Amit Singh, one of the government’s Thodey review panel of experts tasked with running the myGov user audit, has told an audience in Canberra that citizens are hungry for more ways to access government digitally. But the patchy jurisdictional approach to this work so far has meant the experience for people living in Melbourne and Sydney are worlds apart.
“The single-most exciting part about government service delivery or digital service in the federal government is [that], for the first time, we’re joining together different aspects of the government to effectively provide a mechanism for actually taking digital service delivery seriously,” Singh told an audience on Sunday.
“[Previously] we treated it as a service, as a program, as an app. We didn’t think of it as a platform. The truth is, digital service delivery and the things that underpin digital service delivery are critical national infrastructure,” he said.
To shift how digital services were used by citizens and prioritised by government, Singh said, it was essential the platform sat at the heart of the bureaucracy and was controlled by a central agency.
The economist and consultant added that positioning and connecting digital services platforms to the “heart of the APS” was also key to in-house capability because outsourcing the design, build and deployment changed how the government took ownership of the product.
The same trust rules and trust metrics the government used with its non-digital service delivery should also apply to its digital offering.
“It has to be connected to the Australian public service. In the past, we’ve disconnected those things, we’ve left them out in the wilderness,” Singh said.
“We’ve treated technology as if it’s something that can be done by a bunch of fandangled people that live in Silicon Valley or somewhere else. Public sector-government digital delivery is a completely different concept,” he said.
Singh explained that technology solutions and digital platforms designed for government delivery were committed to delivering for all people — not for the median, like a commercial solution might.
A key distinction between government platforms and commercial platforms was that the tools were considered to be the innovation. The principles underpinning the tools, however, which was social good, were fixed and should not be interfered with.
“Your use cases are actually everybody. The underlying fundamental principle is that no one gets left behind.
“If you don’t build in those values, to the way in which you think about digital government service delivery, then you end up with situations like robodebt, then you end up with situations where citizens are not put at the centre of it,” Singh said.
“Trust is a function of competence and character. Trust is a function of capability and reliability. Those rules still apply when you think about government digital service delivery because ultimately what we’re really trying to do is deliver better, enhance the trust that people have in government, and deliver for the national economy,” he said.
Singh made his remarks as part of a panel discussion about how governments can govern better and rebuild capacity. Joining him were panelists senator Katy Gallagher, The Benevolent Society CEO Lin Hatfield Dodds, and former PwC partner Frances Maguire.
Singh said that in his view, the way to build public confidence and trust in government was to deliver for citizens. But delivering for democracy required sound digital capabilities, and the experience for Australians living in different states and territories, or even city and country folk for that matter, were wildly divergent.
“There’s nothing more important to us than rebuilding and renewing the Australian public service like that is the centre [of it all]. Basically, if we got one wish on policymaking in this country, that would be my one wish,” Singh said.
“But you can’t deliver in 2023 if you don’t have a digital way to deliver more Australians. More Australians interact with the Australian government every single day than use public transport across the entire country.
“Yet the way in which we actually deal with that is pretty sporadic, and not particularly great,” he added.
The Melbourne-based economist noted that good government digital delivery meant doing away with lottery postcodes, which saw people in Sydney have an “infinitely better” experience in terms of how they interacted with the bureaucracy online.
“We need to make sure that as Australians, we get beneficial delivery. Now, that’s not the responsibility of the federal government but the federal government has a role to play as an orchestrator. The federal government can play a role in doing better in supporting some of the states and supporting some of the other agencies around the country,” Singh said.
Public service minister Katy Gallagher also told the Chifley Research Centre conference that the iterative improvements to government data and digital capability were a never-ending effort. She said the government was committed to rolling out more digital services competently so that citizen trust did not take a hit and set the whole project back.
“The opportunities to make it easier and better for citizens to engage with government seamlessly, whether it be state governments or the commonwealth, is there,” Gallagher said.
“We’ve just got to work out how to get there and not stuff it up on the way so that no one believes we can do it, which goes back to trust and reliability, capability and control.
“I think [success depends on] pulling all of this together, and setting it out, which we’re trying to do [in] two different pieces of work, but joining it all up and being honest about the time it’s going to take to get there, and some of the hard work that’s going to have to be done in order to achieve it,” she said.
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