Though last Tuesday’s attempted census has attracted much opprobrium for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to focus solely on the issues raised by the department’s bungling is to let a much more significant question go begging: why are so many crucial government services heading so far online?
Regardless of whether the census was thrown off kilter by Distributed Denial of Service attacks (maybe), capacity problems (likely) or a shark chewing on the undersea cable (almost definitely not), problems with the digital streamlining of crucial government services and initiatives like the census have been stacking up across departments for some time now, and the relentless logic underpinning this government-wide process needs unpicking.
The digitisation of government services, also known as e-government, has rapidly become a central part of how Western governments go about their business, the sort of thing so normalised that the UN keeps league tables to measure how different nations are going about it.
Yet, despite the upbeat management speak that resounds internationally around the concept (efficiency, dividends, service), scholar Alexandru Roman has noted that it’s hardly been a demand-driven development on the behalf of citizens clamouring to sit at their laptops to file their paperwork. Rather, it’s been a top-down process of driving efficiency savings through reducing labour costs for governments, and for every success, there’s a heap of initiatives that have been at best noble failures and at worst total blarney.
In a 2013 policy document, the to-be Abbott government proposed that by 2020 four out of five Australians would use internet platforms for all government services, a figure well up from the 38% who had used the internet in their last engagement with government services in 2012. In that paper, the Coalition cited a fall in Australia’s rankings in the international efficiency and digital government uptake under Labor as a spur to increase Australian competitiveness with other countries.
The report continued that to ensure this level of international parity, even though not all Australians have easy internet access or digital skills, the presumption in service provision “should be [that] the Internet is the default way of interacting”. That optimism, however, comes in stark opposition to the reality of online service usage for most Australians.
The adoption of internet technology for the citizen-government how’d-you-do has never been just a matter of putting a service online, as the process of doing so transforms the relationship between the two parties. Since the 1980s, we’ve witnessed the transition from what Michael Lipsky described as “street-level” bureaucracy to a “screen-level” one, whereby the ethical, conversant and flexible decisions that arise from face-to-face conversations, based on understandings of someone’s life story and needs, have hardened into the algorithms, processes and scripts that dominate dealing with a department like Centrelink today — the kind of depersonalised personal service that gives the lie to the notion that a welfare recipient ever really exists in a client dynamic with the government, but more like a square peg in a round hole.
Looking at the digitisation of the DHS, we can see that it’s been excruciating for staff, the department and clients alike. The National Commission of Audit reported that Australians, collectively, spent 143 years on hold to Centrelink across the 2014-15 financial year. Some 22 million calls went unanswered out of 62 million made. That’s 4 million more unanswered calls than in the previous year. As one can merrily read in the reviews left in the Apple Store, the MyGov app has been savaged for being slow, glitchy and inaccessible, which is also the general feedback about the MyGov website.
In an account for The Sydney Morning Herald, a DHS employee bared the psychic cost of being at the front line of carrying out these systems, as clients routinely blame public servants for benefits being withheld. For staff, the burdens of demoralising pay freezes, client desperation and staff turnover partly engendered by results-based digitisation — moving people online — forms a public service that is, on the face of it, not exactly set to flourish. The fact that there will likely always remain a core constituency who, by reason of language, age or disability, simply can’t use online services make the achievement of goals like those in the Coalition’s policy paper hard to realise.
French theorist Francois Ewald described standardisation as a process whereby people are turned into units made legible by systems of administration; what falls by the wayside are the ways in which people tell their stories — in short, every other way of being understood. As users, whether we view an internet platform as a tool for expression (Facebook) or for more pragmatic needs (like, say, internet banking), we tend to always view it on our own terms, as something we use to attend to our needs.
Being confronted with platforms that stubbornly treat individuals as standardised pieces of data leads to bizarre and dismal confrontations, like those on the Centrelink Twitter feed, as those who seek help with their specific life crises receive nothing more than bog-standard answers to their questions. The one-size fits all interface doesn’t actually fit anyone.
This isn’t to throw the whole use of the internet under the bus; some Australian government online services have folded in nicely. For example, the Australian Tax Office offers simple, online interfaces for services like doing your taxes or rolling multiple super accounts into one (also thank you, AusPost tracking numbers!). Sending emails and online notifications also tend to be more efficient. But the thing about services like these is that they treat less complex needs. None of these involve dealing with the thornier and more complex questions of identity, of living day-to-day.
As Senator Doug Cameron noted regarding the Commission of Audit’s report, electronic delivery “creates its own demand for face-to-face and personal delivery, especially given the complexity of the work carried out by Human Services”. Rather than someone’s inability to go online being regarded as an inefficiency, one could more likely say that assisting those people is rather the point of a social democracy, and what makes Australia a country worth living in.
No one doubts that public servants are doing their best in difficult circumstances — the old “don’t shoot the messenger” wave of sympathy came on Twitter after the census — but what they’re being asked to stand behind needs fixing. In a post-WikiLeaks age, where online insecurities are burgeoning especially among older generations, old problems dealt with by the DHS haven’t changed, and the changing system doesn’t fix them. The idea of the digital tide being one that lifts all boats is rapidly being found out. If our systems aren’t working, maybe it’s because they haven’t been designed to fit the problems they were intended to solve.
Would you rather be in a queue at a Centrelink office or phone them and spend time on hold?
“Would you rather be in a queue at a Centrelink office or wait on hold on the phone until you can’t wait any longer and then hang up?”
Fixed that for you.
Thanks Alan, correct in a thousand different ways. People who don’t understand systems don’t realise how limited they are in their responses, and people who are deeply embedded in IT are the least capable of understanding that someone may be fundamentally different to them or any question/answer matrix they may be capable of thinking up.
Use them for the simple, and ditch them for anything human. They can undertake transactions happily, but can’t deal with humans. While Mr Smith’s point is valid, we aren’t really talking about phones so much here, as systems.
A fine article, Alex.
I’ve been dealing sporadically with Centrelink for over 2 years now. I have NEVER been able to make it through the mygov portal yet! Given that I worked in IT for 35 years, I’m sure it isn’t just me. I’m convinced there’s actually nothing behind that virtual door. The only option is to walk down to the office with a bit of paper and a lot of spare time.
You are absolutely on the mark with the conclusion that the design concept of the alleged system does not address the needs of either the organisation or its clients. Rather it seems to have been dreamed up as a money-saving exercise by people who have no interest in the welfare of the citizens (who are the sponsors by way of tax) of this country. This is a massive indictment on everyone involved, from successive government policy makers on down the line.
I recently helped a young Somali woman apply for Australian citizenship. She is intelligent and speaks good English. She has no computer at home. We went into the citizenship website – good pathways to start an application if you know how to use a computer and what to look for.
We started to log on to do the on-line version. However not only does the applicant have to have a password, but has to have answers for 5 security questions. These security questions were clearly devised by people of Anglo culture because they related to subjects not very familiar to people of other cultures – football team, name of pet dog, etc, even mother’s maiden name when of course in many cultures women don’t change their family name on marriage. There were almost no questions relevant to the young woman and whose answers she would remember easily, so we abandoned the online application and decided to print off and do the paper version.
During our session, I tried to ring the citizenship inquiry line to clarify an eligibility question and was advised there was a 35-minute wait to speak to someone. The young woman didn’t have that long as she had to pick up a child from childcare. So we made a guess as to the correct eligibility. Also you can’t pop in to an office and ask someone a question because no office address is given.
Governments seem to want Australia to have a much larger population but don’t seem to want to accept that this means larger public sector staffing to meet their needs.
I was advised to sign up with myGov so that, whilst abroad, I would be able to keep informed. Didn’t work, of course. It kept wanting to send me p/ws to an Oz phone number though accepting that it was O/S.
Yet, strangely, during that trip I was able to vote in the NSW elections without the slightest problem and I am an unabashed Luddite.
I tried that Census thangy – pfftt. Rreminds me of a book I used to red my teenies, “What a MESS”