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The act of opening a computer program and loading a file should be second nature to most. To the Nation Building Authority in ABC TV's Utopia, it is not.
In episode three of the comedy's new season skewering the public service's most absurd quirks and faults, the NBA's staff are forever stuffing up all things IT.
For a start, bureaucrat Ashan De Silva (Dilruk Jayasinha) can't seem to open social media without a mishap.
On Facebook he accidentally likes a page, even if it belongs to a community group opposing his agency's freight line plan. He mistakenly retweets someone insulting his colleague, Nat Russell (Celia Pacquola).
Ashan's fumbles are but one symptom in the show of a larger bureaucratic malaise when it comes to technology.
It's like the writers of Utopia have heard (or experienced) something of the tech headaches that have beset the public service.
Here, they diagnose an awkwardness with technology that starts with the minor (electronic watches and slide presentations) but that ends up hobbling the very major (new rules to keep private owners of major infrastructure in check).
I said liaise with the public, don't talk to them!
- Media liaison Rhonda (Kitty Flanagan) in the latest episode of Utopia
There's not much need to go into the litany of tech problems to hit the real world Commonwealth public service.
Take your pick. 'Robo-debt' is back in the news, attacked as an example of a botched attempt at automating debt recovery.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert celebrated a smashed record this week, saying more people than ever used online portal myGov to do their tax this year. A milestone and something for a minister to crow about, without doubt, but he kept quiet the part where myGov and other government web services went down for a day.
One more statistic gives the episode a useful dose of context. Peak ICT body the Australian Information Industry Association found in 2017 only 16 per cent of people believed the federal government was using technology very well to deliver services.
This might explain why Scott Morrison has tasked the federal bureaucracy with focusing on "congestion busting". The NBA's voices of reason, agency boss Tony Woodford (Rob Sitch) and Nat are trying to do just that.
Tony has an eminently sensible and clever plan to regulate owners of privatised infrastructure, and get tough on them after a series of government asset sell-offs.
Nat wants to bust congestion with an "intermodal" link that will ease rail access to a port but requires the government to knock down 12 houses and maybe a primary school.
"It's OK, kids love trains!" government liaison Jim Gibson (Anthony Lehmann) says helpfully.
Life in the NBA is proving bad for Tony's health. He's returned from a minor arrhythmia and is wearing a watch that detects his heart rate.
In a government with an ever-shortening attention span, he's told to explain his vision for an "infrastructure charter" to the minister using the flashiest of flash presentation software.
Cue tech disasters. His computer won't take the program and needs an upgrade. After much trial and more error, his operating system ends up being downgraded to one that will run the necessary software.
The rest of the NBA is proving incapable of attending to anything for more than a few seconds. Media liaison Rhonda (Kitty Flanagan) wants the intermodal link explained in "140 characters or less". Jim is distracted on his phone while Tony tries to tell him about his infrastructure reform.
Tony is reduced to selling his vision with a series of overproduced projector slides, sound effects and all.
Nat's attempt at bringing along the community with the NBA's proposed freight link is also teetering on the edge of an IT bungle, only a different kind. Rhonda warns her about those not-so-quiet Australians: "Never underestimate a retiree with Facebook skills". The NBA does anyway.
Resistance to the agency's freight link idea grows in the hot, fetid glasshouse of social media. Technology has made the government's efforts to communicate with people hard. In Utopia's view, the public service doesn't help itself with its ham-fisted attempts to use IT to wall itself off from public opinion.
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Nat attempts to give a hotline number to president of the Save Our Suburbs Action Group, Joan Meredith. Her face-to-face chats with the residents don't go so well. Such conversations are hard ones, but in Utopia, the NBA has simply forgotten how to have them.
"I said liaise with the public, don't talk to them!" Rhonda says, chastising Nat.
They're not conversations, anyway, and it's not really consultation.
Eventually, Nat and Ashan are egged at the community meeting and the future of another nation-building project is left in the balance.
Of course, Tony's vision is doomed. His precious minutes with the minister are wasted as his presentation is beset with technical issues. His watch goes off and pandemonium breaks out as the office responds to what it wrongly believes is a heart attack.
How can the government help create good infrastructure if it doesn't get its own IT right? In the world of the Nation Building Authority, it can't. Sadly, real life is much the same.
The minister's attention wanders during the botched presentation. What ever happened to that Riverina Basin Upgrade?
Up on the screen, all those wonderful graphs Tony prepared are replaced with a warning: "CONNECTION LOST".
Those words are true of many things, considering Nat's experience at the community meeting.
The public service of Utopia has more ways than ever to speak to people. It's just forgotten what to say.