There would have been a few nervous people in Canberra on Friday when the Turnbull government announced its plan to finally make some sense of the Australian Public Service's IT debacles.
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In pledging that his Digital Transformation Agency would review more than 100 tech projects, each valued at more than $10 million, minister Angus Taylor committed himself and his public servants to a Herculean task. The work is long overdue and desperately needed. A litany of disasters, revealed in this newspaper in recent months, only hint at the size of the problem.
Take the Defence Department's ill-fated garrison estate management sSystem: a $120 million project to manage contracts for businessesservicing the nation's military bases, $39 million over budget and not operational until 2017, five years late. Where else but Canberra would such a performance rate little more than a footnote? There are dozens of similar stories.
Observers will wonder why it took so long to get around to these reviews. It's understood the agency's predecessor, the Digital Transformation Office, was authorised to begin this project in August 2016.
But Mr Taylor's initiative brings hope of an end, or at least the beginning of an end, to one of the greatest bonfires of taxpayers' money seen since Federation.
Which brings us back to that nervy Friday morning. A small group of multinational tech giants have a lucrative stranglehold on supplying IT "solutions" to the Australian public sector, regardless of how disastrously their "fixes" have performed. On Friday, Canberra-based executives from companies that have reaped billions of dollars over the decades just might have had a moment of concern that their party is coming to an end.
It's long been true in the APS that failure need not do a career much harm as long as it can be brushed under the carpet. Too many departments have been too successful at keeping their embarrassing tech failures hushed up.
But Mr Taylor's IT reviews, which he has pledged to make public "where appropriate", have the capacity to expose some of Canberra's emperors and empresses as having no clothes at all.
Other aspects of Mr Taylor's policy seem obvious, too: reskilling the public service so that the Commonwealth is not reliant on the advice of sales reps with products to spruik for projects of national importance. The minister's long-term goal of an agency having veto powers for major projects will be unpopular in the senior executive service.
But, again, it should have happened long ago.
Mr Taylor's big fix might not work. There are many forseeable pitfalls. But anyone who cares about the expenditure of taxpayers' money should wish the minister well in his endeavour.
