has gone off the rails. This has completely gone off the rails. It has undermined the effort of digital transformation. Look at the number of areas where this has gone off track. This is a problem. Digital technology is not just about the tech; it is the end-to-end process that should be looked at and the application of technology to improve the service. Constituents, the general public, should be able to get better out of digital transformation.

What is happening now is that the Digital Transformation Agency has turned itself into a think tank. It is not legitimately there to help. The problem is that, as these people get distracted in their own internal warfare, the general public is made to suffer. It is unacceptable. It should not be the case that digital transformation hurts rather than helps.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.