The public service has a lot of ground to make up in terms of in-house digital capabilities, fit-for-purpose technology solutions for government services, and creating the best conditions for innovation to flourish in Australia.
They are big ticket items on the federal government’s reform agenda for the bureaucracy and recent work looking at what needs to be overhauled in myGov’s digital service offering.
But just how good a grasp does the APS have on the ambitious mission to modernise its digital wheelhouse and uplift consumer-facing platforms for citizens?
Addressing a conference in Canberra this month, Amit Singh said the principles that underpin digital government service delivery are nothing new.
“There is innovation, but innovations are in the tools, not in the principles of the purposes that underpin them,” Singh said.
“[Government service delivery] still has to resort to the same trust rules and trust metrics that we expect from typical government service delivery, from the typical work of the Australian Public Service.”
Singh was on the panel of experts recently chosen by government services minister Bill Shorten to participate in the Thodey review that was a health check of the myGov portal and application. He went on to explain that trust was a function of competence and character, capability and reliability.
“Trust is about doing something well and doing it all the time. Trust is a function of character, doing it with integrity, doing it for the benefit of other people.
“Those rules still apply when you think about government digital service delivery,” Singh said.
The economist explained that by conservative estimates, fixing myGov could deliver $3 billion in savings — so with a view to delivering for the national economy and enhancing the user experience of citizens interacting with digital government platforms, the national interest case was clear.
This was also only one discrete solution among a suite of other front-facing digital government services, Singh said. The ongoing effort to improve these services should also be regarded as a question of how government policy could enhance national infrastructure.
“A lot of times we get lost in the debate about the complexity of technology and that becomes the thing that becomes the mental block for us to actually think about government digital service delivery,” Singh said.
“We get worried about what role AI plays, and here’s a new thing, all of those are distractions. [Digital services] are fundamentally policy problems, these are not technology problems,” he said.
What is innovation and how are we measuring it?
A few years ago, former chief scientist Professor Alan Finkel co-chaired a review with Treasury Regulatory Reform taskforce head Mark Cully to improve the way the government measures innovation and support better decision-making to cultivate home-grown innovation in Australia.
The report was handed to the federal government in late 2019 and only published months after the Labor government took office in late September 2022. Three years since the report was finalised, little from that important piece of work has been implemented.
“That’s intended to be a public review and it’s intended to be acted on, but it got buried, disappeared,” Finkel told The Mandarin.
“After the election, the current minister, Ed Husic, agreed for it to be put on the [department] website — so there was progress — but it’s not actually being actively implemented,” he said.
“It’s a shame – not from a personal point of view but the recommendations in there are quite valuable.”
Most metrics used to measure government investment in innovation look to research and patents. Finkel said these measures were informed by approaches taken by the OECD and other countries and often assumed all innovation measures began with funded research.
“You start with science, and you want to do something for society. Science is the discovery process,” Finkel said.
“Innovation and engineering convert the science into societal value but the metrics don’t measure that second step.”
“But you know what? Sometimes a bloody good idea just starts off because someone clever wakes up at 3am and says, ‘We could do that better,’ and then they spend six months developing some software or gathering people to do it.”
Finkel’s work on the ‘Improving innovation indicators’ report attempted to develop more indirect ways of measuring innovation and innovation potential.
Using the example of mining companies that extract iron ore from Western Australia, he said there was a range of clever artificial intelligence, remote control and algorithmic process control innovations that mean this competitive process of extracting and utilising rust is dominated by Australia in the world market.
“The product they’re shipping hasn’t changed for millions of years — it’s rust, iron ore — but the way they do it is very clever,” Finkel said.
“That report looked at those kinds of issues and made recommendations of new things that we could measure.”
But Finkel said that, to date, advice was languishing in a drawer somewhere. While the ABS had adopted a change to the frequency and way it conducted its business characteristics survey on the recommendation of the report, that was it.
“That’s a very good thing that came straight out of the innovation metrics review, and [the ABS] acknowledged that, but the rest of [the recommendations] are just languishing,” he said.
Given the review was prompted by a 2017 international comparison that ranked Australia dead-last according to the metric for collaboration between universities and innovation-active small-medium enterprises, you might be forgiven for thinking understanding the innovation landscape better must be a priority for the government.
While Finkel and Cully’s work determined the ‘dead-last ranking’ was misrepresentative based on divergent collection methodologies, they also recommended Australia needed a different policy response to set itself up for success. Specifically, increased productivity and higher living standards.
Questions put to the minister and Department of Industry, Science and Resources about the fate of the review recommendations were answered by a spokesperson who said they were committed to driving innovation and making the economy more productive and competitive.
“The government will draw on the inputs provided from a wide range of stakeholders to this previous review and will work across agencies to continue to help drive this government’s ambitious agenda for our economy,” a department spokesperson said.
“Along with the enhanced business characteristics survey, a number of relevant initiatives continue to be rolled out.”
The official added uplifting and strengthening traditional sectors in the economy was a focus of the new Labor government’s innovation agenda. In addition to the ABS’ business characteristics survey, other innovation initiatives that were being implemented included a targeted update of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations; annual innovation system reporting, including publication of a new innovation scorecard; and the establishment of a National Startup Data Project.
“[We are also] progressing a unified national approach to the measurement and collection of data on the Australian startup ecosystem,” the spokesperson said.
The government’s caution to do more with the comprehensive review gives pause for thought about what ‘innovation’ in a government context really means. What are the true indicators of promising innovation, and are they being applied? The jury’s still out, apparently.
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