Australia's three tiers of government should be entirely connected online, a new report recommends, with every citizen issued a digital identity to easily access services online.
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The report was launched in Brisbane last week by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and ACS, detailing a vision for a fully connected future.
Fergus Hanson, head of the institute's international cyber policy centre, pointed to on experiences from Estonia, which has a highly connected government with strong privacy controls for citizens.
He said an "e-government" would need to be customised to Australia but could sharply reduce costs and improve communication.
"With the history of the failed Australia Card, and scandals such as eCensus, it’s no wonder that barriers such as security and privacy have interfered with the successful launch of integrated e-government up until now," he said.
But, he said, the time was ripe for federal, state and local governments to commission detailed consultations with business and the public to push for an e-government model.
The report's release followed a pledge from Human Services Minister Michael Keenan to have all government services digitally available within the next seven years.
Adressing the National Press Club on November 21, Mr Keenan said he had recently visited Estonia and was impressed by its digitised government.
"In Estonia today, there are just three things that citizens of the country are physically required to do in person at a government office — registering a marriage, a divorce or a property settlement," he said.
"Their electronic signatures are now recognized legally across the entire European Union."
The report, authored by Dr Arvo Ott, Mr Hanson and Jelizaveta Krenjova, stated that any plan to digitise and connect all government bodies in Australia would need to be decentralised to ensure there could be no single point of failure.
Data from a Deloitte Access Economics report cited in the ASPI report showed that increasing the number of transactions performed digitally from 60 per cent to 80 per cent over 10 years would create government productivity benefits of $17.9 billion.
Mr Hanson said such a structure should allow government departments to communicate "seamlessly" and make it easier for people to conduct basic requirements.
"Mindless hassles when moving between jurisdictions (such as swapping licences from one state to another) would evaporate overnight," the report argued.
"There would be no need to conduct 100-point identity checks in person, and time-consuming visits to physical government offices would become a thing of the past."
Repeated attempts by the federal government to create a national identification scheme failed in the past, from the 1980s Australia Card proposal to the Access Card in 2007.
The report cited Australia Post's digital identity as an example of how a citizen identification card could work on a larger scale.
"Addressing privacy concerns through a citizen-driven e-government model is important in winning public support for integrated e-government," the report's authors noted.
"Building trust between citizens and authorities is at the core of a working e-government model, so considerable emphasis should be put on communicating with citizens about how and for what reason their data will be processed by the government."
