The man handpicked by Malcolm Turnbull to head the government’s digital transformation has said the error rate in Centrelink’s data-matching process is so unfathomably high that it would send a commercial enterprise out of business.
Paul Shetler, the former digital transformation office head, criticised the government’s response to its latest IT crisis, telling Guardian Australia it was symptomatic of a culture of blame aversion within the bureaucracy.
“It is literally blame aversion, it is not risk aversion,” Shetler said. “They’re trying to avoid the blame, and they’re trying to cast it wide.
“The justifications that have been given I think are just another example of the culture of ‘good news’, reporting only good news up through the bureaucracy.
“I’m sure that the bureaucracy was being told at every single level that everything was OK. That’s how it works in the bureaucracy. Bad news is not welcomed, and when bad news comes, they try to shift the blame.”
It is the first time Shetler, formerly the government’s chief digital officer and a former chief digital officer for the UK ministry of justice , has broken his silence on the series of IT failures that have plagued the government in recent months: the census debacle, the failure of the Australian Tax Office systems and now Centrelink’s debt recovery problems.
Shetler resigned in November after being hired by Turnbull to transform the government’s approach to digital technology.
He said it was difficult for him to watch successive IT failures, which he described as “cataclysmic” and “not a crisis of IT” but a “crisis of government”.
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“I was very explicit about it internally, not nearly as much so externally. It was a fight that I fought from day one, not an easy fight to win, because you’ve got an entire bureaucracy of IT bureaucrats who are backed by large vendors, who have large numbers of staff, and because ministers, I’m going out on a limb here, very quickly become captive to the departments that they deal with.”