After Malcolm Turnbull became Liberal leader, he made it clear he wanted to be remembered as the "innovation" prime minister. His government would embrace technology and fuel the "digital economy". He placed the Digital Transformation Office within his own portfolio and told public servants he expected "cutting-edge, risk-taking behaviour" in the way they designed IT projects and services.
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Mr Turnbull took his own risk in prioritising technology and "innovation" (a word that's both remarkably flexible and shallow). It's not that anyone opposes "innovation"; it's just that people tend to notice technology when it stuffs up, and ignore it when it works smoothly. Inevitably, the "innovation" Prime Minister was lampooned when the census website collapsed (on census night) and persistent problems plagued myGov, the website people use to access welfare, health, tax and other government services.
High-profile technological projects – such as an online census of all households, or providing essential, private information online to millions of people – almost always suffer setbacks. Some of the criticism the government cops when things go wrong is wildly unfair; the result of an unreasonable expectation that public services should be perfect. Mr Turnbull has previously begged public servants to get over their fear of failure. We, the public, need to allow them to fail, too, lest we stymie any creativity and entrench the risk-averse bureaucratic culture that so many complain about.
Nonetheless, some of myGov's earlier privacy breaches and security flaws were avoidable; they were a symptom of poor design. It's too early to say whether its more recent woes, including shutdowns, were entirely foreseeable. However, as with the census website failure, the suspicion remains that the Australian Public Service lacks the right staff to implement and manage complex technological services. Another, related criticism is that the APS is often "captured" by the businesses from which it buys IT services, because it lacks the expertise needed to manage those contractual relationships effectively.
Sir Peter Gershon, who was asked to review government IT use eight years ago, warned of this problem. He urged the APS to cut its reliance on outside contractors (he suggested halving them over two years) and to instead beef up its skills by employing more IT professionals as ongoing staff. He also foresaw that government agencies would find it difficult to do this, especially if they tried to hire these staff in Canberra, where skilled labour is rarer than in larger cities and costs more. For this reason, he recommended that all departments and large agencies establish significant IT workforces outside the ACT.
Not much has happened since. The government said this year that, in 2014-15, it employed significantly more IT staff, relative to the APS workforce, than it did six years earlier. However, the actual number of IT professionals remained effectively the same, and the government never reported on whether it had recruited outside the ACT (so as to recruit higher-quality staff). IT, like all areas of government administration, has also suffered the stiff effects of the ongoing "efficiency dividend".
The important question now is whether the government is learning from its IT failures. Part of that will involve honestly assessing its staff capacity, and reporting publicly on how well it implemented the Gershon reforms, which it hasn't done in six years.
