Thursday, August 11, 2016

Turnbull Government – In the great census debacle of 2016, it's a case of denials all 'round.

Denial of Service or denial of common sense? Either way, it has led to a denial of public confidence and a denial of prime ministerial goodwill.It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this government has the Midas touch in reverse: everything it comes into contact with turns to manure.

Even its July 2 election victory felt like a defeat, right from the moment a shell-shocked Turnbull stepped up to complain about Labor lies and gullible voters.

Then came the bizarre Rudd/UN messaging and the needlessly rushed royal commission into NT youth detention abuses, which nearly collapsed within days of being announced.

The tech-literate Turnbull makes no secret of feeling let down, describing Tuesday's DOS attacks as "absolutely predictable". His message to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and IBM could not be clearer: you knew this would happen and failed to cater for it.

Yet numerous questions remain regarding the impact of past policy decisions, the quality of past political/ministerial oversight, and the diligence of the public service. Most pressing is a timely explanation of what happened. Who orchestrated these attacks - a state actor such as China or Russia - or was it some spotty internet geeks showing how clever they can be?

The fact that there have been three responsible ministers in the year leading up to this census is a recipe for weakness in program governance.

But many things do not compute. Turnbull told reporters on Thursday that the purpose-built census night system was designed (with IBM) to handle a maximum of 260 form returns per second, but that the number actually submitted on Tuesday never exceeded 150 per second.

Then he said that it was clear there was inadequate redundancy (excess capacity) built in. Which is it? He also stated that at no time did the DOS attacks themselves crash the system. So it was merely log-ons?

It seems pretty obvious that some systemic pressures could have been avoided. Why design the process so that nearly everyone would attempt to complete their online forms on the same day and the vast bulk of those, after dinner?

In all this digital dithering, there's a crying need for the government to pull its finger out to make this right.

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