The Australian Government's ongoing Centrelink bungle is an indication of the fact that an obsession over the use of big data to balance the budget and the ability to do so skillfully are oceans apart.
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Lest we forget, the census bungle last year, the bid to make it a mostly online affair, was also driven by the desire to profit from data, in this case the personal data of Australian residents. Nobody needs reminding of the extent to which that was bungled.
The NBN, the metadata retention scheme, the release of personal data that could be easily identified... the bungles are legion. But Turnbull and his minions still rush headlong into the new world of big data, driven by neoliberal thinking that every function of government can be run at a profit.
There is a mistaken belief in many government circles that an inefficient operation — in the case cited above, Centrelink's inability to monitor welfare recipients — will suddenly become efficient the moment things are digitised.
The reality could not be more different. As those with even basic common sense are aware, what results is that the inefficiency is magnified.