Government services minister Bill Shorten has launched the long-delayed myGov mobile app, bolting on a government electronic wallet to store various credentials and cards as the Albanese government takes a cattle prod to rolling-out integrated digital functionality across agencies.
Eight long years in the making, the myGov app is the federal government’s answer to similar functionality already well-established in states like New South Wales, which has routinely upstaged Canberra’s notoriously glacial pace of delivery amid sometimes-frosty interagency relations.
Launching the app at the Opera House in Sydney, Shorten said that he hoped that the myGov app would be as iconic as the structure but would not take 50 years to become so.
Shorten said that “at long last, and long overdue” Australia now finally had a myGov app that would make services simpler, easier, quicker and more accessible for millions of Australians.
“Today’s announcement means no more annoying myGov inbox announcements that send you somewhere else to go somewhere else,” Shorten said.
To make that happen the app will harness commonly-used biometric checks, like facial recognition, fingerprints or a six-digit number to access the services directly from the handset that Shorten said would provide access to 15 different government services.
“This shouldn’t be revolutionary news, but in government services we have just taken a quantum leap forward in this country.”
Talking to the wallet, Shorten said it would include the Healthcare Card and Seniors Healthcare Card on launch, but that the Medicare Card was due to be included by March next year.
The fact that the myGov app and wallet have launched without embedded Medicare Card functionality is demonstrative of longstanding legacy systems issues at Medicare that now has its digital infrastructure delivered by Service Australia.
The choice to send the myGov app live without Medicare embedded also appears to indicate that other agencies, especially transactional ones like Tax and Centrelink, are sufficiently frustrated to have given up on waiting for Medicare to come to the party.
Shorten’s declaration of a March deadline effectively puts Health on notice that it will now be more directly held responsible for further delays, the slowness of the agency being one of the reasons Medicare’s transactional tech infrastructure was shifted to Services Australia in the first place.
Shorten said privacy was also being addressed in the myGov app through a QR Code function that would enable people to use the codes to provide the equivalent of 100 points of ID to prove their identity to both public and private sector organisations who needed to verify identity.
Shorten stressed that this would bypass the need for organisations to collect and store identity credentials, information that was recently the target of hackers in a series of ransomware hacks and extortion attempts against Medibank and Optus.
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Services Australia takes over myGov, digital identity from DTA
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