Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is to be applauded for his commitment to the digital transformation of the federal government.
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His leadership on the issue comes not before time. Any further delay in government in catching-up, in the digital sense, with the lives of many millions of Australians might have left the Commonwealth and its public service decades off the pace and hopelessly behind the times.
Yet, news last week of the latest embarrassing slip-up from the Health Department, publishing potentially sensitive data on Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, is yet another reminder that government still has much work to do in in its search for digital proficiency
The accidental leak, which was sufficiently serious to force Health Minister Sussan Ley to apologise to a group of general practitioners over the compromised data, had a number of things in common with other recent Commonwealth tech wrecks.
As so often is the case, the Health Department supplied the Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme information to Data.gov.au with the best and of intentions and the research that was being undertaken at the University of Melbourne using the data was no doubt in the public interest.
But as so often, it's the lack of attention to detail or a failure to anticipate consequences that brought the project unstuck.
Attempts to take government online have been dogged by failure or poor service delivery with problems reported at Centrelink, the Tax Office and of course, the recent spectacular census debacle.
There is a dearth of digital expertise and experience in the Australian Public Service and the wider public sector and many agencies have succumbed to the understandable temptation of simply writing a cheque and hiring private contractors to manage the job.
But leaving aside the often dubious value for taxpayers' money achieved through these arrangements, private contractors IBM did not save the Australian Bureau of Statistics from its Census disaster, an affair that will long be cited a lesson in what not to do.
There are no shortcuts for the public service in its search for digital fluency, the only way that Mr Turnbull's dreams of digital transformation will be realised is when the government builds a solid base of technological expertise that is savvy, forward thinking and committed to public service. It will take time and there will be more lessons learned the hard way.
It is also worth noting that the political reaction to the Health Department privacy breach, introducing new offences which may have the effect of criminalising legitimate research, shows that some members of Mr Turnbull's Cabinet remain analogue in their thinking.
Government could do a lot worse than to look to the example of Australia's big banks for what citizens want from online service provision.
While far from perfect, banks have moved in a very short space of time, to a position where large parts of their customer bases are comfortable and satisfied conducting most of their transactions through the development of websites that are user-friendly, secure and efficient. But most importantly, their websites work, nearly all the time.
So, while most can agree on where government needs to be, a far more difficult question is how does it get there and this week has confronted us once again with the truth that surely now public service leaders must begin to grasp: there are no shortcuts.