Most people under the age of 35 probably don’t remember a world without e-tax, a system developed by the Australian Tax Office to make it simpler and faster for Australians to complete their tax returns. Before e-tax was introduced in 1999 Australian taxpayers all had to do their tax by hand, or get an accountant involved…
I’m pleased to say that with all the apps now being developed by Australian governments, the Department of Human Services’ new ‘Express Plus Students’ App, has managed to address almost all the criticisms I’ve had previously regarding government mobile apps. What were these criticisms? And which did the Department fail to address? Read on… Have…
There’s often lots of small – and not so small – activities that communications teams want to carry out online that would make their jobs easier, but aren’t really tasks to give to IT teams. For example, you may wish to update your agency’s Facebook and Twitter profile pictures when your logo changes, automatically post…
The City of Melbourne was recognised in 2012 as ‘Most Admired Knowledge City’ in an award from the World Capital Institute and Teleos, an independent management research firm. The city is building on this with the annual Melbourne Knowledge Week, designed to engage both the knowledge community and the wider public in a range of…
It has been almost exactly two years since the Australian Government responded to the Government 2.0 Taskforce report on 3rd May 2010. The response, which committed to implement most of the recommendations in the report, was made under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and with the support of former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner (neither of whom hold a position…
I went to the Australian Business Register site (www.abr.gov.au) this afternoon to set up an ABN (Australian Business Number) for a company. This is a very common step, taken by hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians every week. However I immediately hit a speed bump. The site’s online ABN registration process threw up an error…
On behalf of a friend I’ve been looking into the contact information for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests across Australia’s Commonwealth and state/territory governments. While I believe that Australia has good Freedom of Information laws (though I know some would disagree), the real tests of this are whether people are aware of their rights and…
What do the the Arab Spring, Anonymous, the Occupy movement, Iranian election protests, Anti-Putin protests, the #VileKyle push and the #Qantasluxury incident all have in common? Each of them was a demonstration of collective action by groups of people without a clear hierarchy of leadership against traditional hierarchical organisations. In each case the traditional organisations…
John Sheridan posted a link on Twitter to a very interesting analysis of the impact of social media on the revolutions across the Arab world over the last year. The paper provides strong evidence that social media was one of the key causes of these revolutions due to its ability to place a human face…
The Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, gave a speech last week to the Graduate School of Government, University of Sydney. Titled Surfing the next wave of reform, his speech discussed the public service’s critical role in supporting and enabling government reform and good governance, and what would be expected of the APS…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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