Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by thanking the member for Casey for moving this important motion. He brings to this place significant experience in the digital economy and a great passion for using digital platforms to better serve customers. It's that mindset which the Liberal and National parties bring as we think about the way that citizens ought to be served. We want to see a customer service mentality using digital technology, just as we've seen in New South Wales, where a coalition government has done an extraordinary job of delivering improved services to citizens through Service NSW and delivering digital products and services such as the digital drivers licence and many others. They've been warmly received and, of course, the minister there, Victor Dominello, has done quite a remarkable job.

By contrast, the Albanese Labor government has no plan and no enthusiasm for improving the experience of Australians using digital channels to access government services and payments. The budget did not contain a single new initiative designed to improve citizens' digital experience. That is despite the fact that citizens are overwhelmingly showing that they value engaging digitally. In fact, in the last financial year alone there were 1.2 billion online transactions. That is Australians saying how they want to deal with government. But the way the Albanese Labor government has responded to this is underwhelming, to say the least.

We've seen the Digital Transformation Agency being now put deep into the bowels of the Department of Finance, and we're already seeing a stultifying level of activity. In an underwhelming speech to the Institute of Public Administration on 13 October, Minister Gallagher, who has responsibility for the Public Service, mentioned digital just once. This government seems to be more interested in looking backwards. We hear a lot about the number of additional people that the government wants to employ within Services Australia, but we don't hear anything about the way these new employers will be supported with digital tools, and we don't hear about a focus on the customer. That may well be because if you are a public servant who works for Services Australia, you can contribute to union delegateship numbers, and that's something the Labor Party is very enthusiastic about but when it comes to serving customers. That's not really in the life experience, frankly, of most Labor Party parliamentarians.

The facts are clear in terms of how Australians want to engage with government. I've quoted numbers already. If we look at what happened between 2019 and 2021: in 2019, on average, 571,000 people were accessing myGov every day. By October 2021, this had risen to almost two million, with a record of 4.2 million in a single day. On this side of the Chamber we look with some pride at the work we were able to do to drive the take-up of digital engagement, to use tools which respond to the way citizens want to engage with their government. We would like to see the current government moving rapidly to build on that track record.

One thing they could do is continue to roll out the digital identity system. We did a lot of work on that over the last few years. This is effectively a portable, reusable digital ID card. You can think about it in those terms. One of the great benefits this offers is that, if it becomes possible for this to be used by private sector businesses and in engaging with state government departments, as it is now possible for citizens to use it in dealing with federal government departments, it allows people to verify their identity without needing to provide volumes of personal identification documents. If I'm renting a car from Hertz, Hertz needs to know that I have a driver license and that I haven't racked up so many demerit points that my license is no longer valid. But they don't actually need to know the number. They don't need to keep that on file if they can have their system engage with the Service NSW system to validate that fact and simply have that certification come back.

The work that's been done in developing myGovID is just one example of the commitment we had in government to use the capacity of digital technology to allow citizens to be served more efficiently and to engage with the government more efficiently and more quickly. There is huge potential to do more of this. The current government is lagging behind in terms of its enthusiasm for that. Let's see some more enthusiasm from the current minister rather than his squalid experience of political payback, which seems to be his main priority at the moment.

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